Radio host lives life of joy

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This article was published 16/10/2021 (1776 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every morning, when listeners tune into CHVN, Winnipeg’s Contemporary Christian Music station, they hear the bright, upbeat and uplifting voice of Mike Thom.

“I try to be positive and encouraging,” says Thom, 40, who co-hosts the 6-9 a.m. show with Colleen Houde.

“I try to find good news stories to spotlight and celebrate,” he says — something that’s really important to him now during the pandemic, when there can be so much bad news.

Things weren’t always so positive for Thom. “It was anything but,” he says. “My life was filled with trauma, tragedy and self-destruction.”

Thom grew up in a Christian home in Shoal Lake in western Manitoba, where he attended a little Baptist church with his family. Then in 1998, when he was in Grade 11, three friends were killed in a car crash.

“That was a defining moment for me,” he said. “I was 16 years old, and it was traumatic. It crushed my faith, my belief that God loves and cares for us.”

Leaving faith behind, his Grade 12 year was filled with partying. “I got into a lot of trouble,” he said.

He also started drinking and using drugs, becoming addicted.

“I used cocaine, codeine, pain killers, pretty much anything I could get my hands on,” he said.

There were times he wanted to stop, but then another friend would die or something else bad would happen and it would throw him off again.

“It was like I was attempting a slow suicide,” he said, remembering that time. “I had no desire to live.”

When he was 20, Thom moved to Winnipeg to go to broadcasting school. After graduating, he got his first radio job in The Pas. It was a good start to a career, but bad personally. “I was isolated and alone,” he said, “My drug abuse worsened.”

During all that time, his parents and church prayed for and stuck with him.

“They kept saying they still loved me, no matter what,” he said.

His mother kept sending the same Bible verse: Jeremiah 29:11. “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.’”

“I’d just roll my eyes, whatever,” he said of those letters.

His life turned around June 25, 2006. He woke that Sunday after a three-day drug binge. “I was up three days straight, no sleep. I was a mess,” he says.

He looked in the mirror and wanted to die. “‘I’m a monster, all I do is hurt people,’” he told himself. “I thought I was hopeless, too far gone for even God to care about.”

That’s when that Bible verse from Jeremiah came to mind.

“I went to the closet and found the Bible my grandmother gave me on my 13th birthday,” he said. He opened the Bible and read and reread the verse.

Maybe it was true, he thought — maybe God did have plans for him.

“It was like the prodigal son story,” he says, referencing the parable told by Jesus in the Gospels. “God was there all along waiting for me.”

He decided to stop doing drugs that day; the next weeks and months were hard as he went through withdrawal. “It was a really difficult time,” he said.

After getting clean, the next step was making amends to everyone he had disappointed and hurt.

“I had to face all those people I hurt, apologize to them for all the things I’d done,” he said.

This included his hometown church. One Sunday he went there to say sorry, ask them to forgive him and thank them for praying for and standing by him.

That fall he enrolled in Providence University College, studying youth ministry. School went well, but he still struggled in his personal life.

“Behind the scenes I was working through a lot of garbage,” he said, noting he relapsed a couple of times.

“I was honest with Providence about it,” he says. There were consequences for his behaviour, he adds, but “they stood by me, with open arms, grace, love and support.”

In his second year he was offered a job as a youth minister at Willowlake Baptist Church in Winnipeg. “They took a chance on me,” he says.

But he missed radio. In 2010 he entered a contest at CHVN when they were looking for a new radio host. He won. Today he is also the program director at the station, which has a “poppy” contemporary Christian music format.

The music “is very danceable, if Baptists and Mennonites could dance,” he jokes.

Life still isn’t always easy; he and his wife, Katie, suffered five miscarriages before their first child, Camryn, was born in 2017. “It was hard and heartbreaking,” he says. “Yet I still couldn’t stop singing praise to Jesus.” Today the couple have two children, with two-and-half-year-old Jeremiah added to the mix.

Of his work at CHVN, Thom says he still enjoys it — even getting up at 4 a.m. “I enjoy telling people’s stories,” he says. “I want to help people get through these hard times. It’s a chance to put a smile on someone’s face.”

faith@freepress.mb.ca

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