From Prison to Pulpit

I'm not the man I used to be — and that's the whole point.

There was a season of my life I don't hide from, because hiding it would rob it of its power. Addiction took years from me. I went to prison. I hit a bottom most people never see and live to talk about. For sixteen months I was homeless and on the run — I even bought a one-way ticket all the way to Guadalajara, Mexico, chasing what people in recovery call a "geographical cure," believing a new place could outrun an old pain.

It couldn't. You can change your zip code, but you can't change your heart. Only God can do that.

"He met me at the bottom — which, I've learned, is exactly where He does His best work."

By a grace I didn't earn and still can't fully explain, I made it back. I drank the water most people are warned about and I was kept. I walked through things that should have ended me, and here I am. That's not a boast. It's a testimony.

The coma — and a Good Friday

There's a reason I don't flinch when I say God does His best work at the bottom. I overdosed and spent six days in a coma on a breathing machine. While I lay there, someone who loved me sat at the bedside and read the old words over me — Ezekiel, in the valley of dry bones: "Breathe on these slain, that they may live." On the third day, my toe moved. And on Good Friday — in the very season we remember an empty tomb — I opened my eyes and came back. I don't tell that to shock anyone. I tell it because I am, quite literally, a man who was as good as gone and is alive — and I've been getting well ever since, one honest day at a time, with faith and good people around me.

He didn't just save me — He sent me

God took a man the world had written off and put him to work. I was ordained through One Promise Ministry, and for a season I had the honor of pastoring Hillside Baptist Church in Grifton, North Carolina. From a prison cell to a pulpit. Only God writes stories like that.

My father — my first hero

Long before I understood any of this, I had a hero: my dad. He served in the U.S. Army, then worked at the Pentagon, went back to school, and fell in love with the brand-new world of computers. He went on to Lockheed Martin, writing software for the United States government — work that, he told me when I was a boy, reached all the way to the B-2 stealth bomber. One stormy night he heard an SOS tapping through the static in Morse code — the beeps and the dots — and helped save a man's life. That was him: quietly brilliant, and always answering the call.

He wasn't only a mind. He was a Catholic man of God who read and led at Mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel in Moorestown, New Jersey, where I grew up. He taught me lacrosse and baseball, how to ride a dirt bike, how to draw a bow and handle a rifle, how to hunt and fish and swim and run a pool table — how to be a man in the outdoors and a man on my knees.

Cancer took him when I was thirteen, but I still measure myself against him every day. I believe the gift that runs through this family — the way my brother William and I can see patterns and build things — came down from him. So when you see the Hahn name on a company, know that it started with a good man who loved God, loved his family, and answered every call. I build to be worthy of him.

"Everything I know about being a man, I learned from my father — and everything about being a new man, I learned from my Father in heaven."

My mother — a woman of words

If my father gave me the mind to build, my mother gave me the heart for words. Her name is Anne Hahn, of Ayden, North Carolina. She built her whole life around language: an English teacher who ran reading and writing workshops, sold books, and started her own publishing company, Sand Dollar Publishing. She believed words could change a person. She was right — it just took me a long, hard road to prove her.

The day the words opened up

Here's the mystery of grace. With all of that in my blood — a mother who taught English and lived for books — I could not read. Not really, not for the longest time. The words wouldn't hold still for me. That changed the day I was baptized at Open Doors by Pastor David Chestnutt — dunked in Mr. Billy's pool, the pastor's own father standing right there. Something opened up in me that day, and the words finally came. My mother gave me a love of books; God gave me the ability to read them.

Open Doors is also where I learned to be a man again. We'd pick up Food Lion's expired food to feed the rehab and the ministry. We raked leaves, we cleaned, we cooked — I cooked many a meal for many a man — and in that plain, hard work I learned how to live, and how to respect other men. Some of the most important lessons of my life never came from a book or a pulpit. They came from a rake, a kitchen, and a room full of men trying to get well together.

"My mother gave me a love of words. God gave me the words themselves."

My first A's came in a cell

I'll tell you plainly that I've been to prison — because of what God did with me there. For the first time in my whole life, I hit the books and earned straight A's: correspondence courses through the Rock of Ages Disciple Institute, and even a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill class I took while I was locked up. A man the world had written off, making the honor roll from a cell. I taught myself, too — yoga, reading, anything a book or a little tablet time could give me. I was hungry to become someone new, and thank God for every resource that let me learn.

I didn't do it alone. I checked in every single day with a mentor on the inside — a woman of faith who helped me look at myself honestly, feelings and all, and taught me things I'd never learned about being a man. And I got well in the drug program there — thank you, Mrs. Boone, for not giving up on me. I worked the prison kitchen too, early shifts, cooking for thousands of men. Hard, humbling work that handed me back my dignity.

"I'm social — but I'm not social services. I'll give you a hand up, not a free ride. I know the difference, because grace gave me a hand up when I'd earned nothing."

And when my day finally came, a friend named Al was waiting at the gate to pick me up — the kind of brother who believes in you before you've proven a single thing. That's the man I try to be for other people now. Everything I build, I build to pass that hand up along.

Why I build

Today I build businesses — the Hahn family of companies — but not to chase money. I build so I have something to give. Every venture is a way to serve: clean water for the homeless, because I have been homeless. Help for people the system gave up on, because I was one of them. Hope for the forgotten, and a hand for children a world away in Pakistan who never had the chances I threw away and was given back.

Faith isn't a label I tack onto a business card. It's the operating system. Every site, every service, every bottle of water is meant to point back to the One who carried me home.

"If God can restore a man like me, He can restore anyone. That's not marketing. That's my life."

Where I come from — my roots & family story →