Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

IT occurred late at night. Fil-Am Tim Rabara sobering up from a drug binge walked into a Mira Mesa Church, kneeled down on a pew and prayed to God for help.

It had been a while since he prayed or even set foot inside a church.

But the 19-year-old felt abandoned, alone, and just sick of the life that he had been living. He was a gang member and a drug addict. His long time girlfriend, the one person that cared about him had just left him after she gave him a stern ultimatum, "it’s either me or the drugs."

He chose the drugs.

And now, he was there kneeling on a pew sobbing, regretting the mistake.

"I cried out to God," recalls Rabara, now 33 years old and a youth pastor at Victory Outreach Church in San Diego. "I was tired of this life. I was saying God if you’re real, I need you to change my life."

"It was the lowest point in my life. It was living life too fast and too young."

By the time Rabara was 13 years old, he had already experimented with marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol.

A year later, he dropped out of high school and began to commute from his Santa Maria home to Oxnard to click up with a local Filipino gang.

"I would ditch school, go back and forth to Oxnard to party, chill, fight other races and gangs," he said. "That’s when I also started using crystal meth."

He was gone four to five days at a time. His mother, a single mom trying to raise his two other siblings, couldn’t discipline him.

"She couldn’t handle me," he said. "She didn’t have the authority to keep me in the house so I would go in these binges and come home tweeked out. I would look out the blinds because I thought cops were coming to get me.

"I was the oldest in the family but I didn’t take the responsibility of the oldest. I threw my responsibilities out the window. I didn’t finish school and just kept doing drugs."

But even during his late night drug binges and criminal activity, he knew deep down inside that what he was doing was wrong.

He said that during his high school years he got involved in a serious relationship with a girl that he thought would help turnaround his life.

"I thought the relationship would help me but it was worse because we started doing the drugs together," he said.

For a good four years, the drugs and the gang life continued. Finally, Rabara’s girlfriend at the time was fed up with her own life. She wanted to start over, a new clean life, get away from everything. She asked Rabara to move with her to San Diego.

He promised he would change. He promised to lay off the drugs.

But living in San Diego was just a change in scenery. It’s said that old habits die-hard. After a few months of being clean, he couldn’t resist the temptation of drugs when a co-worker offered it to him.

"She was doing her part but I wasn’t doing mine," he said. "I started doing drugs again, another year of tweeking and getting messed up."