This cotton ain't candy

Cottonland is a documentary about a small town in Nova Scotia that fell into an economic abyss because the coal mines shut down, and at nearly the same time fell into an epidemic of oxycontin addiction. The question of whether the depressed economy had anything to do with the outbreak of oxycontin addiction is highlighted, and it seems obvious that there is a connection.

Oxycotton, as it's called on the street, is one powerful addicting substance.  It's closely related to heroin, but most addicts start off as people suffering some kind of pain.  Their doctors prescribe the pills, and the pain often just stops.  In fact, patients are so pain free that they feel better than they've felt in years.  And as long as they still have pills, they continue to feel great. 

The problems begin when they try to stop taking them.  Some patients suffer such bad withdrawal symptoms that they are completely unable to function.  Often the pain of withdrawal is worse than the pain they were suffering in the first place.  There seems really no option but to take more of the drug. 

They'll try to obtain more from their doctor, and often are successful.  Eventually, however, they need more than the doctor is willing to let them have, so they begin to pursue other alternatives.  And they do so with abandon!  Their symptoms are so bad that they'll lie and steal and worse, often victimizing their best friends and family. 

Is there any way out?  Cottonland points to methadone maintenance programs as a way to withdraw without such horrible side effects.  But methadone is a drug too.  And withdrawal may be less painful, but still necessary.  And it's possible to end up hooked on methadone!

Treatment approaches are all still experimental, but our approach will highlight faith in God, a community of supportive co-combatants and work to do that's interesting and fulfilling are among the most important ingredients.

What do you think?  Watch Cottonland here.

Certifiably Miraculous

Jesus of Testimony

Greg Spencer of Roseburg, OR, was a police offer in narcotics enforcement in the 1990s. His work kept him immersed in a world of violence, death, and depravity on a regular basis. In addition he was a deputy medical examiner, which meant he had to view autopsies, often on bodies whose life had ended in a horrible death. He was dedicated to his work, but it turned him into a hardened and calloused man, and his first marriage ended because of it.

He left the police force after fifteen years of service and became a cross-country truck driver, but about six months into that, macular degeneration in both eyes rendered him effectively blind. He went on disability, and, with the expectation of being blind and disabled for the rest of his life, got help through the Oregon Commission of the Blind in functional blind living, including white cane and guide dog training.

During this time, he met Wendy – his face softens into a smile when he mentions Wendy – a “born again, on fire believer in Jesus Christ,” who “drug me with her to church.” He met Jesus Christ there. And he married Wendy.
If Greg Spencer’s story were to end there, most of us would consider it a rather happy ending. A man loses his sight but gains salvation, a beautiful wife, and the means to live out a reasonably comfortable life on earth. But his story didn’t end there.

Healed
In 2001, he attended a men’s retreat, the topic of which was, “Cleansing of the Mind.” He needed that. He’d not been able to sleep nights because of the horrid, graphic images of bodies, violence, and pornography still haunting his psyche. Sometimes he would wake up screaming from the nightmares.

So at the retreat he prayed, Lord, cleanse my mind. Take this junk away. Set me free. Right away, he felt the Lord respond directly, You’re clean.

He opened his eyes. And the next thing he knew, he was reading the little red “Exit” sign behind the speaker in the chapel. Not only had his mind been cleansed of the residue of years among such evil, but his eyes had been healed of their blindness. His vision was totally restored. Even the scar tissue was gone.

A subsequent investigation opened by the state of Oregon resulted in comprehensive documentation, both of his visual impairment and the restoration of his sight, and cleared him of any fraud charges in relation to the temporary collection of disability. His is a current-day, thoroughly documented healing, or in the words on the diagnosis submitted by Dr. Brad Seeley of the Dept. of Ophthalmology, Oregon Health Sciences University, “Unexplained Decreased Visual Acuity.”


The Testimony of Data
Greg Spencer’s story is only one small component of the documentary, Jesus of Testimony, produced by Nesch Productions, but it offers our scientifically “enlightened” age some powerful evidence of the supernatural to chew on.

Though this story is dramatic, most of the two-plus hour long documentary is more of an intellectual discussion with an array of New Testament scholars. Here’s a brief summary:

Part One: Lord or Legend looks at references to Jesus from sources outside the Bible – for example the Roman historian Tacitus and Josephus, an ancient Jewish scholar – that confirm details in the gospel accounts. For example, many non-Christian sources didn’t shy away from calling Jesus “God” or “Son of God.” Some mention that he was known for miracles, even by those who didn’t believe in him. Thallus, a Greek historian, wrote of the darkness on Good Friday, and Josephus tells about the resurrection.

