With a Subtitle: A personal testimony of addiction, grace, and the Good Shepherd’s mercy

A brief Excerpt: What felt like a strange thought during Lent became the beginning of freedom. This personal testimony shows how God used loss, timing, and mercy to break a hidden addiction and point one wandering sheep back to Christ.

The Author is: Zack Duncan

The first time I “heard” from God was shortly before Lent in 2011.¹

Prior to this moment, there had been times when I would have said I thought I experienced God. But those were always in a more general way, and I later doubted those experiences.

This would be the first time that I would have to consider it more than just a pang of conscience or a secondhand emotional high caught during a weekend teen conference at a woodsy New England retreat center.

Although, as you’ll see, I still doubted afterwards.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you what happened.

Here’s How it Started

I was taking a shower and I found myself contemplating Lent. This may seem normal, but the story is already atypical.

Not the shower part, but the Lent part.

I was inexperienced with Lent and knew little about it. I had known that Catholics “gave up” something during the pre-Easter season, and I had always been highly skeptical of anything that might seem “Catholic.”

Despite my previous beliefs, the idea of trying out Lent for myself strangely captivated me. I resolved to embrace Lent and fully immerse myself in the Easter season. What a wonderful Christian I surely was!

Look at me, willing to give up something for Easter. You’re welcome, God.

I began to consider what I would abstain from. I wanted it to be something that would be meaningful, yet doable.

What did adults give up for during Lent? My only recollection was hearing from kids in grade school who decided to give up candy. But candy didn’t seem like it would cut it.

Suddenly, a thought flashed unbidden into my mind: poker.

It seemed like an idea I almost told myself. As if it were coming from a part of my brain that I had never heard from before. Like this:

You should give up poker for Lent.

It was all so strange that I almost allowed myself to think the impossible: could that be You, God?

I rejected the idea and put the thought out of my mind. After all, giving up poker would be meaningful, but I knew it would not be doable.

I loved playing poker too much.

I ♡ Poker

There was so much I had found to love about poker.

• I loved the combination of analytics, intuition, strategy, and financial management.
• I enjoyed the opportunity to make calculated risks when the statistical odds were in my favor.
• And I loved watching my poker money (my “bankroll” in poker parlance) steadily increase in my two online accounts at PokerStars and (especially) Absolute Poker.

I was playing for hours a day.

It was like a second mini-career that I was gradually growing into. Each night, I’d fire up the laptop in bed, and I’d hammer away at multiple tables of Texas Hold ’Em while my wife slept.

There are 169 different two-card hands you can be dealt in Hold ’Em, but only 15%—20% of them can be played profitably in a full game of 10 people.

I had poker tracking software that recorded every single hand I played. It also tracked data on the hands of those I was playing against. So I knew my betting tendencies with all of those two card combinations, and I also increasingly knew about the tendencies of my competitors.

Armed with all this data, I expected to win a sizable percentage of the hands I decided to get involved with.

I didn’t always win, of course. But as I consistently made data-informed decisions, I knew that I would continue to make money in the long run.

So I woke up bleary-eyed each morning for work, knowing that I was going to do the same thing again that evening.

I had been playing for over ten years, mostly offline with friends and in casinos. But as my online play increased, I had recently begun contemplating poker more and more.

Occasionally I would daydream and simply look forward to playing poker. Sometimes the daydreaming would involve analyzing past hands to try and finding how to improve.

Sometimes I’d just become angry thinking about “bad beats” I had suffered in certain hands that I thought I should have won. There was plenty of ground to cover.

Back in the Shower…

…I had willfully ignored the poker “idea,” but I still felt interested in finding something for Lent.

I mentally moved on to something else. Something that still seemed meaningful but wasn’t impossible.

Maybe beer?

I loved beer. That seemed like a good one. That would satisfy the criteria I was looking for: something meaningful and doable. I probably drank too much beer, so I reasoned this should make God happy too.

I did some mental weighing in my mind.

“God, if that’s you, will you take beer?”

This didn’t seem like a prayer or even a coherent thought as much as testing the idea in my mind. I was preparing myself in case something truly supernatural occurred.

But there was no clear answer to my tentative “counteroffer.”

Instead, something frustrating happened. Each time I tried to contemplate beer, the unknown part of my brain kept changing the subject back to poker.

No matter what I did, the idea was inescapably sitting on me.

It was disconcerting, to put it mildly. I had no framework to evaluate this kind of experience.

I hated the idea of giving up poker. Yet the more I hated it and tried to reject it, the more it stuck in my mind.

And I knew nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Never before had a thought so counter to my own desires suddenly taken center stage. This was an unprecedented data point.

Poker.

I knew I couldn’t escape it by pretending it wasn’t there. I had two choices:

• I could surrender and give up poker for Lent. I might not know if it was truly God, but saying “ok, fine” was a clear option before me.
• I could refuse to give up poker for Lent. But only if I was willing to disobey what I suspected could actually be a direct command from God.

By the time the shower was over, I had given in.

I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew I would give up poker for Lent.

It did get me talking to God in the days and weeks ahead. It was all a one-way conversation focused on a single topic: I wanted to be clear that if this truly had been Him, I had only agreed to Lent.

I was going back to poker as soon as Easter came.

This was my approach to Lent. I eagerly anticipated the prospect of playing poker. I don’t remember doing anything, like spending more time reading my Bible or reflecting on the Passion of Jesus or anything like that.

I read and prayed my Bible exactly as I felt I should in those days: just enough.

Just enough to consider that I was being a “good” Christian and sporadic enough for it to leave me mostly unchanged.

