Sam Cullum had grown up in a secure, happy, Christian home.
Yet when he was 15, after splitting up with his girlfriend, he began to self-harm, cutting himself with scissors.
"Why did I do it? In a strange sort of way, I guess the physical pain took away some of the emotions I was feeling - it made me forget about my problems."
Sam started to hang around with other young rebels in his home town of Coventry. The "Lady Godiva" statue was a well-known place for alienated "Goths, skaters and grebes" to hang out.
"I felt accepted there," says Sam, "because I wasn't the only one who self harmed."
It was around this time that Sam was invited to a Jesus Army event.
Sam had experienced God for himself at a Christian camp, years earlier so he decided to go along. He was unprepared for the power he encountered.
"I told them that I self-harmed and was prayed for. It blew my head off. Throughout the prayer, I was screaming, but at the end of it I felt so joyful.
"When I went to cut myself the next day I found I just couldn't. Something was physically stopping me. I was amazed. God had done something real."
With his parent's blessing, Sam started to come to the Jesus Army more and was baptised as a Christian. At his baptism someone said that he would "do battle with the devil".
True enough, a tug of war was to follow. Sam was "experiencing more of God", but he was still hanging around at the statue."I started smoking a lot of weed. I was worrying a lot of people and told a lot of lies to cover my tracks."
Things started to spiral for Sam as he began to dabble in other drugs with some of his mates.
"After a while" he admits, "all we cared about was how to get money for drugs. We stole, lied - anything."
Meanwhile, Sam's family and his friends at the Jesus Army were praying for him - hard! One day, Sam reached his turning point.
"I'd had this big fall-out with my mates in town - the police had to split us up. Later, I went to the Jesus Army house. A friend - one of the leaders - threw a cushion at me and asked if I wanted to talk.
"We went out into the garden and I told him I'd had enough of the lies and the drugs. But I was scared that God wouldn't want to forgive me. We prayed together and I started crying so much - because I knew I had gone against God.
"At the same time I can't describe how amazingly happy I was to know that I was forgiven. When I went inside to tell people, I couldn't say anything because I was laughing and crying too much all at the same time."
It was Sam's "breakthrough" moment.
"I know I've messed around enough. Now I just want to be all out for God. I've seen just the smallest part of His love - and that's enough to make me realise I have to follow Him through good and bad times for the rest of my life."
[Re-printed in Christian Today with the kind permission of Jesus Army's Streetpaper. To find out more about the work of Jesus Army and Streetpaper, visit www.jesus.org.uk/]