Part Two: Are the Gospels Reliable? gives data on the numbers of extant manuscripts, full and partial, to address the question, Are the gospel texts we have today reliable copies of the originals? It also looks at ancient customs concerning oral traditions and the dating of the writings.

Part Three: Miracles, which is the segment containing the story of Greg Spencer, deconstructs David Hume’s circular argument against the possibility of miracles, on which most arguments against miracles are based today and explains how the empirical sciences, historiography, and forensics go about (or at least should go about) evaluating claims concerning the miraculous.
Part Four: The Testimony of Prophecy. The Old Testament contains more than three hundred prophecies about the coming Messiah. All were fulfilled in Jesus Christ. This segment draws out a few of them, establishing the supernatural credentials both of the ancient prophets and of Jesus himself.

Part Five: The Resurrection – Fact or Fiction? looks at the practice of crucifixion (a highly reliable means of killing, which the Romans both invented and perfected), the evidence for the empty tomb, and the various theories posited to explain the resurrection away.

Part Six: The Good News gives us the basic New Testament gospel message, and then we hear from two men. Dr. Michael Brown, who says his own story is “from LSD to Ph.D.,” shot heroin and played drums in a rock band with the intention of becoming a rock star until the day he realized how much God loved him and that Jesus had died for him. On that day, he says, God set him free, and he never put a needle in his arm again. Dr. Brown went on to earn a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. He is the author of numerous books including Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus: Messianic Prophecy Objections.

Dr. Craig Keener was an atheist when some people shared the gospel with him. He said, “I’m an atheist; I don’t believe that. Why should I believe that?” and then walked away.
But although they couldn’t give him a good argument for it, they did give him the right content, and after that, God gave him a different kind of evidence. “God gave me the evidence of his own presence,” he says, knowing that some people may not be able to understand that. It was “a certainty that went beyond any other kind of evidence that I could have had because it came directly into my heart.” He didn’t understand the language of salvation that the people had used, and he struggled with God over the implications of it. But eventually his knees buckled underneath him and he surrendered. That was the beginning of his Christian life.

The Testimonies of the Living
Jesus of Testimony is packed with data about this one central figure of human history, Jesus of Nazareth. The information could have been put into book form, but there’s something more human about hearing the scholars speak to it, especially the ones whose lives have undergone such drastic transformations. Greg Spencer didn’t ask God to restore his sight. Dr. Michael Brown didn’t ask for help getting off drugs, and Dr. Craig Keener never asked to be “cured” of his atheism.
The data is compelling on its own. The evidence in human lives, the testimonies of men whose lives have been restored, changed, retooled, if you will, for good rather than for naught, is soul-nourishing. If the historical Jesus of testimony is who he told us he was, this should come as no surprise whatsoever.

Craig Keener, who now teaches at at Asbury Theological Seminary and is the author of numerous books including, Miracles: The credibility of the New Testament Accounts, has a message for anyone who’ll listen: “If God would take me, … who had blasphemed God’s name, who had spoken against him, if God would take me, God will take anybody who’s just willing to accept the testimony of the Spirit. Jesus rose from the dead, and now Jesus is alive and is Lord of the universe and is ready to transform the life of whoever comes to him.”

Pillzapoppin

According to Townhall magazine, cigarette smoking has just killed the third Marlboro man.  And in related news, CVS has announced that it intends to stop selling tobacco products later this year, a move that it says will likely cost them over $2 million a year.  Tobacco companies are not dead of course, but lots of their customers are.  How long have they known that the products they were selling, and making billions of dollars a year on were deadly?  How long have they known that they were addictive?  We don’t really know for sure of course, but the evidence has been piling up for some time now that they’ve known for a long time. The money was just too good to worry about inconvenient things like people becoming addicted and dying.

When William Wilberforce first started advocating for the abolition of the slave trade, slavery was a really big business.  It took 20 years of diligent effort, but Parliament finally was persuaded to abolish the slave trade.  Twenty-six years later, slavery itself became illegal in the United Kingdom.  In America, it took a bloody civil war but the outcome was the same.  Slavery became illegal.

