Over the following four months, Ryan went out and found Adam a half-dozen times and took him back in. Adam continually suffered severe mood swings ranging from excitement about living and what he would do after conquering drugs to depression and a “Why bother?” attitude. Ryan talked with him for hours, sometimes through the night, and a recurring topic was the philosophical “problem of evil.”
“Adam had a hard time wrapping his head and heart around it,” says Ryan. “How could a fair, just, and loving God allow so much evil and suffering in the world?” This was a question Ryan had also struggled with, eventually arriving at the conclusion that there could be both evil and a loving God. While some use the existence of evil to discount the existence of God, he believed the opposite—that evil was an unfortunate but necessary element in God’s world.
“That’s where faith comes into play,” Adam said to him, “and I’m having a hard time with that.” They would go in circles, with Ryan contending that you can have strong faith and still have questions.
On August 12, 1996, Ryan called Janice and Larry after spending three days searching for Adam around Hot Springs. This time Adam had disappeared with David’s car and thousands of dollars’ worth of camping gear, stereo equipment, CDs, two checkbooks, and a Smith & Wesson .38 Special handgun that had belonged to the Whiteds’ grandfather. Janice and Larry agreed that Ryan and David should call the police. When they resisted, Janice told them that Adam needed to hit rock bottom. “That is the only way he’s going to come back up,” she said. “It’s either that, or he’s going to end up dead or somebody’s going to get hurt or killed.”
Praying that they were doing the right thing, Ryan and David filed a formal complaint against Adam. One discussion Ryan had had with Adam brought him a measure of peace with the decision: they had talked about “how beautiful grace is and how God’s grace can redeem so much darkness and what was so ugly can be made beautiful,” says Ryan.
Two days later, Janice and Larry received a phone call from a friend who had spotted Adam in David’s car at the same house on Morphew Road where Adam had been on New Year’s Eve. Immediately, Janice called the Garland County Sheriff’s Department and advised a deputy of the active warrant for Adam’s arrest, refusing to hang up until the officer agreed to send a car to his current location.
“We’ll meet you there,” she told him. “We’re leaving right now.”
The Browns parked down the street from the two-story house shortly after noon. Following the plan they’d formulated on the way over, Janice walked around the house to cover the back door while Larry knocked on the front door. A few seconds later the back door swung open and Adam nearly ran into Janice. “Don’t run, Adam,” she said, reaching for his wrist.
When Larry came hustling around the side of the house, Janice was holding Adam’s hand. “I got him,” she said as Larry put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. The two of them flanked their son as they walked to the front of the house and stood facing the street.
“Adam,” said Larry, “there’s a warrant for your arrest. We’ve called the sheriff. It’s time for you to face what you’ve done.”
Sadness washed over Adam’s face, and he squirmed some when a sheriff’s car pulled up and a deputy approached them, but his parents held him tight.
“Adam Brown?” the deputy asked.
“Yes sir,” was Adam’s subdued response.
“Put your shirt on, son.”
Adam pulled the sweaty, dirty shirt over his slouched shoulders. After being placed under arrest and handcuffed, he was led to the cruiser.
When the deputy slammed the car door, Adam watched Janice’s legs buckle and Larry catch her and hold her tight. She buried her head in his chest and sobbed.
Knowing he had broken his mother’s heart, Adam slumped in the backseat, trying to hide his face from the world. But when they passed through the heavy gates of the Garland County jail, he couldn’t run anymore. The one person he had to face now was himself.
Pastor Smith was sitting in his office at Second Baptist Church when Larry knocked on the door.
“I’ve done the hardest thing in my life today,” Larry told him. “I’ve had my son arrested.”
“That’s the toughest kind of love you could have given Adam,” said Pastor Smith, “but let me tell you something—I did the same thing with my daughter just a year ago.” His daughter’s cocaine addiction had led to stealing, forging checks, and, ultimately, arrest. “We could have paid her bail, but we left her in there. It broke my heart, but I knew it was the best place for her.”
They talked and prayed together at length, then Larry hugged his pastor, thanked him for confiding, and asked him what had happened with his daughter.
“She served most of her sentence,” he said. “She was released through the prosecuting attorney, charges dropped with an agreement to go to Teen Challenge, a Christian drug treatment program. She’s our daughter again now. She’s much better.”
“Mike,” said Larry, “when you have the opportunity, would you go by and visit Adam?”
“Of course,” said Pastor Smith. “I’ll get over there as soon as I can.”
The first night Adam was in jail was the best night of sleep Janice and Larry could remember. “We knew where he was,” says Janice. “We knew he was safe.”
Adam didn’t sleep a wink. That day reality sank in as he’d had his mug shot taken and his body fully searched, taken a supervised shower, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit with PRISONER stenciled on it. After staring at a tray of food during dinner and being pegged by the other inmates as the new “cracker head,” he was led to his cell.
When the steel-barred door slammed shut, he sat alone on a thin mattress, his back against a cool concrete wall, facing eleven felony counts. In the morning, feeling the quiver of withdrawal, he called home.
“Okay, Mom,” he said. “I messed up. When are you getting me out?”
