Where else do you turn in those hours when you're in darkness, and it doesn't look like the light will come? Let me tell you about a man named Robert. Robert had everything. He was a successful developer, and he was the CEO of a 32 million dollar business in the Boston area. But suddenly the bottom fell out. His business collapsed in the early 1980s, and he was plunged into bankruptcy.

"I had a wonderful firm with fifty people," Robert says of his former company. His company had helped disadvantaged people obtain affordable housing, but federal funds became scarce and they went bankrupt.

But not only did his company go bankrupt, his personal life went bankrupt too. In a three-year period, at the same time he lost his business, Robert's father died, his father-in-law died, his wife became an alcoholic, and his eldest child was committed to a hospital for a year.

One day as Robert was driving home, he was so distraught that he could hardly drive his car. As he later recalled that day he said, "I got out of the car and got down on my knees and prayed for help." He had hit bottom and felt totally defeated. He says, "I prayed for help, not believing that anyone could help me. But when I got up, I knew something extraordinary had happened. For the first time there was a clarity, a lightness, a sense of peace."

Robert had not been to church for many years, but after that experience he began attending again. He began reading the Bible and found himself drawn to the Psalms. He found they had meaning for his life. When he went into the church the first time, he read Psalm 30: "As for me, I said in my prosperity, 'I shall never be moved.'" That verse spoke to Robert very personally. "I realized," he says, "that I had suffered from the sin of overconfidence." His life changed from that moment on.

Ron Newhouse