To combat depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts, Eden Frenkel delved into personal development, self actualization, Buddhism, meditation, Hinduism and the mystical interpretation within Judaism known as Kabbalah.
“To be honest, I enjoyed the process of studying those cultures, but they were very temporary fulfillments,” the Jewish born singer says on her YouTube channel, Graves into Gardens. “I constantly needed to go back and search for more. They didn’t fill the emptiness. I was looking for peace and happiness.”
As a 12-year-old in the synagogue, she stayed before the ark and prayed longingly to God after everyone had left and gone to eat.
“God, I know there is something,” she uttered. “I don’t understand. I feel like there is something between us.”
Eden had a proclivity for music but joined the Canadian Army as a career. In addition to seeking peace from religion, she sought peace from psychedelics. She had suffered some abuse as a child, she says, and sought in vain to resolve the trauma.
When she got stationed in Toronto, she met some Christian women who were extremely friendly and they invited her to study the Bible. Why not? she thought, since she had studied so many other religions.
What she found out about Jesus startled her.
“All I knew growing up was he was a man who did miracles. In the beginning, I didn’t really take it seriously,” she says. “But after getting to know who Jesus was and what He did and what he claimed to be and what he wanted for his people, it was incredible.
James Tughan doesn’t blame the cops for shooting his son after he pointed a (toy) gun at them. James himself had called the police after his adult adopted son, his brain altered by drugs and concussions, had called to threaten James’ life. He recognizes the police were there to protect the innocent.
“I can’t really hold anybody responsible for that except Alex,” James says on a 100 Huntley St. video. “He provoked it”
He could not defuse the family tumult that resulted from the incident, so he now pours his pain into his drawings on paper. An accomplished artist in the realism genre, James explores the fragility of relationships in a world fraught with sin, but at the same time offered hope through the redemption of a loving Savior.
“This is how I deal with this phenomenon,” he says.
James Tughan grew up in a Christian home in Toronto and found faith in Christ, but not all was as it seemed. There were fissures. Unlike many who reject the faith of their parents because of some level of inconsistency between action and diction, James incorporated the jarring dissonance into his art.
With eye for detail, James excelled in realism and became a sought-after artist for commercial pieces for 25 years.
But recently, he’s turned more to fine art, wanting to give voice to a vibrant faith struggling with a shattered reality.
He married and had a beautiful family. He and his wife adopted Alex, who excelled in sports.
It was accidents on the snowboard (he preferred not to use a helmet) and a drug habit that started in the 7th grade that doomed Alex. His parents didn’t catch on to his drug use until it had devolved into ecstasy and heroin. Alex warped into an aggressive and hateful young man.
“In the end we ended up with a perfect storm,” James recounts. “Alex stopped being Alex, he became someone else. Our house was a war zone. He had become a con artist and… Read the rest: James Tughan Christian artist, troubled son.
He beat him repeatedly as if he was trying to tear out his insides.
“Dad was just an angry man,” Tim says on a 100 Huntley Street video. “I guess I was his pinata. When Dad lost his cool, there was just no filter. There was no off button. He was truly brutal.”
After being beaten and then locked in the furnace room in the dark for hours, 11-year-old Tim resolved to run away. He packed his little suitcase and the next day instead of going to school he went to a nearby township in Canada.
He was hoping to be adopted by a family or live in a commune, but instead he was preyed upon by a pedophile. The predator pretended to call some nurses who agreed to take him in. Instead, he took Tim to his apartment and raped him brutally.
Those two wounds — the physical and sexual abuse — became his deep, dark secret that was too painful to talk or even think about.
As he matured, Tim turned to drugs to silence the screams in his head. He fell into Rochdale College’s 1968 cooperative experiment in student housing and free college, but it degenerated into a haven for drugs, crime and suicide.
“I was doing everything I could to medicate the pain that I was feeling from my wounds: drugs, alcohol, sex, everything, and I became a drug dealer,” he says. “Rochdale is where I would go to get my drugs.”
One day, his supplier informed he could no longer provide the drugs he needed to sell and consume.
“Why?” Tim asked.
“Because I found the Lord and I’m not doing that anymore,” he responded.
His response was completely off radar for Tim, so he agreed to go to church and see what it was all about.
It was 1972, and St. Paul’s Anglican Church was experiencing revival among the students. The movement was called the Catacombs, named after the underground hideaway of First Century Christians, where they could worship without harassment from Roman persecutors. Thursday night service attracted upwards of 2,000, and Tim went home afterward and fell to his knees.
“I asked Jesus into my heart,” Tim remembers. “And there was a change in me.”
But the wounds were deep and rejuvenation not easy, so he quit Christianity.
Tim didn’t just walk away. First, he prayed.
“One thing I ask,” he said to the Lord, “is that day when I stand before You on Judgment Day, please remember that I gave it my best shot.”
He let go of God. God never let go of him.
Years later, he was married with a 3-year-old son and stepdaughter. He was visiting his brother-in-law at Lake Aquitaine, talking, sharing, eating. They lost track of time when his stepdaughter ran in frantically.
“I’ll never see my brother again!” she screamed.
“Where’s your brother?” Tim asked panicked.
“He is drowned in the lake…”
Barefoot, Tim ran out into the frigid March waters.
He arrived as a stranger was coming out of the water with Tim’s son in his arms.
Tim grabbed the child, carried him to shore and tried to administer CPR. The child had been underwater for five minutes. There was no response.
“I cry out to God, ‘Please don’t take my son. I’ll do anything,” he pleaded.
Continuing in his attempt to revive him, Tim managed to expel not only water but also seaweed from inside.
Mustard Seed Budget 