“We’re not,” said Janice.
“What do you mean, you’re not? You can bail me out.”
“Nope.” Janice stood firm despite Adam’s angry voice. “You can stay in there till you see the judge.”
Later that day Adam had a visitor. He didn’t recognize the name Mike Smith or the face of the man sitting on the other side of the glass partition. Elbows on the concrete counter, Pastor Smith leaned in and said through a phone, “Hello, Adam. Your parents asked me to pay you a visit.”
Adam was initially standoffish. “Yes sir,” he said. “Are you a lawyer?”
“No, I’m an associate pastor at your parents’ church. Your dad shared confidentially with me what’s happened, and I want you to know having you arrested was the hardest thing they have ever done. Adam, they didn’t want to do this and it was out of tough love, pure love, that you are here. Whatever pain you are feeling, I can guarantee they are feeling it double.”
Jaw clenched as he fought back tears, Adam shook his head.
“I know the hurt they’re feeling, Adam,” Pastor Smith continued, “because that’s exactly what I did to my own daughter. She was right here at the Garland County Detention Center, just like you, for the same reasons.”
His interest piqued by the similarity of their stories, Adam asked how the pastor’s daughter had gotten out of jail and where she was currently.
“Even though she was brought up in a Christian home, she strayed. There was something missing in her life, big time, and that was the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Adam nodded.
“Jesus was missing in your parents’ life too,” Pastor Smith said, “and I believe, Adam, that as horrible as these last years have been for them, you helped lead them to God. Your father has recommitted his life to Jesus, and your mother has been saved. They reached out, and I feel certain that he gave them the strength to have you arrested. God is at work here, just as he was for my daughter. He miraculously provided a way for her to get out of jail and into a Christian drug treatment program that worked.”
Respectful and
receptive through the rest of their meeting, Adam asked Pastor Smith as he was leaving to deliver a message to Janice and Larry. “Tell them I’m sorry,” he said. “And that I love them.”
Arrested on a Wednesday, Adam simmered in the jail cell through the weekend. During this time Janice and Larry received just one call from him.
“I want you to know,” he told them, “I got beat up yesterday.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Janice responded, trying hard to sound nonchalant.
The Browns consulted an attorney and spoke with the Whiteds, arriving at a plea to present to the judge: they agreed to drop the charges if restitution was paid and if Adam would consent to one year in Teen Challenge instead of the year in prison he was facing.
Five days in jail seemed to have humbled Adam, thought Pastor Smith on his second visit, when Adam immediately began sharing his spiritual history. Though Adam’s attendance at church was sporadic throughout his childhood, at age fourteen he had invited the Lord into his heart and been baptized at Center Fork Missionary Baptist Church, where he was taught that God forgave his sins and offered him eternal salvation. At the time, Adam’s Sunday school teacher had been Wanda Holden, mother of Richie, the boy with Down syndrome he had stood up for. “Almost every day at the end of Bible study,” says Wanda, “Adam requested we say a prayer for his parents—that they be drawn to the Lord and be saved.”
Now Adam said he was ready to recommit his life to Jesus and asked the pastor if he could help.
“I’ve been here before with other people in jail,” Pastor Smith said. “They’ve prayed like we’re about to, but Adam, I want you to know that God can and really does want to change your life. But it begins with an honest and open desire from you to say, ‘God, no more is it about me; it’s about you.’ Are you ready for that commitment?”
“I am,” said Adam, and on the other side of the glass partition he got off the chair, knelt down, bowed his head, and repeated after the pastor,
God, for the first time in my life, I trust you. And God, I thank you that I’m here in jail. God, whatever you’ve got planned for my life, I trust you. God, I’m sorry for my sins. And today, the best way I know how, I ask you to come into my life. Come into my heart and save me. I want to begin a brand-new life. Amen.
Pastor Smith visited Adam again after several days. “Adam had questions,” he says. “Lots of questions, but the biggest one was, ‘After all I’ve done, how do I begin to live this Christian life? How do I turn my life around?’ ”
“Well, the bad news is you can’t,” Pastor Smith said to Adam. “But the good news is Christ can turn it around for you, and he’ll give you the strength and power to do it.”
“How?” Adam asked.
“Let me just show you a verse in the Bible. ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ That’s Philippians 4:13. If we try to do it within our own power, Adam, we’re going to fail.”
One week later Adam faced the judge, who sentenced him to a total of forty-five days in the Garland County Detention Center, after which he would attend the Teen Challenge drug treatment program at an out-of-state location. Teen Challenge—a faith-based nationwide residential program that treats all ages, despite the name—was not a lockdown program, the judge explained. Adam could leave anytime he wanted, but if he did, he would be back in jail for an additional year. As for the restitution, it was more than ten thousand dollars, which Janice and Larry paid once again.
After Adam served the entire forty-five-day sentence, Larry picked his son up from jail. Adam was stoic as they hugged, then walked to the car, but once they began to drive, he broke down and cried. Larry told him they weren’t going home but instead heading to a father-son weekend retreat run by Second Baptist Church. Knowing that Adam, too, had recommitted his life to Jesus, Larry believed the retreat would be a safe environment for reconciliation before Adam left on Monday for Teen Challenge.
