Love is an Action

by Aidan Shih, 15

Derek Bloom is hitchhiking in the main square of Olympia, Washington, when he gets the call that Marcos had died. 

Marcos earned his master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, but he never had a high-paying job or did academic research. Instead, Marcos lived in an abandoned Amtrak train in upper Manhattan. He’d been Derek’s friend for about five years. They’d met in Central Park, where Derek lived. There, Derek says, Marcos would “meet people from all over the world, fall in love, [and] drink himself to death.” 

Marcos had felt free. 

But when Marcos went to the hospital for an infection, he was told that it was minor and that he would be fine. Two days later, Marcos was dead.

In Olympia, Derek is crying. 

Derek was raised as a conservative Christian in Lenapehoking (the name the Lenape people use for the area around Bucks County, Pennsylvania). Since he was 18 years old, Derek and a friend roamed the United States, advocating and volunteering at soup kitchens in what was, for him, a “radical Christian pilgrimage.” They had a car in the beginning, but for most of the trip, Derek had no roof over his head.

But, by his definition, Derek was not “homeless.” That term would imply a lack of choice in his situation, living on the streets. Derek did not have to live on the streets; he could have lived with his mother or gotten a job. 

He decided to live on the streets. 

“When I was living on the streets or traveling, hitchhiking, squatting, I remember being free.”

Along this journey in 2003, Derek participated in his first major protest in San Francisco. He and people all over the world that day were opposing the United States-Iraq war. 

This protest woke Derek up to the world of activism. 

“It just blew me away. I saw people doing direct action, blockading traffic, and getting arrested. I saw people throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, and the people were on fire. I saw people just marching and singing songs. I saw people mail blood to the White House to try to stop the war in Iraq. That was all happening when I was 18, and I decided that [activism was] what I wanted to do with my life, mostly because I saw the humanity. I had these relationships. I was meeting people on the streets, and I thought, ‘Oh, you’re human, you have a story, just like me. You’re important.’ I wanted to support that community, so it all came together, and I started to become an activist.”

After travelling the country, at 19, Derek moved to New York to work with people experiencing homelessness. This is where he met Marcos. First, Derek slept in a tent in Central Park, but soon he was living in the basement of a nearby Baptist Church, working in a soup kitchen. With money from his grandfather, he attended college for 2.5 years, studying theology and social work. 

During the 2004 Republican National Convention in the city, he protested against George W. Bush; Derek was arrested “three or four times that week.”

Soon, the protesting turned violent.  

“We were making out in the middle of Times Square, shutting down traffic, and horses were trampling us, and they threw us in cages with oil on the ground.” 

Derek would eventually win thousands of dollars because of this treatment. But attending the protest and enduring the pain he experienced there solidified his commitment to challenge the injustice he saw in his country publicly.

When he was 24, Derek married the partner he is still with today. He notes, though, that the ceremony was not a legally binding marriage, as they were “not believing in a state.” They then went to work and live with the Dené (Navajo) people in Arizona from 2008 until 2015. At the time, the company Peabody Coal was running the second-largest coal mine in the United States, and Dené families and elders were resisting relocation from their home for the mine.

Over his 10 years there, Derek would help this cause in a very specific way.

“To support the resistance was to help them herd their sheep so they don’t over-graze the land. [After living with the Dené,] I would put supporters [and] human rights observers from all over the world to stay and live with these families and support their resistance to stay on their ancestral homeland.” 

Derek became not just an advocate for change, but a leader for it.

After his time with the Dené, Derek moved to New Jersey. He soon found work at Trinity Church as the Director of Community Engagement and Organizing, a position he still holds today. In the ten years since Derek took on the role, the budget covering his community service work has increased from $55,000 to $1.2 million, money used to pay workers and cover housing and food services. He runs a pantry and a soup kitchen that collectively serve over 35,000 meals a year. Another one of his projects, Code Blue, provides shelter for the unhoused on winter nights colder than 32°F; in the winter of 2023-4, the project served 345 people. 

“Ultimately, we’re doing what we feel called to. Loving your neighbor isn’t this symbolic thing where you say a prayer for them every once in a while […] Love is an action.” 

Derek also gives peer recovery coaching to people struggling with addiction. 

“During these coaching sessions, we [talk] about healthy communication, how to deal with stress, how to deal with anxiety, tools that could help you communicate better, with the understanding that being sober and healthy isn’t just about one thing, but when your overall life is healthier, it’s easier to make healthier choices for yourself.” 

