Choice Fruit

Two-and-a-half years into his marriage, John Pursell found himself under the proverbial garden tree.

“I remember thinking, Why, one time, what the heck! She wanted to! And it wasn’t her fault. I was the man in the family.”

From his wife’s hand, John drew his first snort of the enticing powder. One encounter with crystal meth ripped away both his and his wife’s rationality, plunging the pair into a twisted romance with addiction.

The Poisoned Taste

The couple used the drug recreationally at first, then full time. “You wake up one day and you cannot function without it,” John explained, disgust oozing from his Arkansas drawl.

The chronic sleep deprivation eventually wreaked havoc on his job performance as a carpet installer.

“We could tell something was going on, and he was spiraling downwards,” said Barry Staunton, his boss at Arnold’s Flooring America in Little Rock.

A little over a year after their first encounter with meth, John and his wife split. The drug had consumed all of their attention, distracting them from each other. And the bills were piling up.

“It created monetary problems,” John explained. “With money problems comes marriage problems.”

After the breakup, John attempted to sustain some semblance of a career as a carpet installer, all the while building a lucrative meth lab in his house.

But after the police raided his lab, John was forced to take his “business” on the road, bouncing from hotel room to hotel room, wherever he could concoct the drug most surreptitiously. He hid out in an upscale crack house for a few months. But the cops finally caught up with him on March 5, 2005.

By the time he got to Pulaski County Jail, his head was clearer than it had been in six years, because he had been forced to detox while he was on the run. Sitting on his bunk, he replayed a day in his boyhood when he walked down the aisle toward the altar of a little Baptist church, responding to the preacher's invitation to receive Jesus.

Now that he’d lost everything – his wife, his access to meth, his self-respect – this time he walked down a figurative aisle.

Lord, I can’t do this, and I know You can, he prayed. And then, he says, “the peace of God that passes all understanding came over me.”  In that instant, his desire for his demon drug fled, replaced with a hunger for something deeper. Something more satisfying.

Daylight in Detention

Not long after he met peace, he was transferred to the Tucker Unit in Pine Bluff. One of his buddies had recently enrolled in a values-based reentry program developed by Prison Fellowship, and urged John to join him.

“Man, if you really want to change, [this is] the place,” his friend said.

Although John was content with where he was in general population, he realized that God might have other plans. Lord, if that’s where You want me to be, he prayed, that’s where I want to be.

A few weeks later, John found out his application had been accepted, and he was transferred to the Prison Fellowship reentry unit.

The difference between his new “home” and his former prison barracks seemed like “daylight and dark.”

For years John had been operating from a self-gain agenda. But in the reentry unit, he found he needed a new M.O.—one driven by character. “They drilled us while we were there,” he explained. “We had six core values: integrity, restoration, community, affirmation, responsibility, productivity.”

Producing a New Fruit

After 18 months in the program, equipped with a stronger faith and a commitment to a lifestyle of integrity, John was ready to go home to Little Rock and face the inevitable hurtles: finding a job, a place to live, and transportation. He got a slight head start: His mom loaned him her car for two months, and his friends at Arnold’s Flooring decided to hire him back, not to his old position, but as a warehouse worker.

Barry Staunton had known John for almost 30 years. In fact, John was the one who picked Barry up his first day on the job. Over the years, Barry had risen from low man on the totem pole to vice-president. John had floated in and out of contract jobs, eventually losing the company’s trust because of his addictions.

Even though Barry had been burned before by an ex-prisoner (who he caught trading rugs for drugs), Barry and Arnold’s owner Steve Arnold decided to give John a second chance. “Giving him another opportunity just felt like the right thing to do,” Barry explained.

When John returned to Arnold’s as a warehouse worker, he was okay with it. He was busy focusing on integrity. It paid off. Two months after starting the warehouse job, he was promoted to estimator and project manager.

“[John] has a peace about himself now that’s made him a good employee,” said Barry.

Day by day, good choice by good choice, John has been coming back from the fall and finding victory.