A stone that cried out
How rocker Dave Schriek came back to God
April 2, 2008
Andrew Koole
He’s the oldest person in the room. “How old are you, David Schriek?” I ask, sitting across the table from him in the Marlie Snider Collegium.
“No comment. Around 30; we’ll leave it at that,” he says. Maybe a touchy topic for someone that age who’s in his third year of university, but with a past like Schriek’s, a university education at first seems almost unnecessary. Dave has already lived a life idolized by many: he played lead guitar in a rock band.
“The only life I’d known was touring,” Schriek, former guitarist of bands Schriek, Salvation and Big Radio, says “Six nights [a week], three months at a time, sometimes without coming home. We would go to Prince George, move on to Alberta, playing all the towns, Edmonton, Calgary, through all the prairies. That was our main touring area.”
Between ’93 and ’98 Dave’s life revolved around partying every night, getting laid by beautiful women. People surrounded him, but he felt alone. “When you’re so saturated with pride, adrenaline, the party scene, you have this surface-level happiness,” Dave says, “but you have no joy.”
God called him before all that, but he ignored Him. “I hadn’t lost my salvation,” he tells me, “I had lost my fellowship.”
Then that life ended. Schriek’s band stopped touring and he had to start all over again. “After we got off the road,” he says, “I was extremely depressed. I was in denial.”
Dave moved back in with his parents and tried to get his life together, but it was hard. “I was too proud to beg,” he tells me, “too proud to get a minimum wage job pumping gas because, hey, I’m Dave Schriek, my songs have been on the radio, I’ve opened for famous bands [like 5440 and Nickelback], I’m a big deal.”
He decided he needed an education, but that on its own was going to be tough. “My high school diploma was so bad, no college would accept me,” he says. “I had to go back and take Algebra, Biology, Chemistry 11.”
Finally, he got accepted into the music program in Selkirk College, in Nelson, B.C. “First year was hell,” he says. “I had to learn how to read music, needed to learn theory. I hadn’t been in school for a long time. My mind was like rubber. I was completely broken, but God had a plan for all that.”
Things did pick up for Dave. By his third year at Selkirk, he had two diplomas, in guitar performance and audio engineering. After Selkirk, he moved to Whitehorse to teach guitar at Unitech Music Academy and play for musician Ted Moore.
He then moved to Kelowna to work in a group home, which he says was the easiest job he has ever done. “Some people think of working with crazy people and think, ‘oh, that’s hard,’ but I loved it, man. I just took guys with schizophrenia out for the day. I’d say, ‘What do you wanna do today?’ And they’d be like, ‘Uh, I want to go to Tim Horton’s and get a doughnut and a cup of coffee.’ And I’d be like, ‘Great, me too!’”
Now he’s back in school, finishing his music degree. And his relationship with God is flourishing. “I became like the prodigal son or David [with Bathsheba]. Once you’re born again you’re born again, but you can lose your fellowship. Remember the Church of Corinth. Actually,” he looks around, “do you have a Bible, I want to read that right now. I love that verse. Here it is: ‘Hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord.” (1Corinthians 5:5).
David Schriek lived the dream, and it didn’t deliver what it had promised. “When I was living on the road I was miserable,” he says. “I was living to please the flesh.” Now, 10 years later, he’s living for someone else. And he’s smiling.
Now you go...
Got something to say?