On January 8, 1990, our son John Michael was born. At the tender age of four months, nine days old, John’s birth mother felt she could no longer give him the care she so deeply wanted him to have. So through the help of a dear friend and an experienced attorney, we became John’s parents through the process of adoption. John was nearly the perfect baby and almost as nearly the perfect child. He was eager to please, loving, gentle, and kind right from the start.

One morning when John was only three years old, he told us that he had “asked Jesus into his heart” after we had tucked him in the night before. Such a tender heart to lay awake in bed thinking about Jesus.

After talking more about this with him, we were totally blown away by his understanding of the Gospel. So we took him at his word, and continued to foster the belief and love for Jesus that God had put in his young heart.

The summer after 5th grade John wanted to follow Jesus in baptism. After discussing this as a family and ultimately with our pastor, he was baptized as a public profession of his faith.

As years passed we began to see changes in our then 12-year-old son especially after one of his close friends was brutally murdered that school year. We sought professional counseling and sought help from our church family, but John began to stuff his feelings—stuffing them more and more as he grew older.

When he was around the age of 14, we realized John’s struggle was becoming even more serious and destructive. We sought once again professional help only to see John stuffing his feelings and shutting down even tighter.

We prayed for John. We begged God for wisdom. We asked the Lord to intervene. We sought more professional counseling and help. We sought advice from our pastors—but nothing we did seemed to help John. By the time he was 18 he was using and addicted to some very serious drugs.

After numerous failed attempts in various ways to get help for John, we insisted he go to a residential drug rehabilitation program. This would be the first of many rehabs John went to and completed, only to relapse within weeks of leaving the program.

John entered once again a residential program in July, 2015. This program was different from the others. It was based on Biblical teaching and focused on heart change. John seemed to do better here than any other place he had previously been. He reaffirmed his faith in God through Jesus, studied the Bible with the other men, and we began to see spiritual growth in his life. When he finished up, he was offered a place to live if he stayed in town with a wonderful family that we had never even met.

A few short months later, it became apparent that John was engaged once again with drugs and alcohol. He eventually totally relapsed. After a few times in the hospital and a couple more times in short rehab programs, John lost his physical life to fentanyl poisoning on January 7, 2017, just one day before his 27^th birthday.

We will never completely understand in this life why all of this happened, but we do know that God was ready to take John to Heaven—to live with Him for all of eternity because of John’s faith in Christ.

Addiction is a horrific problem in our society today. It is a monster that takes over, and it is very difficult to kill. It has no discretion nor does it distinguish “good” people from “bad”. Many are experimenting with drugs and alcohol only to find themselves full-blown addicts/alcoholics soon after.

We know that ONLY through submission to and provision of a loving God can any man or woman win this unimaginable, beastly battle. And even then it’s difficult to get to the other side.

Our son fought the fight, not always as we would have preferred, but fight he did, and he has won his prize because of his faith in Jesus Christ.

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”  

2 Timothy 4:7

Quoted scripture is from the ESV unless otherwise noted.