The day came when Temsu Longchari’s mother made peace with the fact that she would lose her son to heroin. She pleaded with God, “Even if you take away his physical body, please have grace on him and save his soul”. Temsu the son of a government officer and a teacher from Nagaland, remembers, “I started dosing on heroin in class seven. With the heroin addiction came lies, stealing money from home to fuel the habit and a rejection of God”.
Temsu’s mother continued to pray for him even though he recollects with shame, “I often laughed at her and mocked her saying, “There is no God, in fact for me, drugs became my God.”
After a stint in a detox centre Temsu dredged up a memory of the first thing he did, “I went looking for heroine”. Temsu shared his heroin habit with a friend and one day he was surprised to hear the friend say, “Temsu we need to know more about this Jesus thing, God, the whole church thing.” Temsu though surprised by this change of heart in his friend was so far removed from this thought that his reactions was amusement, “I just laughed at him. The next day I went to visit him and I was waiting at a little tea shop 15-20 meters from his house when I heard a commotion. Someone told me a person had been shot. With a thumping heart I thought of my friend and ran towards his house and I saw him lying in a pool of blood.”
This incident was a turning point in Temsu’s life. He went to live with an aunt for a few days and started feeling a deep desire for someone to help him and change the life he was steeped in. Temsu remembered praying, “If you are truly there, if you are really the God that my mom believes in, then help me”. After that something came over Temsu and he made doses of the deadly heroin in descending order so that he could start taking smaller and smaller doses everyday and eventually be free of the drug. He started taking the small doses only when the pain got unbearable and then Temsu realised, “on the 21st day I was completely free of the withdrawal from heroine addiction”.
From that point onwards Temsu entered into a discipleship training programe and as he wrestled with his condition, the disease and God, one night he cried out to God saying,
“Why did you make me like this, an addict? Why did you give me this disease” In that moment of his despair Temsu heard a voice coming from inside him saying, “I gave my life on the cross to redeem people like you.” Temsu felt, “that was a very comforting moment for me, I can’t even explain the joy, the relief, the comfort that I got from that. I finished my program in 6 months and from that day onwards my path was guided by God. He closed the wrong doors and opened the right doors. I have no doubt that God was there from the beginning when I cried out and that he was answering my mother’s daily prayer. She never gave up praying”. Tensu lives and works in Brisbane for the last 20 years and he recoils in horror as he remembers his fight against addiction, “That is how I got out of drugs and maintained my sobriety from drugs.”