In fact, Derek has a personal understanding of addiction due to his early struggles. Because Derek has ADHD, he was told that he wasn’t smart and would not get into college. This narrative deeply discouraged him. 

“I didn’t have a lot of hope in the beginning of my life for what I would be able to do in the world.” 

By fourth grade, Derek had turned to alcohol to cope, and a few years later, he started smoking and doing drugs. 

“I was numbing myself out. I was wallowing. The only thing [drugs] do is numb you out in the moment. They make you feel good in the moment, but they don’t actually fix your situation. They don’t give you self-esteem, they don’t give you love, they don’t give you a job, they don’t give you relationships. If anything, they take all those things away from you.” 

Derek was struggling to hold onto a life that people told him wasn’t worth living.

But his life turned around when he attended a Christian celebration in Pennsylvania called “Creation Festival.” The event featured punk rock music, which Derek loves. But beyond music, he heard a speaker give a talk that was particularly interesting to Derek. The speaker talked about his own heroin addiction, recounting the story of how his friends, worried about the speaker’s drug use, convinced him to say a prayer. While praying, the speaker felt God and, the next day, went to an inpatient program, never to use heroin again. 

Hearing this, 17-year-old Derek Bloom looked up into the Pennsylvania night sky. The Milky Way was bright white. Derek said a prayer, something along the lines of:

 “God, if you’re real, if you’re love, I want to feel that.” Derek “almost felt a lightning bolt […] and [he] was immediately sober.” 

Seeking Jesus, he went into the woods and prayed for help to stop doing drugs permanently. 

Later that week, Derek met with his friend and lover at the time, Ian, on a hill back in Lenapehoking (Bucks County). Ian told Derek that on Wednesday, the same day Derek prayed to God under the stars, he had begun reading the Bible and believing in God. They decided together to stop doing drugs and to become sober. Derek didn’t drink alcohol for eight years following that day, and he has never used hard drugs again. 

“Life is all about love, loving yourself, and loving your neighbor. It’s the simplest part of it, but I think to make love not corny, it needs to be fierce. Loving someone means standing up for them, fighting for justice for them. No one is free until we’re all free.Derek Bloom is hitchhiking in the main square of Olympia, Washington, when he gets the call that Marcos had died. 

Marcos earned his master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, but he never had a high-paying job or did academic research. Instead, Marcos lived in an abandoned Amtrak train in upper Manhattan. He’d been Derek’s friend for about five years. They’d met in Central Park, where Derek lived. There, Derek says, Marcos would “meet people from all over the world, fall in love, [and] drink himself to death.” 

Marcos had felt free. 

But when Marcos went to the hospital for an infection, he was told that it was minor and that he would be fine. Two days later, Marcos was dead.

In Olympia, Derek is crying. 

Derek was raised as a conservative Christian in Lenapehoking (the name the Lenape people use for the area around Bucks County, Pennsylvania). Since he was 18 years old, Derek and a friend roamed the United States, advocating and volunteering at soup kitchens in what was, for him, a “radical Christian pilgrimage”. They had a car in the beginning, but for most of the trip, Derek had no roof over his head.

But, by his definition, Derek was not “homeless.” That term would imply a lack of choice in his situation, living on the streets. Derek did not have to live on the streets; he could have lived with his mother or gotten a job. 

He decided to live on the streets. 

“When I was living on the streets or traveling, hitchhiking, squatting, I remember being free.”

Along this journey in 2003, Derek participated in his first major protest in San Francisco. He and people all over the world that day were opposing the United States-Iraq war. 

This protest woke Derek up to the world of activism. 

“It just blew me away. I saw people doing direct action, blockading traffic, and getting arrested. I saw people throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, and the people were on fire. I saw people just marching and singing songs. I saw people mail blood to the White House to try to stop the war in Iraq. That was all happening when I was 18, and I decided that [activism was] what I wanted to do with my life, mostly because I saw the humanity. I had these relationships. I was meeting people on the streets, and I thought, ‘Oh, you’re human, you have a story, just like me. You’re important.’ I wanted to support that community, so it all came together, and I started to become an activist.”

After travelling the country, at 19, Derek moved to New York to work with people experiencing homelessness. This is where he met Marcos. First, Derek slept in a tent in Central Park, but soon he was living in the basement of a nearby Baptist Church, working in a soup kitchen. With money from his grandfather, he attended college for 2.5 years, studying theology and social work. 

