Beyond Belief (20 page)

Piece by piece.

One day I put on some workout clothes and walked down to the shop my grandfather had built between my childhood home and Granny’s house. I unlocked the door and flipped on the light and stood looking at the Bowflex machine I had brought here from the Garner house about a year earlier.

I swiped the dust off the bench and sat down. I did a few sets, got my heart rate climbing (in a natural way, a welcome change), and sat there smiling to myself. My stamina was about what I’d expected, but my strength was not too bad.

My goal was to be positive. I had been positive with my mind, so it seemed natural to take the next step and be positive with my body. It felt good to strain my muscles for the first time in a long, long time, and it felt good to expand my lungs and breathe hard at the end of a set.

The next day my chest and arms were sore. Soreness never felt so good.

Piece by piece.

This was another step, another small but positive step. I was taking them regularly now, one at a time. I didn’t know where they would lead, but I felt pulled in a positive direction with the same force that had led me astray. This time, however, there was an importance difference.

I was sure there was a different director in charge.

While I was at my grandmother’s house, putting the pieces together, Katie was having an ordeal of her own. She was trying to come to terms with her anger. I don’t think either of us had it easy.

The ripples of my addiction spread in concentric circles, and Katie was in the first circle. She got the tallest waves and the most severe swells.

The emotions ran through her. She went from angry to sad to disgusted to bitter to vengeful to resigned and then back to angry again. She would sit home, wondering where I was, trying to convince herself she didn’t care. Then she would realize she did care, she cared deeply, and her frustration at not knowing whether she would ever see me alive would start the cycle all over again.

It wasn’t healthy. My troubles were consuming her, taking over her life. She needed direction. She needed someone to tell her to leave me or embrace me or forget about me. She called our pastor, Jimmy Carroll, and his wife.

“Jimmy and Beverly, I need to talk to you.” Her voice quivered on the phone. “I won’t lie to you, I’m mad. I’m angry. Josh should be reprimanded for what he’s done. He can’t treat people this way and expect to get away with it.”

They invited her over to their house. When she got there, they ushered her to the living room. They listened to her vent about my failings and her feelings. She told them I was making progress, but how could she trust me to stay clean? How could she allow herself to be drawn back in, knowing disappointment was a distinct possibility?

Finally, Katie said, “I need to know what God wants me to do.”

Jimmy folded his hands in front of him and said, “I can tell you’re angry, and you might not like what I’m about to say.”

Katie just looked at him, wanting to know what she should do. More than anything, I think, she wanted to know if there was anything she
could
do.

Jimmy said, “You know what God wants you to do, don’t you?”

“No, that’s why I’m here.”

“Katie, God wants you to forgive Josh.”

Katie had all this anger, all this frustration, all this resentment. All those worried phone calls that went straight to voicemail. All those nights spent sitting up waiting for me, knowing I wasn’t planning on coming home. All that time sitting around wondering whether to give up on me or give me one more last chance.

The bitterness needed to go somewhere, didn’t it? It needed an outlet. It needed to get out and breathe, and now she was told to swallow it? To let it go? To forgive?

To her, forgiveness sounded like a cop-out. It sounded like letting me off the hook.

And yet, deep inside, she knew Jimmy was right.

He was looking at her, for who knows how long, waiting for a response.

“Forgive?” Katie asked.

“Not just forgive,” Jimmy said. “Forgive completely.”

It took some time for Katie to digest this advice. I was someone who had turned her life upside-down time and again, to the point where she needed to get a restraining order against me just to make sure I didn’t come around when she was trying to sell our house. And the advice she got from her spiritual leaders was not only forgive, but forgive completely? She’d waited a long time to give me what I had coming to me — I’m sure it had been planned and replanned in her head a million times — and now she was told that Jesus would forgive and forget. Forgive and forget and not mention it ever again. She shook her head but accepted it. How hard was that?

They sat and prayed about it. Jimmy and Beverly knew it wouldn’t be easy, but they knew it wouldn’t work any other way. I hadn’t responded to any of the thousands of attempts to scare or berate me into getting clean, so chances were that confronting me would be a waste of time, anyway. And even if it made Katie feel better to get it off her chest and let me know how many different ways I had failed her, the effort might backfire.

Over the course of her visit, Katie traveled the distance from bitterness to understanding. She thanked them for their time and left. On the drive home, she told God she would forgive me completely, but she hoped for something in return. She wanted to be free of all the feelings of resentment. Forgiving was the right thing to do, but she couldn’t forgive and still harbor the resentment that she felt. That would kill her, and kill any chance of repairing our relationship.

She had lost her husband. She had come home from the hospital with our new baby — an event that is supposed to be one of the happiest of a person’s life — and found only worry and fear. She found an unthinkable environment where she could send her husband out for a bottle of medicine and not see or hear from him for three or four days. She was raising Julia and Sierra by herself, and her inability to understand why I insisted on self-destructing rather than being with people who loved and cared for me was more than she could bear.

And now all she wanted was freedom from those feelings, in the same way I wanted freedom from the shackles of my drug use.

When Katie got home from the pastor’s house, she picked up the phone and called my grandma’s house. She asked to speak to me, not knowing whether I was going to pick up the phone.

When I answered, she got right to the point. “Josh, I just want you to know that I forgive you. And I also want you to know that I won’t hold anything you’ve done against you from now on. If you can keep getting better and we can work to reconcile our relationship, I promise not to bring any of this stuff up again.”

My body was adjusting to the shock of getting off drugs. I was filling my days with positive thoughts to offset the cravings that rocked me and made my palms sweat in an air-conditioned room. I was making progress. I spent my days praying for the strength to string together one more good day, just one more good day. And those days were building.