They arrived at a local lake in time for the hamburger cookout and found forty ten- and eleven-year-old boys eating at picnic tables with their thirtysomething fathers. “We at the right place, Dad?” Adam asked, and the two began to laugh, the first time in a couple of years. They laughed again when the boys expressed their delight at having Adam on their team for the fathers-versus-sons soccer game.
The night was spent in a group Bible study, roasting marshmallows around a fire pit, and sharing a cabin dormitory. Early the next morning, with cups of coffee in hand, Adam and Larry walked to the edge of the lake and had a heart-to-heart. Adam apologized for the pain he’d put his parents through in the past two years, and Larry apologized for the harsh words he’d spoken to Adam. What haunted Larry most was when he’d called Adam “simpleminded” and “lazy” during one heated argument.
Adam told him he probably deserved it at the time, but Larry was firm that it had been hurtful, and he’d meant it to be hurtful, and that was wrong.
They agreed to leave the past behind them and prayed together. “That’s done, Lord,” Larry said. “We’re going forward from here, and we are putting all of our trust in you.”
On Sunday Adam reconnected with his mother, receiving too many hugs to count. Manda, who had graduated from college and was working as an x-ray technician at a local hospital, did the same when she joined them at church. Though happy about Adam’s sentencing to rehab, Shawn still had his reservations about his brother and chose not to see him. “I was behind him,” he explains. “I just wasn’t ready to face him.”
The following day, as Janice and Larry saw Adam off at the airport, she told her son she was proud of him. “For what, Mom?” Adam said. “I just got out of jail.”
“Because I know what you’re fighting is real hard,” she said. “You keep fighting.”
Larry sent his son off with Proverbs 3:5–6: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.”
At the Sanford, Florida, Teen Challenge, Adam was one of a hundred mostly young men receiving treatment for “life-controlling” behaviors and addictions. There were no fences around the suburban neighborhood property that looked like a small school with a central basketball court. The doors were not locked in the dormitory-style housing, which consisted of bunk beds, lockers, and a communal bathroom. “When we first got there, it felt like Bible boot camp,” says Kenny Marsten, a recovering crack addict who roomed with Adam in 1996. “But it was a safe haven, and we needed that.”
This safe haven at first isolated Adam from any outside pressures. Phone calls were prohibited the initial month, while letter writing was encouraged. No visitors were allowed in the first four months, then family visits were permitted on prearranged weekends for a few hours, and then, with good behavior, eight-hour passes for day excursions were issued. Otherwise, Adam was ensconced in the program.
What little free time there was consisted of half-hour to one-hour blocks that could be used for exercise, working out in the weight room, or playing a pickup game on the basketball court—where Adam usually gravitated. Five days a week, Adam rose at 5:00 a.m., ate breakfast, and was driven to the program’s auto-detailing shop at the Manheim Auto Auction in Sanford, where he waxed and buffed cars with a heavy commercial buff pad from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. On the ride back to the center, he would get in a quick nap before attending Bible-related classes with titles such as “Attitudes,” “Overcoming Temptation,” “Growing Through Failure,” “How to Study the Bible,” and “Loving and Accepting Myself”—followed by one-on-one counseling and chapel. After that it was a cafeteria-style dinner, quiet time for personal devotions, and lights out at 10:00 p.m.
That first week at Teen Challenge, Adam heard the parable of the prodigal son. This story from the book of Luke would become his favorite, one he returned to repeatedly for inspiration while attending the rehab program.
In the parable, Jesus told how a man’s son brazenly asked for his inheritance while his father
was still alive, a rebellious and selfish thing to do. The father complied, and the young man left home and squandered all his money in “wild living.” A severe famine came, and the young man, now broke, ended up feeding pigs in order to support himself. He’d hit rock bottom.
Destitute and starving, the young man finally decided to return home, hoping for forgiveness from his father but expecting anger. To his surprise, his father welcomed him home with open arms, saying that his son had been “dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (see Luke 15:11–32, NIV).
In an early phone call to check on Adam’s progress, Janice and Larry spoke with the program’s director and Adam’s counselor, Wayne Gray, who said that “Adam is really embracing a relationship with Jesus Christ. Because of that, I believe Adam will find true meaning and purpose. He’s learning that God loves him and God will guide him through this dark time.”
Adam began to earn a reputation among the staff and his peers for his enthusiasm, empathy, and—while he could be lighthearted and goofy—competitive nature and drive, which really shone on the basketball court. Most Sundays, when Adam traveled with Teen Challenge’s small choir, singing at churches across central and northern Florida, he would volunteer to give his personal testimony, “how his drug addiction had impacted his family,” says Gray. “He cried every time he told of driving away in the backseat of a police car while he watched his mother crying so hard that his father had to hold her up.
“He always volunteered for our community/street outreaches. We owned a fifty-by-eighty-foot tent and would put it up in housing projects and parks to witness, do kids’ programs, and serve meals. In short order Adam was in charge of the tent crew. I’d watch him bark orders to make sure things were done safe, and then he’d play with the inner-city kids for hours.”