At a young age, Zac Vachikhan found himself hanging around bad influences as a result of unresolved issues concerning his father. I grew up without my dad. He left when I was pretty young and you know throughout my life I’ve always wondered why he left and I always had this feeling that it was my fault. So I started getting into the wrong crowd, I just had that didn’t-care mentality. As his insecurities took over and depression set in, Zac looked to drugs for the answer. I started smoking weed at the age of 11 or 12 all the way to about last year. That’s 11 years and on top of that I was always partying and trying to fill this void, just try to just flush out reality. And so I was always partying every weekend, getting drunk and then I was introduced to pills. That really was my escape, I was high almost every day, almost off any narcotic I could find- Xanax, Adderall. I just had to have something.
Still void of peace, Zac turned to his family’s religion of Buddhism and even went as far as becoming a monk. I became a monk, trying to find inner peace, trying to overcome these things and I only felt like I was going more down because I couldn’t even live up to that expectation. I couldn’t succeed at anything I did and so that was really discouraging and it brought me deeper into depression. Living as a Buddhist monk seemed to leave Zach worse off than before, life had become too heavy for Zach to carry any longer.
Then one night, I just thought to myself “I’m just dead weight”. My mom hides her gun in her room. I went and grabbed it and ran downstairs and locked my door, turn up the music and tried to pull the trigger but it just jammed. I figured it was a sign somehow. Zac had planned to commit suicide once more but was caught by a friend who had stopped him in the act. I was gonna hang myself but he snuck through my window and found me and took the rope from me, stayed with me that night and made sure I didn’t do anything. I just poured out to him- like I don’t know why I can’t do anything right in my life, why I am the way I am.
After some convincing, his friend had talked him into coming to youth service that next day. The presence here was amazing. It was really good but it was weird for me to see how much people care, like I wonder where all this excitement and love and stuff was coming from. Why these people worship this God so much, because I’m over here going through what I’m going through and I just didn’t believe in a God. The word spoken that night had reached Zac in a way that nothing else had. I was being touched. I felt really really convicted but in a good way, like it reevaluated in my life and I went home and I cried. I didn’t make it to 20 minutes of the service but I went home and I cried and something sparked in me. Somehow found a Bible in a Buddhist home, it was kind of ironic and then I read through Psalms and proverbs in one sitting and I just got curious, like what does this mean, like why do I feel the way I feel? That following Sunday, Zac was back in church and gave his life to Christ. I felt this push to come up on the altar call so I gave my life. Things have been great, set free from drugs. I never went back. I actually found a big packet of pills and I called my girlfriend and told her that I just didn’t want to do it anymore. So I flushed them and then God has taken me through so much now. Me and my girlfriend were living a sinful life and we decided to separate, try to focus on God and now we’re getting married and we’re both serving in the church and it’s it’s amazing to be in an environment where people care and to feel the presence of God, to know what true love and true peace is. My name is Zac Vachikhan and this is my testimony.