By the time he was fourteen, Michael Steimel was as tall and as tough as most of the older guys already in high school. Those attributes come in handy in Indiana (as do shooting and rebounding skills), where basketball reigns supreme in the hearts and minds of the local citizenry. It's called Hoosier Hysteria.
By the time he was fourteen, Steimel was also a full-blown alcoholic. He loved booze, couldn't get through a day without it, and was often wasted. By the time he was fifteen, he had quit a promising career in basketball, was hanging by a thread of flunking out of school, and was dealing with a profound loss of self-esteem and what would later be diagnosed as depression. Despite those obstacles, Michael by his mid-twenties had married his high school sweetheart and carved out a good living erecting transmission towers for telephone companies. But he couldn't shake the demons tormenting and leading him into a downward spiral: a failed suicide attempt at age thirty-three (self-inflicted gunshot to the head), a broken marriage, and a total loss of assets-compounded by a years-long legal struggle to regain custody of his two daughters.
In Redeemed, Steimel tells his inspirational story of how he painstakingly navigated his way through life's trials and tribulations to find God again, get sober (which he has been for 20-plus years), join a church, become actively involved in his faith community, and take his message of redemption and recovery to churches and schools.