During the 2004 Republican National Convention in the city, he protested against George W. Bush; Derek was arrested “three or four times that week.”

Soon, the protesting turned violent.  

“We were making out in the middle of Times Square, shutting down traffic, and horses were trampling us, and they threw us in cages with oil on the ground.” 

Derek would eventually win thousands of dollars because of this treatment. But attending the protest and enduring the pain he experienced there solidified his commitment to challenge the injustice he saw in his country publicly.

When he was 24, Derek married the partner he is still with today. He notes, though, that the ceremony was not a legally binding marriage, as they were “not believing in a state.” They then went to work and live with the Dené (Navajo) people in Arizona from 2008 until 2015. At the time, the company Peabody Coal was running the second-largest coal mine in the United States, and Dené families and elders were resisting relocation from their home for the mine.

Over his 10 years there, Derek would help this cause in a very specific way.

“To support the resistance was to help them herd their sheep so they don’t over-graze the land. [After living with the Dené,] I would put supporters [and] human rights observers from all over the world to stay and live with these families and support their resistance to stay on their ancestral homeland.” 

Derek became not just an advocate for change, but a leader for it.

After his time with the Dené, Derek moved to New Jersey. He soon found work at Trinity Church as the Director of Community Engagement and Organizing, a position he still holds today. In the ten years since Derek took on the role, the budget covering his community service work has increased from $55,000 to $1.2 million, money used to pay workers and cover housing and food services. He runs a pantry and a soup kitchen that collectively serve over 35,000 meals a year. Another one of his projects, Code Blue, provides shelter for the unhoused on winter nights colder than 32°F; in the winter of 2023-4, the project served 345 people. 

“Ultimately, we’re doing what we feel called to. Loving your neighbor isn’t this symbolic thing where you say a prayer for them every once in a while […] Love is an action.” 

Derek also gives peer recovery coaching to people struggling with addiction. 

“During these coaching sessions, we [talk] about healthy communication, how to deal with stress, how to deal with anxiety, tools that could help you communicate better, with the understanding that being sober and healthy isn’t just about one thing, but when your overall life is healthier, it’s easier to make healthier choices for yourself.” 

In fact, Derek has a personal understanding of addiction due to his early struggles. Because Derek has ADHD, he was told that he wasn’t smart and would not get into college. This narrative deeply discouraged him. 

“I didn’t have a lot of hope in the beginning of my life for what I would be able to do in the world.” 

By fourth grade, Derek had turned to alcohol to cope, and a few years later, he started smoking and doing drugs. 

“I was numbing myself out. I was wallowing. The only thing [drugs] do is numb you out in the moment. They make you feel good in the moment, but they don’t actually fix your situation. They don’t give you self-esteem, they don’t give you love, they don’t give you a job, they don’t give you relationships. If anything, they take all those things away from you.” 

Derek was struggling to hold onto a life that people told him wasn’t worth living.

But his life turned around when he attended a Christian celebration in Pennsylvania called “Creation Festival.” The event featured punk rock music, which Derek loves. But beyond music, he heard a speaker give a talk that was particularly interesting to Derek. The speaker talked about his own heroin addiction, recounting the story of how his friends, worried about the speaker’s drug use, convinced him to say a prayer. While praying, the speaker felt God and, the next day, went to an inpatient program, never to use heroin again. 

Hearing this, 17-year-old Derek Bloom looked up into the Pennsylvania night sky. The Milky Way was bright white. Derek said a prayer, something along the lines of:

 “God, if you’re real, if you’re love, I want to feel that.” Derek “almost felt a lightning bolt […] and [he] was immediately sober.” 

Seeking Jesus, he went into the woods and prayed for help to stop doing drugs permanently. 

Later that week, Derek met with his friend and lover at the time, Ian, on a hill back in Lenapehoking (Bucks County). Ian told Derek that on Wednesday, the same day Derek prayed to God under the stars, he had begun reading the Bible and believing in God. They decided together to stop doing drugs and to become sober. Derek didn’t drink alcohol for eight years following that day, and he has never used hard drugs again. 

“Life is all about love, loving yourself, and loving your neighbor. It’s the simplest part of it, but I think to make love not corny, it needs to be fierce. Loving someone means standing up for them, fighting for justice for them. No one is free until we’re all free.Derek Bloom is hitchhiking in the main square of Olympia, Washington, when he gets the call that Marcos had died. 

