My dad always said I was hard-headed, that it would take something like that to wake me up spiritually, and I guess it did. My heart had gotten so beat up that I didn't have anything left to give.
It just took all of that to come to a screeching halt, to get to the point of having nothing, for me to finally realize, Hey, what are you fighting with this for? Until then, I hadn't claimed my faith as my own I had just grown up with it.
I'm still going to make mistakes, but I don't have any problems with publicly professing my faith now. It just took me a long time to get to the right place in my relationship with Christ.
And it took me, since I was 17 and left home, running from God, to now, as a 30-year-old man, when I honestly feel like I've come full circle and my heart's finally in the right place.