To say Aaron Palmer’s life was chaotic growing up would be an understatement. His addict mom was married eight times. Eight times. The revolving relationship door spun enough to make a Kansas tornado jealous. And every one of those men seemed to have two things in common: they were alcoholics and they were abusive.
“I saw a lot of terrible things,” Palmer told me on a recent afternoon from his home in Tacoma. “My mother was kidnapped when I was a kid. When I was in seventh grade, she was getting beat and I ran out and [her husband at the time] had a gun to her head. So I saw a lot of crazy, terrible, terrible things a child probably shouldn’t see right? It was just chaos, violence, and complete instability.”
Unsurprisingly, Palmer turned to alcohol to cope. It started as a way to numb what he had gone through. But by the end of college, the small pet had grown into an uncontrollable beast.
“I graduate from college somehow during all this chaos and next thing you know, I’m drinking three or four days a week and I’m starting to have blackouts,” he explains. “Then came the DUI. After getting pulled over in front of his apartment, his blood-alcohol level registered a 0.26, over three times the legal limit.
But not even that was the wake-up call he needed: “I get out [from jail] the next day and what do I do? I go to the bar and start all over.”
The wake-up call would come two months later in November of 2011. Palmer’s friend invited him to his wedding in Maui. But with his credit cards maxed out, he couldn’t afford it. Desperate for that sense of belonging again, though, he opened up a new card and hopped on the plane.
Needless to say, his golf clubs never left his room. But on the second-to-last day of his drunken foray, he decided he would drag himself to the beach to fulfill a longtime desire to see the sun rise over the ocean.
True to form — and still “buzzed” from the night before — he grabbed a bottle of vodka and stumbled down to the sand. As he watched the sunrise peek through the clouds with empty eyes, he looked down the beach and noticed something: someone was fishing. Curious, he inched closer. And closer. And closer. That’s when he noticed this “someone” was a young boy. Ten years old, to be exact.
“I see him down on the beach, close to the water, and I see a woman taking pictures of him with a real camera,” he recalls. With his inhibitions gone and vodka bottle in tow, he struck up a conversation with the woman. He asked why she and the boy were up so early.
“Well, my son is part of Make-A-Wish Foundation, and this is part of his final wish that was granted to him,” she replied. “He doesn’t have long to live.”
That’s when something started stirring inside of Palmer. He felt a strong desire to talk to the boy. He didn’t just want to; he needed to. After getting the mother’s permission – something that still baffles him to this day – he began the 30-minute conversation that would change his life.
“I saw a boy facing death who had more faith, and more happiness, and more hope than I had in my entire life.”
“I’m contemplating suicide because of alcoholism and completely depressed, and yet this little boy has cancer that’s going to take his life for sure and he has more hope, faith, and happiness than I do,” he reiterates.
t was in that moment, he says, that God “slapped” him in the face.
“You are so selfish. What are you doing with your life? You have been given a life that you could do anything you want with, and here you are drinking it away,” he recalls.
He left the conversation completely God-smacked. And as he said goodbye to the boy and his mother, he made a decision to start a new journey. A journey focused on the hope the young man showed him.
When he returned to Tacoma, Palmer followed through on his commitment to turn his life around. He stopped drinking and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The spark the young fisherman ignited on the beach that day became a flame. He began pursuing God as well, and found purpose and meaning.
“My faith just grew, and grew, and grew, and grew, and grew, as well as my trust in God and His plan,” he says of that season. “I came to understand that Aaron’s not in control anymore.”
November 2023 marked 12 years since Palmer’s conversation on the beach. Twelve years sober. Since then, he got married. He has a son and a daughter. He built a thriving financial planning business and has even performed weddings as an officiant. And he’s been telling his Hawaii story to anyone who will listen. A story of life transformation, of pursuing God, and of a conversation that changed his life. In fact, he even chose Hawaii for his wedding five years later because it was “where this boy saved my life.”
But as he’s told the entire story (thousands of times, he says), there’s always been a little piece missing. Maybe as a result of still being drunk, or maybe because he was just so blown away, he never got the young boy’s name.
“I’ve always just described him as the boy on the beach,” Palmer says.
In 2023, however, he got a “nudge” from God (through a confidant) to change that — to give “the boy on the beach” a name and to share with the young man’s family the impact the boy had on him.
But how do you find one boy, one family, from 12 years ago when you don’t even know their last name, let alone their first ones? Where do you even begin? Is it even possible?
He started the only place he could think of: makeawish.com. “One day I get a call from Kim [Elenez], the CEO of Make-A-Wish North Texas,” he explains. She finally delivered the news he had been waiting for.
Palmer quickly reached out to Matt and Rachel Hallmark, the latter of which he now knows is the mother from the story he’s told countless times. As he told them the story, they too were in awe. On December 27, 2023, after a long drive, the Palmers’ and the Hallmarks’ worlds collided – again.
“We meet their four beautiful children, we have dinner, and I get to share with their children how their brother changed my life,” he recalls. “And how I have a beautiful family all because Rachel said ‘yes’ that day, and then Ethan spoke life into me.”
Still, what about the question that has always stuck with Palmer: Why did Rachel say “yes” that day when he asked to talk to Ethan?
Matt chuckles: “That’s not something Rachel would ever normally do. But she knew that, in this case, there was a reason to allow him to let him do it. The Holy Spirit was just impressing upon her to allow Aaron to do it.”
This true story is a testament to how God can use anyone, at any time, to heal any situation. Even the most hopeless.