Marcos earned his master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, but he never had a high-paying job or did academic research. Instead, Marcos lived in an abandoned Amtrak train in upper Manhattan. He’d been Derek’s friend for about five years. They’d met in Central Park, where Derek lived. There, Derek says, Marcos would “meet people from all over the world, fall in love, [and] drink himself to death.” 

Marcos had felt free. 

But when Marcos went to the hospital for an infection, he was told that it was minor and that he would be fine. Two days later, Marcos was dead.

In Olympia, Derek is crying. 

Derek was raised as a conservative Christian in Lenapehoking (the name the Lenape people use for the area around Bucks County, Pennsylvania). Since he was 18 years old, Derek and a friend roamed the United States, advocating and volunteering at soup kitchens in what was, for him, a “radical Christian pilgrimage”. They had a car in the beginning, but for most of the trip, Derek had no roof over his head.

But, by his definition, Derek was not “homeless.” That term would imply a lack of choice in his situation, living on the streets. Derek did not have to live on the streets; he could have lived with his mother or gotten a job. 

He decided to live on the streets. 

“When I was living on the streets or traveling, hitchhiking, squatting, I remember being free.”

Along this journey in 2003, Derek participated in his first major protest in San Francisco. He and people all over the world that day were opposing the United States-Iraq war. 

This protest woke Derek up to the world of activism. 

“It just blew me away. I saw people doing direct action, blockading traffic, and getting arrested. I saw people throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, and the people were on fire. I saw people just marching and singing songs. I saw people mail blood to the White House to try to stop the war in Iraq. That was all happening when I was 18, and I decided that [activism was] what I wanted to do with my life, mostly because I saw the humanity. I had these relationships. I was meeting people on the streets, and I thought, ‘Oh, you’re human, you have a story, just like me. You’re important.’ I wanted to support that community, so it all came together, and I started to become an activist.”

After travelling the country, at 19, Derek moved to New York to work with people experiencing homelessness. This is where he met Marcos. First, Derek slept in a tent in Central Park, but soon he was living in the basement of a nearby Baptist Church, working in a soup kitchen. With money from his grandfather, he attended college for 2.5 years, studying theology and social work. 

During the 2004 Republican National Convention in the city, he protested against George W. Bush; Derek was arrested “three or four times that week.”

Soon, the protesting turned violent.  

“We were making out in the middle of Times Square, shutting down traffic, and horses were trampling us, and they threw us in cages with oil on the ground.” 

Derek would eventually win thousands of dollars because of this treatment. But attending the protest and enduring the pain he experienced there solidified his commitment to challenge the injustice he saw in his country publicly.

When he was 24, Derek married the partner he is still with today. He notes, though, that the ceremony was not a legally binding marriage, as they were “not believing in a state.” They then went to work and live with the Dené (Navajo) people in Arizona from 2008 until 2015. At the time, the company Peabody Coal was running the second-largest coal mine in the United States, and Dené families and elders were resisting relocation from their home for the mine.

Over his 10 years there, Derek would help this cause in a very specific way.

“To support the resistance was to help them herd their sheep so they don’t over-graze the land. [After living with the Dené,] I would put supporters [and] human rights observers from all over the world to stay and live with these families and support their resistance to stay on their ancestral homeland.” 

Derek became not just an advocate for change, but a leader for it.

After his time with the Dené, Derek moved to New Jersey. He soon found work at Trinity Church as the Director of Community Engagement and Organizing, a position he still holds today. In the ten years since Derek took on the role, the budget covering his community service work has increased from $55,000 to $1.2 million, money used to pay workers and cover housing and food services. He runs a pantry and a soup kitchen that collectively serve over 35,000 meals a year. Another one of his projects, Code Blue, provides shelter for the unhoused on winter nights colder than 32°F; in the winter of 2023-4, the project served 345 people. 

“Ultimately, we’re doing what we feel called to. Loving your neighbor isn’t this symbolic thing where you say a prayer for them every once in a while […] Love is an action.” 

Derek also gives peer recovery coaching to people struggling with addiction. 

“During these coaching sessions, we [talk] about healthy communication, how to deal with stress, how to deal with anxiety, tools that could help you communicate better, with the understanding that being sober and healthy isn’t just about one thing, but when your overall life is healthier, it’s easier to make healthier choices for yourself.” 

