Free Fearless by Eric Blehm Page A

didn’t seem long enough.

6

In God’s Hands

    O N THE FIRST DAY OF M ARCH 1996, Janice and Larry returned home from searching for Adam after hearing from the University of Central Arkansas that he had not attended classes for weeks.
    Nobody they knew had seen or heard from Adam. Larry was distraught and Janice was at her wit’s end. She kept telling herself that she’d felt this way before, that even though she would worry herself sick Adam was dead somewhere in a ditch, he always showed up. But they couldn’t—and Adam couldn’t—keep going on like this, so Janice and Larry sat down at their kitchen table to figure out a course of action.
    As Janice brainstormed aloud how they would save their son, Larry had an epiphany. Reaching across the table, he took his wife’s hand. “We’ve tried everything we can do,” he said. “We can’t fix Adam. God is going to have to fix Adam. We’ve got to go to church.”
    Janice hadn’t been raised to know God. She didn’t even
think
about God. With Larry’s words, however, a light bulb switched on. “You’re right,” she replied.
    Larry slapped both his knees and said, “We’ll go this weekend.”
    The next Sunday morning Larry found the Bible his mother had given them as a wedding gift, wiped some thirty years’ worth of dust off the spine, and brought it with them to Second Baptist Church in Hot Springs—the church Manda attended when she was home from college.
    A woman about Janice’s age greeted the Browns by the front door. “Good morning! Welcome,” she said. “My name is Helen Webb. Come on in and let me show you around.”
    Larry, who hadn’t gone to church since Vietnam, was a bit rusty on his knowledge of Scripture, and Janice had never read the Bible, but after that first sermon, bothof them felt lifted up. The peace Larry experienced returned him to occasional times in his youth when he had leaned on God.
    They went home with an invitation to come back soon.
    The associate pastor, Mike Smith, knocked on the Browns’ front door three days later to thank them for being guests of the church. Over a cup of coffee, Janice and Larry shared Adam’s story. “We are failing our baby,” Janice said as she shook her head and wiped at tears.
    For more than an hour, Pastor Smith listened while they explained their family past and their spiritual past. As a child Larry had gone to church three times a week but stopped once he entered the military. Janice had attended church only for weddings, funerals, and a Christmas Mass or two and said she knew nothing about religion. “I don’t know how to pray,” she said, “so I’ve just been talking to God nonstop in my head since church on Sunday, asking him to look after Adam.”
    “You’re doing fine,” said Pastor Smith. “Just open up your heart to Jesus. He knows exactly what you’re up against; your struggles are not uncommon. And he has a plan.”
    Pastor Smith understood intimately what Adam was up against with addiction and cocaine, but he left the Browns’ home without sharing his personal history. Back at the church he called Helen Webb, who was in charge of the prayer chain. “Helen, we need to pray for a couple,” he told her. “Their son was arrested, he’s battling drugs, and they desperately need our prayers.”
    The following Sunday Janice and Larry attended separate Bible studies before the worship service. In the women’s class, “most of them were mature Christians,” says Janice, “and they started talking about ‘I read this scripture, and it revealed to me that I need to do this today.’ It was totally foreign to me, but what I saw was that they were living their lives through the Bible and laughing and having fun—and I didn’t think Christians
could
have fun.”
    She became intrigued with the Bible, who Jesus was, and why all these people were so enamored of him. When she shared a little about Adam, one of the womentold her to “give some of that weight you’re