Feb. 18, 2011 —     EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in a series of articles about addiction and recovery in our community. Each Friday, The Morehead News will share families’ experiences as they encounter and overcome addiction and navigate through an array of public agencies.

    “They have tried the way of faith and the way of no faith.”

    This quote from a well-known 12-step book may aptly describe the condition in which some addicts or alcoholics find themselves after prolonged addiction and all of its attendant hurts and fears. 

    Their families also struggle to reconcile faith with their own enabling behaviors and the actions of addicted loved ones, wavering between giving up and holding on.

    Jeff Fannin is the pastor of Bluebank First Church of God and the owner of Good Shepherd’s Printing. He’s also a former addict.

    “This problem of addiction may be closer to me than to some other pastors because I’ve been there. Years ago I was on drugs,” Fannin said.

    “I was high the day I gave my life to Christ in 1979. I didn’t become a religious person, I became a new person,” he added.

    A poster at the entrance of Good Shepherd’s displays lines of cocaine, a razor blade and a phrase--- “be sure to kiss your kids goodbye.”

    Fannin said he got the idea for the poster some years back when he counseled a man addicted to crack. He had two children.

    “Addiction is devastating to families financially, emotionally and physically but especially spiritually,” Fannin said.

    He said sometimes people in addiction, and their families, reject the very idea of God.

    “As soon as you start talking about God, the walls come down.

    “Maybe they’ve had negative experiences with churches in the past, or sometimes they have trouble seeing God as a father, based on the things that have happened in their lives,” Fannin said.

    Fannin said faith can help families in or recovering from addiction when they approach the concept as a spiritual relationship rather than as a religion.

    He said it’s important for families to realize that God does not fail, but people’s actions do have consequences.

    Judy Leitz teaches parenting classes at the Hope Pregnancy Care Center. Parents and other kinship caregivers are referred to her by social service agencies. Often it’s because children have been removed from their parents because of addiction.

    “I see the absolute brokenness and the guilt that the parents feel when they come in.

    “They also feel like a victim because their children were taken,” Leitz said.

    The Hope Pregnancy Care Center is a faith-based organization, and Leitz said she is free to talk to her clients about God.

    “Many of the parents feel that because of what they have done God is angry with them and they have no hope,” she said.

    “I tell them God does not lay you down and beat you with a hammer. Nowhere in the scriptures does it say He does that.”

    Leitz seldom encounters people in addiction who get high for pleasure. Instead, she said her clients often have deep, primary emotional wounds, for which drugs and alcohol were used to numb the pain.

    “Hurt people hurt people,” she said.

    “Men and women come into my office and just cry. Some of them grew up in homes where there was abuse, drugs and alcohol.”

    Leitz said unhealed emotional scars are not just common among drug addicts.

    “It doesn’t matter whether a person is addicted to drugs or food or whatever. The problem is that they’ve gotten to the point where they feel that no one likes them, so how could God like them?”

    She said more often than not, when people come to her classes they are seeking a spiritual remedy as well as to solve their problems related to addiction.

    “I ask if I can pray for them and there’s only been one time that someone has refused.”

    She said prayer is of vital importance for the community, since the problem of addiction is so widespread.

    Leitz also said that condemnation from other family members does not help.

    “God made families, and families are to love one another. When the family is torn apart, someone has to do all they can to bring it back together.

    “Never give up. That sometimes means we have to let go, but let your loved one know that you will never give up on them. God won’t either,” Leitz said.

    Chris Perry and his family know something of the crisis of faith when it concerns addicted loved ones.

    Perry is the CEO of Fleming Mason Energy. He’s also the son of two parents who’ve lost one child to addiction and now visit another in jail.

    Perry’s youngest brother, Justin, died of an overdose last April. He got 180 Oxycontin pills from an Ohio pain clinic on a Friday.

    When they found him the next Tuesday night, there were only 63 pills left.

    “I feel for the families and for the ones in addiction. This is so hard for everyone,” he said.

     Perry said his faith has sustained him during this time and has empowered him to turn his grief into a purpose.

    “I would not have made it through this without faith. That’s why I go speak at churches, youth groups and civic clubs, to let families know that there is hope,” he said.

    Still, Perry said he and his parents have sat and cried together and wondered what they could have done differently.

    Perry and his brothers all have college degrees and had a good home life, but Perry sees now that the whole family made bad decisions.

    “My brothers made bad decisions to use drugs, and my parents and I made bad decisions that enabled them,” he said.

    Though, his family does grieve Justin’s death and Shawn’s incarceration, Perry said he has now become an ardent supporter of families who have also suffered in this way.

    “My favorite passage in the bible says ‘we don’t grieve like those who have no hope,’” Perry said.

    “My mother and father believe this too,” he added.

    Perry will share his family’s story this Sunday at 11 a.m. at Owingsville Church of God.

    There’s another line from a well-known 12-step book that encourages those in addiction to be open to the possibility that faith, even a hint of it, just may be a remedy for the suffering.

    It reads: “Though he came to scoff, he may remain to pray.”

    Tucker McCormack is a 39-year-old graduate of the Morehead Inspiration Center, a residential treatment center that uses the 12-step program of recovery.

    He is one, like so many others, for whom the 12 steps have been an alternate but powerful doorway to faith and recovery.

    And as was suggested in the last article in this series, his first entrance to recovery was through the iron bars of a jail cell.

    Next Friday, McCormack and Brittany Goodman share their experiences going from jail to rehab, and how the 12-step philosophy helped them encounter God right where they were.

    Noelle Hunter can be reached at nhunter@themoreheadnews.com or by telephone at 784-4116.