'It is no secret, what God can do'

By Neil Earle

The words to this fine hymn danced through the back of my mind as Andreas (not his real name) reahearsed his inspiring and deeply moving victory over addictions (18 years clean). Andreas was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1953. His father and mother were not closely knit but they both escaped Hungary in the turmoil of the ill-fated revolution of 1956.

Andreas they sent to an orphanage in Szaqed, his sister to their grandparents. The grandfather had sexually abused him so Andreas wasn’t as discouraged by the abandonment as might appear. “It was a step up,” he smiles bravely at the recollection.

Seventy-Five Criminal Charges

In 1963 the family was reunited in Toronto. Andreas had been through enough toughening to make his way in the strange new metropolis. “In fact I saw myself as champion of the underdog,” he recollects. “In the sixth grade I picked a fight with the toughest kid in school and beat him up. He left us alone after that. They sent me to a Catholic school where they tried to deal with me. Already I was a deeply troubled kid. But they liked me because I was good in sports.”

Track and field couldn’t cover up the cruel emotional crosswinds tearing at him, however. “By age 16 I had stolen over 100 cars. Age 18 I faced 75 criminal charges for theft, breaking and entering and armed robbery. I was living on the streets.”

Yet God, he feels, was looking after him through all this. In 1975 he had met his wife, Theresa, a devout Catholic from a good family (name changed). They were both selling encyclopedias and somehow Andreas, out on bail, ended up as her supervisor. “After one date with her I announced to one and all, This is the woman I’m going to marry!’”

Not for the first time in his life, he played the long shot and won. Married but still on drugs, Andreas experienced the first of his gentle nudges from God.

“I remember it well. I was stoned on LSD and the acid was peaking. We were watching a religious movie – can’t even remember which one but in the middle of the acid trip I saw the character who played Jesus look straight towards me. It was just like it was Jesus himself staring at me and he seemed to really care about me. Me.”

He asked Theresa: “Do we have a Bible?”

“A Bible? What’s wrong with you? Is it the drugs?”

But Andreas felt something had clicked in his mind. This angry young addict, somehow able to keep going as a salesman, out of jail on $100,000 bail, now knew – in an instant – that there was a God. He began to read the Book.

God of Grace

A little later Andreas was indulging another of his addictions – gambling – when the sure-bet Miami Dolphins lost a big game. He threw a beer bottle at the TV set. Theresa had had it that day. She stomped out. Andreas came apart in howls of anger at God. “Why can I never get a break?” he cried out. For an hour he poured out a torrent of abuse against his Creator, pinning everything in his unhappy life on God. Later, when he became acquainted with the Book of Job, a similar petitioner, he felt the author was writing about him.

“After an hour of this things began to change. It became slowly impressed on my mind all the things God had been doing for me. The orphanage – that was a step up from child abuse. My parents had escaped Hungary. We had a new life in Canada. And there was the time I feel asleep drunk while driving to Peterborough. I had a 100 mph crash into another car where a little baby in the back seat ended up in the safest spot imaginable in the vehicle to prevent her from being injured. It was another miracle. The Ontario Provincial Police were dumbfounded that no one was killed.”

All this came flooding back to Andreas. Instantly, he fell face down and cried and cried and cried. He apologized to God. God had been with him all along. Now he saw it. Theresa could also see this. “She always said there was another me inside,” Andreas says. “She knew if I ever turned it around I would be just as good a force for good as I had been for evil.”

He would need this support. His court case was coming up. His lawyer said there was no way Andreas could escape “pen time,” incarceration in the Big House, rather than the local jail. This really scared him. He petitioned God. “Give me a deuce less a day and I’ll straighten out (inmate term for two years less a day),” he prayed.

Incredibly, Andreas felt so convinced that God was going to help him that he fired his lawyer, a man with a very good reputation. The Judge was stupiefied.

“Who’s your replacement?” he asked.

Andreas was street smart enough not to answer “God” though the word was on the tip of his tongue. Instead he muttered: “Myself, your honor.”

“Do you have any ideas how serious these charges are,” the Judge responded.

Oh, yes. Andreas knew. The case was armed robbery of a jewelry store by him and two other desparados. Again, a grace note. There had been a mother in the store who needed help feeding her baby. Andreas had tried to help her. In court, the mother testified to this incident.

Then came the sentencing.

“The Judge hands the sheet to the bailiff. Then he pulls it back. He tears up the paper. For a long time the judge stares out the window. He shakes his head. He rewrites the sentence. The Bailiff reads it. I was so nervous all I heard was the word ‘twelve.’ Oh no, twelve years, I think, but the prisoner next to me is pumping my hand and congratulates me all excited like – Twelve months, he said, twelve months. I am elated. I’m taken to a holding cell in the Don Jail. I keep thinking on the way there, I don’t even have Bible. I enter my cell. On the bed I see a Bible. I grab it like a long lost friend and it turns open to Luke 15, the Prodigal Son. Thank you, God.” Andreas and the Book were to get even better acquainted the next twelve months.

Incredibly, the inmate next to him hears his story and asks Andreas if it will work for him. “Of course God will help you,” Andreas replied. The prisoner fires his lawyer, trusts God and gets his sentence cut in half.

Freedom Road

Great things now happen. Andreas’ story spreads. Some forty or so inmates end up praying with him along the range some nights before shut down. A guard on the catwalk wonders what’s going on. “Don’t worry. This is a good thing,” says Andreas, “I’ll explain it in the morning.”

Andreas is then assigned to work in the kitchen. Again he sees God at work for coming across on the kitchen TV is the booming bass of Herbert W. Armstrong, voice of The World Tomorrow program in the early 1980s. Some dozen or so of the inmates start watching along with Andreas. He sends for church literature. It is 1983 when Perc Burrows, then a fulltime minister of the Worldwide Church of God, visits Andreas in prison. On release, Theresa is faithfully waiting for him only now he is not alone. The Toronto Worldwide Church of God baptizes him in May, 1984.

End of story?

No. “Even after all that the drugs in my body still had such a strong hold. It was very strange. God had given me so many victories yet some of the addictions still stayed. Later on I felt God explained that to me as, When you fall you will know I am there for you. Always remember, the righteous man falls seven times but gets up again. But it was very very frustrating to me and my ministers trying to deal with this. I was up and down in the mid-1980s. No one seemed to know what to do. Then came 1987 and the local church started a support group for people like me called the Invitational Bible Study. If you had a drinking problem or whatever you were to let a minister know and you’d be invited to the special Bible Study.”

The front and back covers of Mending Broken Relationships by Dr. John Paul Eddy, with Curtis May and Neil Earle. Click to enlarge.

(The principles behind the Toronto Support Group is explained in the book, “Mending Broken Relationships” available from atimetoreconcile.org.)

“What impressed me about my ministers was that here were well-educated people who, as far as I knew, came from good homes, had never experienced some of these things, yet here they were meeting with us, counseling us, telling us God was on our side and actually going to the AA and Narcotics Anonymous meetings with us. They were really sincere in trying to learn as much about all this as they could. It was the blend of Bible encouragement with outside counseling that made the difference.”

Finally, in 1989, after attending a detoxifying clinic in New Orlean, Andreas began to get the last compulsions off his back. Eighteen years clean and sober are a testimony to his faith, his wife’s constancy, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Hs children are successful young adults and Theresa has a degree in child care. Truly, it is no secret what God can do. As Andreas told those inmates at the Don Jail: “What He’s done for others, He’ll do for you.” Call Him up today. Ask Him to send you encouragers into your life. He’s only a prayer away.