As it turned out, God used it anyway.

Poker Addiction

You, dear reader, have probably been able to see what I couldn’t see then: I was addicted to poker.

It didn’t seem like an addiction at the time. I was making money! Sure, I was also sacrificing sleep and thinking about it more and more, but that seemed like commitment.

Like focus.

Not like compulsion.

The reality was that as my “focus” grew, so did the stress and mental strain. I was playing at higher levels where there was more to win and more to lose. The competition was harder.

With greater financial swings in the bankroll came emotional swings as well.

Lack of sleep, mental fatigue, and frustration from bad beats were stealing joy from life. The trajectory was towards less freedom and a lower quality of life as my poker focus increased.

But God saved me from this. Just like he would later save me from pornography.

He took my half-hearted and self-centered commitment and used it to free me from something that was slowly destroying me.

Here’s What Happened

The Lenten season began on Wednesday, March 9, 2011. That Wednesday was my first day of life without poker.

As Lent continued, I kept looking forward to getting poker back in my life. I was sure I would have been playing sometime in the evening after an Easter Sunday meal with my family.

But something completely unexpected happened shortly before I could get back to the online tables.

It was the Friday before Good Friday, the same as today. That day came to be known as “Black Friday” in the poker industry.

Because on Friday, April 15, 2011, the three largest online poker sites were indicted and shut down by the FBI and the Department of Justice for violating the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 by illegally processing payments for U.S. players.

The sites in question: PokerStars, Absolute Poker, and Full Tilt Poker.

I had played at PokerStars and Absolute Poker. Overnight, the accounts were frozen. The next month Absolute Poker laid off most staff and announced plans to file for bankruptcy.

The bankroll I had been steadily building was lost forever. I would never get the money back² nor would I ever play again.

I was free from addiction, but didn’t know it yet. I was too busy being sick to my stomach at the loss.

Angry at Freedom

I was horrified when I learned what happened. I couldn’t believe it. I was angry and lamented my “bad luck.”

If God actually did have some involvement in the unbelievable chain of events, I certainly wasn’t thankful. I was mad at Him.

This is one of the many reasons I now know that God is gracious, patient, and merciful.

He knew I’d be ungrateful in the moment.

He also knew I never would have said yes had He called me to quit poker completely. I could barely say yes to Lent. Yet He knew that the weeks without poker during Lent would begin the process of helping me break me from my poker obsession.

He asked me to take a baby step and He had the rest of the plan already worked out.

I’m a Sheep

I stopped talking to God after “Black Friday” happened.

The thought that it actually might have been Him seemed too foreign, too disturbing. Too much of an intrusion into “my” life.

For years afterwards, I saw it only as a crazy coincidence. The very first time I thought I might be hearing from God was the very time the online poker industry shut down, which just happened to be when I quit poker. I intentionally didn’t think about the low odds of it all being random chance.

So for me, it would only be a strange series of events. Events I preferred not to think about or talk about.

It took more additional events (including more supernatural “coincidences”) later in life for me to realize the wonderful and terrifying truth: God is real in a more personal way than I had ever imagined.

Not only is He real, but He deeply loves and cares for people like you and me. He loves and He cares even when we are completely clueless and incapable of seeing things as they truly are.

This is very good news. Because on my own, I now know that I am a sheep.

Sheep are often kind of stupid.

Sheep can be stubborn and unappreciative.

Shepherds, happily, are patient and kind with sheep. They genuinely care for their sheep, guarding them from predators and guiding them to safe pastures. Sheep come to trust their shepherd.

How much more can we trust Jesus, the Good Shepherd.

Today Matters

The FBI raid in 2011 was followed one week later by the real Good Friday. That’s a week from today.

It’s the day Jesus was arrested, abandoned by His friends, and crucified on a Roman cross outside of Jerusalem. An enemy of the Jewish religious authorities and of Rome.

Those authorities were blind. Just like I was blind. Just like all of us are blind before we come to know Jesus.

If I knew Jesus back in 2011, it was a distant relationship. I knew about Him, certainly. But I certainly didn’t trust Him. I lived with trust in myself, instead of in Christ.

In many ways, I didn’t want to believe that God was still doing miracles for sheep like me.

But the alternative, the terrifying and amazing truth, is that Jesus is both real and trustworthy. It might seem scary while we’re on the path, but that’s because sheep like us don’t know what the Good Shepherd knows.

Next Friday is Good Friday, the day that Jesus died for people like you and me. Three days later He rose again, and He continues to raise His followers to new life in Him today.

If you don’t trust Jesus today, what could be a better time than today to start? To recognize you are also a sheep and that you need a Shepherd as your Savior, Lord, and Friend.

Thanks for reading.

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Notes:

1: The idea of “hearing” from God can be a divisive one for some Christians. There are debates over the validity of subjective experience and the risk of manipulation or delusion. I definitely think there are risks for manipulation both from person to person (“I think God wants you to do this”) and within the spiritual realm (1 John 4:1).

This article isn’t to press deeper into those important issues. It is to share what happened and you’re free to make of it what you will.

I should make clear that I believe that Scripture contains all we need to know Jesus. I also think God can reveal Himself in other ways should He so choose (perhaps especially to people who might need a little extra help).

2: I believe that some players were able to recover their accounts. It seems as though Poker Stars did make this possible. Absolute Poker, my primary account, only returned a small fraction (and after a protracted process) due to their financial insolvency. I never got funds from either, perhaps because I was so sick at the idea of what I had lost.

And by the time I got over that sick feeling, I never wanted to go back!

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