In both cases, the massive amounts of money made by men who turned a blind eye to the evils of their enterprise, was sufficient to cause men of good will to allow the evil to continue.  So here’s a question for you.  What are the evil enterprises today?  Could it be the abortion industry?  I doubt it.  It’s plenty evil, but I doubt that the money being made rises to that level.  What about illegal drugs?  Most of that money is in the underground economy, so it’s hard to pinpoint reliable numbers, but it’s hard to see that as the best candidate.  The best candidate in my opinion is the legal drug business – pharmaceuticals.

Are they evil?  Let’s take a look.

According to Clarion Ledger’s Jerry Mitchell, the overdose that killed actor Philip Seymour Hoffman started with an addiction to prescribed painkillers.  He’s not the first.  It’s a rapidly rising trend.  Painkillers are prescribed by a physician, and prove tremendously effective in dealing with the pain.  Unfortunately, some of the people that take them find that they are unable to stop.  The pain and sickness they experience when they try to stop is worse than the pain they started taking the pills for to begin with - so bad that they absolutely must have more.  Eventually they can’t get them legally, and start buying them illegally.  And they start using them in higher and higher doses.  As they do the cost becomes prohibitive.  Many turn to heroin as a cheaper alternative, and that’s led to a rapidly rising number of heroin addicts.  In fact, nearly 80% of heroin addicts report previously being addicted to painkillers.

But as scary and insidious as that is, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg.  One of the things that’s seriously wrong with our health care industry is that doctors treat nearly every condition by prescribing more pills.  We have become the pill ‘popping-ist’ generation in history, with annual sales near $1 trillion!

You can read more on Matt Walsh’s blog and you should, but the point I want to make is this: don’t think you could never be a drug addict. It’s happened to plenty of people, and it could easily happen to you as well.

As they say, there but by the grace of God go I.

Review of Against All Odds by Joe Tarasuk

This is an incredible real-life story.  The Joe Tarasuk you get to know in the first half of the book is so different than the one in the second half, that you might be tempted to believe some of the story is a bit glamorized.  How could a guy who rose to the top levels of the cocaine business, dealing directly with a Bolivian drug lord, change so completely?  How could a guy who was so addicted to alcohol and cocaine walk out of that life and into the light of God’s love?  And how could a guy who could barely read or write himself write a book that’s as absorbing as this one? 

The one thread that runs through the story from beginning to end is Joe’s awareness of the spiritual realm.  We in the USA generally fall into two camps here: either we don’t believe in the existence of a non-material world at all, or we buy into the Hollywood version of demonic creatures, which is mostly ridiculous.  The truth is somewhere else.  The truth is that we are all partially spiritual.  The fact that you think, that you can understand and translate the words on screen or page into thoughts means that you possess spiritual powers.  But they’re very limited spiritual powers. 

In reality, the spirit world consists of holy and demonic beings.  What Joe Tarasuk shows us, up close and personal, is how demonic powers can take hold of a person, twist their thinking more and more, and eventually turn them into a slave of their own desires.  (C.S. Lewis brilliantly showed us some of the strategies they use in The Screwtape Letters.)  Joe’s natural ability to sense this darkness, and the power it had, drove him to and beyond the brink of sanity.  But his awareness of the power of God through the Holy 

Spirit gave him all he needed to resist those powers, even though they took him to some dark and scary places before he finally gave up.

Only the Holy Spirit – the third person of the tri-une God – can overpower the demonic beings and force them to release a man they’ve taken over.    And it was Joe’s willingness to surrender to Him and His will completely that allowed him to move away from the darkness of the demonic realm of drugs and lawlessness, and into the wonderful light of God’s truth.

In Against All Odds, Joe takes us on a personal journey from shy kid, to scared kid, to star athlete, and into his life as a young adult trying to live a good life, but with the baggage of low self-esteem, the haunting memory of having been sexually abused, and without a moral compass to guide him.  Starting with a “little pot”, he gradually goes from smoking it to growing and selling it, then is introduced to cocaine, which took him to a more euphoric high.  Soon, it became an easy next step to start selling it too.  And he shows us firsthand how he rose up the ranks of street dealer to the big time.  As he unfolds this success story though, we are also shown his rising inner struggles with the spiritual darkness he increasingly found all around him, as well as his own sanity.  When he’s finally busted for trafficking, we share his profound feeling of relief as he surrenders his life to God while sitting in the police car at the arrest scene!

The story changes at that point, but does not become less intriguing.  We see him admitting his guilt, but getting a 35 year sentence anyway.  Then we walk with him as he is offered the chance to stay in the local jail with the sheriff to do ministry work in the nearby jails and prisons.  We see his growing knowledge of who God really is, his growing friendship with the sheriff, and his willingness to work hard and to go above and beyond what is required. 