My surrender to God’s will, and my plea for His help, led me to an understanding of the nature of this fight. As Katie’s father once told me, I would reach a point where it was do or die. I would either get better, or die. When I walked up the path to my grandma’s front door, I had reached that fork in the road.

When Katie finished, I offered only a quiet “Thank you” before hanging up, but her call came at a crucial time. Granny filled my head with positive thoughts throughout the day, and now Katie was offering her unconditional forgiveness. I had become accustomed to the opposite approach, to people reminding me constantly what a disappointment I was to them.

These new attitudes — mine, theirs — gave me not just faint flickers of hope, but rays of hope. I didn’t want to jinx it, but I closed my eyes that night and repeated the verse that had become my new mantra:

Humble yourself before God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

And once again, I let the thought creep into my head:
I think I can do this.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

GRADUALLY, I MADE my way back into the world. Big Daddy, my father-in-law, put me in touch with a psychiatrist at Duke University named Dr. Keith Brodie. Dr. Brodie was the former head of the school’s psychiatry department as well as the former president and chancellor of the school. Big Daddy knew him, and he believed I could be helped by sitting down and talking to him.

From the moment Dr. Brodie and I had our first conversation, I felt a connection with him that I hadn’t felt with any other doctor. He knew the mind of an addict, and he knew the mind of an athlete, and our sessions were immensely productive.

Dr. Brodie understood one undeniable fact about my life to this point: I got into trouble when I didn’t have baseball. It was the catch-22 of my problem: Without baseball, I had little reason to stop using; while I was using, I would never be allowed to return to baseball.

So, with repeated suspensions lining up around me like prison walls, I had trouble seeing a way out. Whenever I got clean before, for stretches up to four or maybe five months, I would end up looking down the road and seeing another six months before I could even apply for reinstatement to play again. The road was long, and my patience was short.

But now, with my sobriety unconnected to baseball, I felt how quickly my body seemed to be bouncing back. I was encouraged, and a little bit amazed, every time I started to do something physical. I knew there would be physical repercussions from the years of drug abuse, things like a compromised immune system that led to susceptibility to any kind of infection, but for now, this soon after quitting, I felt better than I had a right to feel.

With Dr. Brodie’s urging, I started to think the unthinkable.

Could I really get back in the game?

I received a call from Marc Topkin of the
St. Petersburg Times.
He covered the Devil Rays, and he heard through team channels that I was doing better and getting clean. And by the way, what about baseball?

I’d been through this so many times I didn’t want to get anybody’s hopes too high. Not my family’s, not the Devil Rays’, and certainly not mine. I wanted to make the point that I was feeling better. This time felt different. This time felt real.

That seemed like enough.

But inside me, thoughts of baseball accelerated. It was my job, the only thing I’d really done for any length of time. I thought back to my daddy’s words — “Your biggest sin is depriving people of watching you play” — and wondered what I’d be like now. Could I still be, in Daddy’s words, “the best the game’s ever seen”?

And how would I ever know if I didn’t give it a shot?

The story appeared in the
St. Petersburg Times,
informing the baseball world I had once again begun thinking about resuscitating my baseball career. That afternoon, the phone rang and Granny handed it to me, shrugging her shoulders to tell me she had no idea who it was.

“Josh, this is Roy Silver. My partner Randy Holland and I run a baseball facility in Clearwater called the Winning Inning. We saw the story in the paper this morning and we’d like to offer you a place to stay and a place to work out.”

I listened to Roy explain his philosophy. The Winning Inning was a Christ-centered baseball facility that ran programs for ballplayers from little kids to major-leaguers. The motto was “Developing Players from the Inside Out,” which seemed about right for me. It was located in Clearwater at the old Phillies’ spring training site, Jack Russell Stadium.

He was offering me one of the old Phillies’ minor-league offices to sleep in, and his facility to work out in, but it wasn’t a handout. I would be required to work around the facility — doing jobs that ranged from raking the field to cleaning toilets — to earn time in the batting cage or on the field.

Roy tracked me down at Granny’s house because he had seen the story in the paper and he knew of me from his days as a Devil Rays’ minor- league coach. He was offering me what amounted to a stay at a ballplayer’s halfway house, and right away it sounded like the perfect opportunity for me.

This was another example of God providing for me. When events line up the way they did, logic doesn’t explain them. And if not logic, then what?

When I got off the phone with Roy Silver, I really started thinking about the course of events for the past couple of months. From the moment I had wobbled to Granny’s screen door to being offered a place to get back in baseball shape under the eyes of two Christian men with my best interests at heart, I could only say the logic of it all continued to escape me.

I came to the only “logical” conclusion.

It was a God thing.

In a way, I didn’t think I could turn down the opportunity. When I surrendered, my exact words were, “Do with me what you want.” This seemed like another God-sent message that I needed to accept in order to fulfill my mission.

Katie and I discussed the opportunity, and we agreed it would be a perfect next step in my progress. After further discussions, I became more comfortable with Roy and Randy, and the idea of starting over in a quiet, low-key atmosphere without any crazy expectations appealed to me.

About this time, Katie came down with a horrible case of the flu. She called me and I went over to the house and took her to the hospital. I took care of Sierra and Julia while Katie was laid up, and holding Sierra in my arms with the knowledge that I’d been given a second chance to be a good father made me resolve to make that work, too.

A couple of days later, I came down with the flu just as Katie was starting to feel better, so the roles were reversed and she took care of me. The few days we spent taking care of each other convinced us our relationship was worth fighting for, and we agreed on a course of action. I would go to the Winning Inning, work on baseball and recovery, and then we would work on repairing our relationship.

We made a commitment to each other. It was a commitment I wouldn’t have been able to make without first making the commitment to myself.

My life was coming together.