Fearless (10 page)

Although Janice had gone for one reason only, to help Adam, “it ended up helping me,” she says. “Once I realized I needed Jesus, it wasn’t for Adam; it was for me.”

Scripture by scripture Janice devoured her new Bible, until one morning, as she stood in her kitchen, she asked Jesus into her heart. She shared the news with Larry, who said he had recommitted himself to God and reconfirmed that Jesus Christ was his Lord and Savior. Together they prayed, asking Jesus to save Adam.

Only then were they able to stop chasing him. “We quit,” says Janice. “We were like, ‘Lord, you’re in charge, and we’re going to back away and let you be in charge.”

For the first time in her life, Janice understood what it meant to have “blind faith.”

Two weeks later Adam’s boyhood friend Ryan Whited was driving south on Highway 7 in Hot Springs when he heard a horn honking from behind. The driver in the blue Toyota truck tailing him waved him over.

Ryan pulled off to the side of the road and the Toyota rolled up alongside. “Adam Brown!” Ryan said through the open window. “What’s been going on?”

In high school, though not a football player, Ryan had been rowdy right along with Adam. He had mellowed some as a senior and become more active in his church, and in fact had invited Adam along a few times. When Adam had been working on his workbook in drug rehab three months earlier, he had answered the question “Name the spiritual mentors in your life” with three names: Grandma Brown, Aunt Becky, and Ryan Whited.

But it had been years since Adam had seen Ryan, who had attended the local community college after graduation, then traveled around the world, living in a commune in Switzerland before returning to Hot Springs.

“Sorry for pulling you over like that,” Adam said, “but I saw you driving and I
kind of need to talk to you.” He hopped into Ryan’s car and proceeded to unload what had been going on in his life, that he’d stolen from virtually everyone he knew in order to support his drug habit. When Adam confessed he’d stolen from his parents, he started crying. “I’m really addicted to crack,” he told Ryan. “I can’t stop doing it. I need your help.”

Adam asked if he could move in with Ryan and his brother, David. “I know y’all will be a good influence, and I’ll get myself well,” he said. “I won’t be a problem.”

Yes, Ryan said immediately, then he called David, who was four years older and a youth pastor at a local church, to confirm. David had known Adam as a kid and agreed to let him stay, with some basic ground rules: no drugs or drug friends allowed in the house.

Adam, not trusting himself, asked if Ryan could drive with him to where he’d been staying to pick up his belongings. Along the way he pointed out five crackhouses. “If I disappear,” Adam said, “can you come get me out of there?”

In a wooded area outside town, they turned down a narrow road of broken blacktop that led to a trash-strewn clearing. “This is it,” said Adam, pointing to the centerpiece of the dump—a dilapidated trailer.

The inside looked as bad as the outside and smelled even worse. Dirty dishes covered with rotting food were piled in the sink. There was a crib in the living room. The floor was littered with garbage. Adam waded through the tiny rooms, grabbing clothes and stuffing them into a black Hefty bag.

“It was in a state that animals shouldn’t be living in,” says Ryan. “It was just nasty. The clothes that we gathered were on the floor. It wasn’t like we got out specific things from the closet that had been put away. It was a disaster. I was just sitting there in this place thinking,
What in the world is going on in Adam’s life that he could live here?
”

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,

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.”