At 13 or 14 years old, I had become a convinced atheist. I think in that period, I was filled with anger, year after year, because every year I was trying new destructive things.

I found myself connected to many drug dealers and dangerous individuals. At one point, I wanted to help someone get drugs. After I gave him the drugs, he became part of our group. He seemed okay, and we started hanging out with him. He became one of us.

He had moments when we were using drugs where he would fall into a deep depression and stop talking. We asked him what was wrong. He told us he was a Christian who had fallen off the path. When I saw that things were really serious for him, we spent three, four months just trying to understand his view of life. He shared many things from the Bible, saying, “I am not living this at the moment. Do not look at me as an example, but this was my life and this is the truth.” I thought, “Okay, this seems interesting and true. I want to know more.”

From not believing in God, I started having a real fear that if this is true, I would have a problem and would have to give an account of my life before God. At that moment, I think I prayed, because I did not know exactly how to pray. I felt something different than anything I had experienced before. I said, “God, tonight we are going to a party, let’s start tomorrow.”

But, a thought kept coming back: “Not tomorrow, today you need to change your life.” I refused to listen to God's voice. I went to the party, and we got into a fight. I ended up with my face badly injured and had to go to the hospital. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, “Okay, this is serious. I need to listen to God's voice, not tomorrow, but today."

I got home, took all of the drugs I had hidden in the house, and flushed them down the toilet. That was it. That was the moment I went from death to life in Christ and gave up my former ways.

I used to be lost and broken, and now God is helping me and working through me to heal broken and lost people who are in the same spot I was. Now, I'm a pastor in Bucharest. If I could go back to the old Alex, when I was in gangs, doing drugs, living a dangerous life, filled with anger and lacking purpose, I would tell him that everything he's trying to find, he will find in Christ. This is the most important thing I could hear. You only need Christ. Christ is everything.