In fact, Derek has a personal understanding of addiction due to his early struggles. Because Derek has ADHD, he was told that he wasn’t smart and would not get into college. This narrative deeply discouraged him. 

“I didn’t have a lot of hope in the beginning of my life for what I would be able to do in the world.” 

By fourth grade, Derek had turned to alcohol to cope, and a few years later, he started smoking and doing drugs. 

“I was numbing myself out. I was wallowing. The only thing [drugs] do is numb you out in the moment. They make you feel good in the moment, but they don’t actually fix your situation. They don’t give you self-esteem, they don’t give you love, they don’t give you a job, they don’t give you relationships. If anything, they take all those things away from you.” 

Derek was struggling to hold onto a life that people told him wasn’t worth living.

But his life turned around when he attended a Christian celebration in Pennsylvania called “Creation Festival.” The event featured punk rock music, which Derek loves. But beyond music, he heard a speaker give a talk that was particularly interesting to Derek. The speaker talked about his own heroin addiction, recounting the story of how his friends, worried about the speaker’s drug use, convinced him to say a prayer. While praying, the speaker felt God and, the next day, went to an inpatient program, never to use heroin again. 

Hearing this, 17-year-old Derek Bloom looked up into the Pennsylvania night sky. The Milky Way was bright white. Derek said a prayer, something along the lines of:

 “God, if you’re real, if you’re love, I want to feel that.” Derek “almost felt a lightning bolt […] and [he] was immediately sober.” 

Seeking Jesus, he went into the woods and prayed for help to stop doing drugs permanently. 

Later that week, Derek met with his friend and lover at the time, Ian, on a hill back in Lenapehoking (Bucks County). Ian told Derek that on Wednesday, the same day Derek prayed to God under the stars, he had begun reading the Bible and believing in God. They decided together to stop doing drugs and to become sober. Derek didn’t drink alcohol for eight years following that day, and he has never used hard drugs again. 

“Life is all about love, loving yourself, and loving your neighbor. It’s the simplest part of it, but I think to make love not corny, it needs to be fierce. Loving someone means standing up for them, fighting for justice for them. No one is free until we’re all freeDerek Bloom is hitchhiking in the main square of Olympia, Washington, when he gets the call that Marcos had died. 

Marcos earned his master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, but he never had a high-paying job or did academic research. Instead, Marcos lived in an abandoned Amtrak train in upper Manhattan. He’d been Derek’s friend for about five years. They’d met in Central Park, where Derek lived. There, Derek says, Marcos would “meet people from all over the world, fall in love, [and] drink himself to death.” 

Marcos had felt free. 

But when Marcos went to the hospital for an infection, he was told that it was minor and that he would be fine. Two days later, Marcos was dead.

In Olympia, Derek is crying. 

Derek was raised as a conservative Christian in Lenapehoking (the name the Lenape people use for the area around Bucks County, Pennsylvania). Since he was 18 years old, Derek and a friend roamed the United States, advocating and volunteering at soup kitchens in what was, for him, a “radical Christian pilgrimage”. They had a car in the beginning, but for most of the trip, Derek had no roof over his head.

But, by his definition, Derek was not “homeless.” That term would imply a lack of choice in his situation, living on the streets. Derek did not have to live on the streets; he could have lived with his mother or gotten a job. 

He decided to live on the streets. 

“When I was living on the streets or traveling, hitchhiking, squatting, I remember being free.”

Along this journey in 2003, Derek participated in his first major protest in San Francisco. He and people all over the world that day were opposing the United States-Iraq war. 

This protest woke Derek up to the world of activism. 

“It just blew me away. I saw people doing direct action, blockading traffic, and getting arrested. I saw people throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, and the people were on fire. I saw people just marching and singing songs. I saw people mail blood to the White House to try to stop the war in Iraq. That was all happening when I was 18, and I decided that [activism was] what I wanted to do with my life, mostly because I saw the humanity. I had these relationships. I was meeting people on the streets, and I thought, ‘Oh, you’re human, you have a story, just like me. You’re important.’ I wanted to support that community, so it all came together, and I started to become an activist.”

After travelling the country, at 19, Derek moved to New York to work with people experiencing homelessness. This is where he met Marcos. First, Derek slept in a tent in Central Park, but soon he was living in the basement of a nearby Baptist Church, working in a soup kitchen. With money from his grandfather, he attended college for 2.5 years, studying theology and social work. 

