- Austin: My junior year of high school, I got a phone call one day. [A White Chair film]
It was my grandma, and she said,
"Your mom is--we're taking her to the hospital.
She passed out."
I got there just as the ambulance was getting there,
and it couldn't have been two hours.
The doctors came in and they said that my mom had passed,
that she was gone.
She didn't have terminal cancer,
she didn't have a sickness, she didn't have an illness.
It was something that came out of nowhere.
I remember going from the special room,
my grandma took a left to go see the body,
and I took a right
and I ran out of the front of the hospital,
threw my hands in the air,
and I cursed God for the first time in 17 years.
[Austin Carlile]
Okay.
When I was about 19 is when music really came into my life.
And when music came into my life,
I saw it as my new God.
[I believe it's time for me to be famous] ♪ heavy music playing ♪
[and out of place]
I started my band, Of Mice and Men,
had tryouts, found the band,
wrote a record, went on tour right away.
I could yell into a mic and get all of that rage and that hate out.
[So this time I'll make you proud]
♪ heavy music playing ♪
Some of my lyrics, I talk about bullying,
I talk about depression, I talk about suicide,
divorce, losing loved ones.
[I need your love like a boy needs his mother's side]
When you're on the road and you're touring a lot,
drinking is very easy.
I drank all the time.
I smoked marijuana all the time,
because it helped the pain, I thought,
of what I was dealing with mentally and emotionally and spiritually.
♪ I need your love like a boy needs his mother's side ♪♪
♪ trailing piano ♪
When my mom passed away,
they thought she had a heart attack,
but they found out later with the autopsy
that she had something called Marfan syndrome.
Marfan syndrome causes all of your connective tissues in your whole body
to stretch, to pull, to break apart.
A lot of people that have Marfans are in wheelchairs or crutches.
Their backs look like an S.
And the biggest thing to worry about with Marfans is your aorta valve in your heart.
And my mom never knew that she had Marfans,
that's why we lost her.
And I found out that I had the same genetic disorder,
had the DNA testing done and turns out I have the mutant gene.
And it was kind of cool for me to know that I had a mutant gene,
because I'm a big X-Men fan.
I'm a big comic book fan.
And so knowing that I'm a mutant was kind of cool,
and it brought a little solace to me.
The Marfans, you know, I wasn't supposed to even do sports anymore.
And here I was jumping off of balconies
and jumping off of stage
and starting mosh pits and going into the middle of them.
A few years into the band,
I found out that I needed to have heart surgery.
They cut my sternum from here to here.
Your head's on ice.
Your heart's stopped.
They pull out your heart.
They replaced that part of my aorta right here
with the same material as a sailboat sail.
I wanted to do it so I could be better and move on.
I went back to the band.
Get to the hard part.
My health started to get worse and worse and worse.
Issues with my hip, my ribs, my back, my legs.
Every time I would sing--
really bad arthritis,
I would have just really, really sharp pain shoot up into my head,
and my whole body would have seizures
and I would throw up because of the pain.
Before, we had toured with Avenged Sevenfold and Metallica in Australia.
I would have to sing, pop my rib back in,
sing, pop my rib back in.
I got to sing on stage every night with Linkin Park,
taking pain medication every day.
The band could tell I was in pain,
and "Are you going to be okay, let's stop."
No, push through, push through, keep going.
Things to help me sleep, things to help me wake up.
It was just a decline,
a very sharp decline.
I remember very vividly our bus was having a party like usual,
and I crawled to the top of the bus.
I called my dad, and I said, "Hey, dad.
Man, like, what is the purpose of this?
What am I missing?
What am I doing wrong?
The band is building all this success,
and all these things, but I'm still so empty and hurt and lost."
And the only thing that he replied with was "Where's God in your life?"
I don't remember my response,
I don't remember the rest of the conversation,
but I remember hanging up and those words just hanging on my spirit,
"Where is God in your life?"
Over the next couple years,
I started to become sober,
I specifically remember trying to write,
and I couldn't write about anything other than what God was doing in my life
and this change that I wanted and was craving so badly for.
And I remember putting down the pen
and saying, "You know what, God?
I want to come back.
I need you.
I can't do this on my own anymore.
I don't want to do this on my own anymore."
I said, "I want you to use me,
use my feet, use my hands, use my mouth, use my talent,
use everything that I am for your glory."
And I said, "I give you my life, I give you my heart.
Use it."
And I had no idea what I was in store for.
October of 2016, my doctor said you can't do this anymore.
Every time I was singing, I was tearing holes in my spine,
and the pain was because the spinal fluid was coming out.
The doctors told me, you can't be in the band,
and your body needs to rest.
Everything that I was was that band,
and I walked away,
and I knew God was calling me to do something different,
but I was so confused as to what it was.
[Austin left the band and moved to Costa Rica]
[He taught music, coached a baseball team, and ran sound for his father's church.]
I prayed to God one night.
I said, "You have to take this from me.
I can't do this anymore.
I don't know why you're putting me through this.
And the next morning I woke up, still didn't feel good.
And I met a group of people that I saw in the back of the church
that I knew that they weren't from there.
So I went and introduced myself afterwards,
and within a couple minutes of speaking with them,
this young lady says to me, "Can I ask you a weird question?"
And she said, "God, the spirit, is telling me
that you're having some back issues right now."
And I was like, "What?"
Then and there, they lay their hands on me and prayed for me,
and I starting from standing with them praying
to my knees,
and as they were praying for me,
God was telling them different pains
that my body is having,
and I started to break down.
And they prayed for healing, they prayed for restoration.
I'm not usually a sensual, touchy-feely kind of guy,
that's not my thing,
crying in public isn't a big thing,
I stood up after that prayer,
and I could touch my toes for the first time in like two months.
I stood up and I took my back brace off.
I went out and was playing football and playing in the waves.
My dad kept saying, "Take it easy, take it easy.
Don't overdo it."
Turns out these were missionaries
that were just on a spirit-led trip
to South America,
and I was healed.
And people saw it, like, "Did you have surgery?'
What's going on?
You're glowing, like you're not limping."
Now, I had a storage unit filled with everything that I had from childhood
I found out just three weeks after the healing
that my entire storage unit was auctioned off,
and I broke--I broke down.
And I said please, you took all my stuff, that's fine.
The only things that I want back are my mom's ashes,
my family photos, and the only letters I had written
from my mom.
And these people wouldn't even give me that back.
And I thought it was so wild
that God healed me
and then took all of this from me.
And I saw it as God saying, "You wanted to be a new man?
You're a new man in me.
Here we go."
The whole time I was running from God,
I was kicking and screaming and trying to run the other way.
He was waiting for me.
He welcomed me back with open arms.
And just to know that the God of the universe,
the God that created everything that we are
loves me, loves you, loves us so much
that he gives us chance after chance after chance after chance
and pursues us,
there's no greater love than that.
The people that have followed me,
they have to know now what actually brought me through all those things,
and that was Christ.
He's so important to me,
because I don't have anything else.
I literally have nothing else,
but my heart is more full than it's ever been in my entire life.
My name is Austin Carlile,
and I am second.