Church journey leads to change for former bad boy
“Getting high was becoming more important to me than athletics or anything else.”
“I was pretty well known in junior high for my athletic ability. I’m not conceited, but people would tell me, ‘You’re tall, dark and handsome. Why shouldn’t a girl like you?’ I said, ‘Well, you don’t know me.’
“I never liked myself. I was real popular in school. But inside, there was something missing. I wasn’t happy. All I remember were the bad things I did. Me and my sister would get into an argument, and I’d hit her. I’d steal cigarettes from my parents when they weren’t looking. I’d take money out of my mom’s purse. I remember doing things like that.
“I don’t remember at the grocery store helping some older lady put her groceries in the car. I don’t remember going over and stopping a fight from happening, taking up for the underdog. I don’t remember those things. I just remember all the bad things I did. I knew it was wrong. I’m supposed to be nice. I’m supposed to help people. But the other things I was doing, the bad things, were what weighed heavy on my mind. That’s what led to my real problems.”
From age 12 to 16, he smoked marijuana practically every weekend. Following a bad car wreck that left him in a coma for six weeks, he couldn’t run track so he began experimenting with other drugs and skipping school.
“Getting high was becoming more important to me than athletics or anything else. It got to where my drug addiction had a total hold on me.
“My senior year, the principal was going to kick me out because I refused to go to special assignment class for 30-something days. He told my dad that if I refused to do that, I was not going to be welcome at school. I said, ‘I’m not doing it, Dad. I’ll walk out of this office right now, and I don’t care.’ Then my dad said, ‘If you walk out of this office, you’re walking out of our house at the same time. If you walk out of this room, your clothes will be at the front door when you get home. Don’t walk in my house ever again.’”
He entered a drug abuse program, and was in and out of other programs for a number of years. Then he met a girl he used to date, and they ended up getting married.
“That was the greatest thing because I started going to church with her. God really fell on me at that church. At the pulpit, God hit our preacher so hard one day that he fell out in the spirit. He said, ‘We need more Jesus.’ When he did that, he passed out. People started going up there to see if he was OK. I was thinking that they needed to move away from him because he and JC had a one-on-one going on. Finally I thought, I want some of that. So I started to walk up there. Before I could get there, I fell out, too. The next thing you know, the compulsion, desire, everything I had toward drugs and alcohol was gone. It was amazing.”
— Russell “Rusty” Jenkins
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