During the 2004 Republican National Convention in the city, he protested against George W. Bush; Derek was arrested “three or four times that week.”

Soon, the protesting turned violent.  

“We were making out in the middle of Times Square, shutting down traffic, and horses were trampling us, and they threw us in cages with oil on the ground.” 

Derek would eventually win thousands of dollars because of this treatment. But attending the protest and enduring the pain he experienced there solidified his commitment to challenge the injustice he saw in his country publicly.

When he was 24, Derek married the partner he is still with today. He notes, though, that the ceremony was not a legally binding marriage, as they were “not believing in a state.” They then went to work and live with the Dené (Navajo) people in Arizona from 2008 until 2015. At the time, the company Peabody Coal was running the second-largest coal mine in the United States, and Dené families and elders were resisting relocation from their home for the mine.

Over his 10 years there, Derek would help this cause in a very specific way.

“To support the resistance was to help them herd their sheep so they don’t over-graze the land. [After living with the Dené,] I would put supporters [and] human rights observers from all over the world to stay and live with these families and support their resistance to stay on their ancestral homeland.” 

Derek became not just an advocate for change, but a leader for it.

After his time with the Dené, Derek moved to New Jersey. He soon found work at Trinity Church as the Director of Community Engagement and Organizing, a position he still holds today. In the ten years since Derek took on the role, the budget covering his community service work has increased from $55,000 to $1.2 million, money used to pay workers and cover housing and food services. He runs a pantry and a soup kitchen that collectively serve over 35,000 meals a year. Another one of his projects, Code Blue, provides shelter for the unhoused on winter nights colder than 32°F; in the winter of 2023-4, the project served 345 people. 

“Ultimately, we’re doing what we feel called to. Loving your neighbor isn’t this symbolic thing where you say a prayer for them every once in a while […] Love is an action.” 

Derek also gives peer recovery coaching to people struggling with addiction. 

“During these coaching sessions, we [talk] about healthy communication, how to deal with stress, how to deal with anxiety, tools that could help you communicate better, with the understanding that being sober and healthy isn’t just about one thing, but when your overall life is healthier, it’s easier to make healthier choices for yourself.” 

In fact, Derek has a personal understanding of addiction due to his early struggles. Because Derek has ADHD, he was told that he wasn’t smart and would not get into college. This narrative deeply discouraged him. 

“I didn’t have a lot of hope in the beginning of my life for what I would be able to do in the world.” 

By fourth grade, Derek had turned to alcohol to cope, and a few years later, he started smoking and doing drugs. 

“I was numbing myself out. I was wallowing. The only thing [drugs] do is numb you out in the moment. They make you feel good in the moment, but they don’t actually fix your situation. They don’t give you self-esteem, they don’t give you love, they don’t give you a job, they don’t give you relationships. If anything, they take all those things away from you.” 

Derek was struggling to hold onto a life that people told him wasn’t worth living.

But his life turned around when he attended a Christian celebration in Pennsylvania called “Creation Festival.” The event featured punk rock music, which Derek loves. But beyond music, he heard a speaker give a talk that was particularly interesting to Derek. The speaker talked about his own heroin addiction, recounting the story of how his friends, worried about the speaker’s drug use, convinced him to say a prayer. While praying, the speaker felt God and, the next day, went to an inpatient program, never to use heroin again. 

Hearing this, 17-year-old Derek Bloom looked up into the Pennsylvania night sky. The Milky Way was bright white. Derek said a prayer, something along the lines of:

 “God, if you’re real, if you’re love, I want to feel that.” Derek “almost felt a lightning bolt […] and [he] was immediately sober.” 

Seeking Jesus, he went into the woods and prayed for help to stop doing drugs permanently. 

Later that week, Derek met with his friend and lover at the time, Ian, on a hill back in Lenapehoking (Bucks County). Ian told Derek that on Wednesday, the same day Derek prayed to God under the stars, he had begun reading the Bible and believing in God. They decided together to stop doing drugs and to become sober. Derek didn’t drink alcohol for eight years following that day, and he has never used hard drugs again. 

“Life is all about love, loving yourself, and loving your neighbor. It’s the simplest part of it, but I think to make love not corny, it needs to be fierce. Loving someone means standing up for them, fighting for justice for them. No one is free until we’re all free.”