 At a young age, Zach Vachacan 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 throughout my life I was always wondered why he left. 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 insecurities took over and depression set in, Zach looked to drugs for the answer. I started smoking weed at the age of 11, 11 to 12, all the way to about last years, that's 11 years. And on top of that, you know, I was always partying, you know, trying to fill this void, just trying to just flesh out reality. And so I was always partying every weekend, getting drunk. And I introduced the pills, you know, and that really was my escape. You know, it was high almost every day, almost off of anything, really any narcotic. I could find Xanax, Adderall, you know, I just had to have something. Still void of peace, Zach turned to his family's religion of Buddhism, and even when as far as becoming a monk. I became a monk, you know, try to find inner peace, try to, you know, overcome these things. And I only felt like I was going more down because I couldn't even live up to that expectation. Like, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't succeed at anything I did. And so there 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. And then one night I just, you know, thought to myself, like, I'm just dead weight. So my mom hides her gun in her room, I'm not going to say where, but I went and grabbed it. I ran downstairs and locked my door, turned up the music and tried to pull and trigger, but it just jammed. I figured it was a sign somehow. Zach had planned to commit suicide once more, but was caught by a friend who had stopped him in the act. I was going to hang myself, but he snuck through my window and found me. He wrote for me and just, you know, stayed with me that night and made sure I didn't do anything. And I was just, I just poured out to him. It was like, man, 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 you service that next day. The presence here was amazing. It was really good, but it was weird to me to see how much people cared. Like, I wonder, I was wondering where all this, you know, excitement and love and stuff was, was coming from, where these people worshiped us 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 words spoken that night had reached Zach in a way that nothing else had. I was being touched. I felt really, really convicted, but in a good way, like it reevaluated my life. And I went home, I cried. I didn't even make it to like 20 minutes of a service, but I, I went home and I cried and something sparked in me that I 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, Zach was back in church and gave his life to Christ. I felt this, you know, this push to come up on altar call, so I gave my life and great, you know, set free from drugs. I never went back. I actually found a big packet of pills and I called my, my girlfriend and other that I just didn't want to do it anymore, so I fleshed 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, you know, and try to focus on God and now we're getting married, 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 Zach Vachicon and this is my testimony.