We see his hunger to be close to God and his willingness to pray and fast.  And after only 18 months of this growth and service, he secures a release, and moves back to Maryland!  From there we share his quest for complete freedom through Celebrate Recovery, where he learned the joys of helping others get free as well.  (He says he was clean and sober, but not free until he dealt with the baggage put on him by his past.)  We see him continuing to grow in his faith, his service to others in recovery, and in his business in flooring. 

But this is real life, and we also see the darkness returning to Joe’s life, this time because of his wife’s inability to break free from her own addictions.  As she descends more and more deeply into addiction, we share Joe’s feelings of helplessness over his inability to fix her.  We watch as her life slowly ebbs away, and share in his grief over her death. 

Finally, after a time of grieving the loss of his wife, we see Joe gradually starting to pursue his dream of opening a recovery center, as CrossRoads Freedom Center takes shape.

As the book draws to an end, we are left with a sense of anticipation, and a conviction that God has used Joe Tarasuk for a purpose – a purpose that will outlive his life on earth, and that will bring peace to many tortured souls.  Addictions to drugs and alcohol are a scourge upon our world, and freedom from them remains an elusive ideal.  Most treatment programs ignore the powerful spiritual forces at work in the addict, and fail much more often than they succeed.  The few (like AA and NA) that do have a spiritual component so water it down that it may as well not be there at all.  One of the few that does it right is Celebrate Recovery, which in just a few decades has grown to over 20,000 church locations.  CrossRoads Freedom Center will be one of only a handful of residential recovery programs that use the CR principles.

We should all pray that it is successful, and we should all read this powerful story of how it all came about.

Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose

The need for aftercare services for prisoners returning to society

I once got a cute postcard from a friend. It had a picture of a guy in a convoluted position, and it said ‘Keep your eye on the ball, your shoulder to the grindstone and your hand on the wheel.’ Now try to work in that position! Cute.

CS Lewis once said “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

Both illustrate the task in front of a newly released prisoner. He or she is typically given whatever personal possessions they had when they were first incarcerated, and enough money to buy a bus ticket. They need to find a place to stay and get something to eat. After that first night, they need to look for a job, find a way to get a little bit of pocket money, and check in with their parole officer. Most prisoners are released with just the clothes on their back, so all the basics are needed – outerwear, underwear, shoes, and socks not to mention soap, deodorant etc.

Going on job interviews is a challenge, because they have little or no money for bus fare, no decent clothes, and no driver’s license.  Because of their criminal record, few employers are willing to take a chance on them.  Then there are the ways in which they interact with other people.

During incarceration, they have been effectively cut off from the rest of the world. There are no cell phones permitted, and the only land-line is a shared payphone, and phone calls are ridiculously expensive. Other means of communication are limited and challenging. As a result, family relationships are strained. Children are forced to cope without their incarcerated parent, and are often angry and alienated. So there’s often a pressing desire to reconnect with loved ones, and to start the process of setting things right.

If that were not enough, a whole new set of social skills needs to be learned. Crimes that lead to incarceration are the result of a lot of poor choices, not all of which were made by the one convicted and incarcerated. Sometimes hanging with the wrong crowd is seen as a better alternative than sticking around the house where families are dysfunctional; parents are involved in drugs or alcohol, or where abuse is involved. So they go out to the streets, and learn social skills street-style.  Eventually they realize that those skills are of no use in “normal” society. Then a new way of living is forced on them by incarceration. But none of the social skills learned inside are very useful on the outside, either.

The bottom line is that in order to reenter society, stay clear of further legal problems, and ultimately to become a productive member of society the newly released inmate stands at the bottom of a huge mountain. The task of climbing that mountain is so daunting, that almost nobody can do it without a lot of help.

Meanwhile, the government wonders why we have such a high rate of re-incarceration.  It’s called recidivism, and it’s extraordinarily expensive.  If I have a job, support a family and pay my taxes, I am a net gain to society.  But if I’m in prison, it costs taxpayers over $38,000 a year.  So we have a lot of incentive to actually prepare inmates for life on the outside, then work to assure that they have a support system that gives them a decent second chance.

Until laws and systems undergo some pretty radical changes however, most of the support has to come from volunteer organizations, particularly those that are faith-based.  CrossRoads is one of them, and we are working with others in the community to try to get it right.  If you or someone you know either has need of re-entry support, or would like to volunteer to mentor someone who does, please contact us.  Let’s all work to make freedom worth having for everyone.