Gabe is a 32 year old sales professional in the Los Angeles area who is embarking on the most important transformation of his life. He has a heart for serving and leading others, but has been drowning in depression over his own perceived deficiencies and failures for the past several years.
He comes from a loving family in Northern California, where he developed into a strong student athlete and leader in school and church. Through service opportunities, he developed a passion for helping to alleviate poverty and suffering in Latin America. He learned to speak fluent Spanish while studying in Costa Rica, and did humanitarian work in the Peruvian Amazon and Mexico. He became program director of a small but dynamic nonprofit organization, and earned a graduate degree in international economic development from a prestigious university in order to gain the tools necessary to more effectively do the work for which he was so passionate.
His ever-present anxieties were alleviated as long as he was focusing on others, but when his education was complete, and some personal difficulties exposed his weaknesses, he turned inward. It was time for the young man who thrived on supporting others to focus on his own future and needs, and he was ill-equipped to do so. He descended into a crisis of depression, and covered his emotions with drinking alcohol and eating comforting foods. The once athletic young man with a promising future lived the life of an emotionally tortured and despondent dependent. As always, he remained his own worst critic. He was disgusted with his weight gain and his repeated failures to get out of the rut he was in.
He finally fought his way back on his feet enough to move down south and take a career job in an unfamiliar industry. But there was no real healing, and the cycle of self loathing and self comforting/medicating remained. He met a troubled but exciting girl who he poured everything into for a tumultuous couple of years, but she was unable or unwilling to respond to him the way he hoped. He became convinced that he was incompetent to live up to the promise of his youth. These thoughts were a constant torture.
But the God of his youth had never abandoned him, but rather had some very important discoveries for him to make through the pain. He feels as if he is awakening in the inside of a cocoon, and that the life that awaits is more purposeful and adventurous than any he would have planned for himself.
