Steve Adams "There has to be more to life than this"

Steve Adams will never forget the events of June 11th,1996. It was a Tuesday and began the way most other days had for Steve in recent years. He awoke with the same ache inside that demanded plenty of the drug he was currently using.

He’d used all kinds of drugs since coming home from Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990’s. Military service wasn’t the cause of his drug use, but it made the relief the drugs provided more urgent.

So that morning he looked around the flea-bitten room he lived in and thought about his next fix. It was a miserable place and he was a wreck of a man – skinny, malnourished and foul. When the people living above him ran the tap or flushed the toilet the basement underneath him filled higher with water, which reeked into his room.

Then someone said in a powerful, pure voice, “There has to be more to life than this.”

There was no one else in the room but Steve, but as soon as he heard the voice he could not resist getting up and immediately leaving the room. An irresistible authority compelled him to walk straight to the Washington State Police Barracks and tell them he needed help from the drug addiction that was killing him.

Steve would never have gone near a police station without force. He knew he had outstanding warrants against him from a neighboring state that would lock him up for years. Nonetheless, he was in front of a policeman asking for help.

They looked him up in the computer but found no offense on record against him. Steve knew that wasn’t right. They must have looked up the wrong name. But no; the computer found nothing at all. The policeman told him of a place to spend the night and the next day Steven went to the Washington City Mission.

He ate a simple lunch at the Mission that tasted better than any food he could remember. He lay on a basic cot that was more comfortable to him than the softest mattress with highest grade cotton sheets. His life had changed in the space of a moment by a voice from where? Heaven?

It was the first of many God moments” says Steve. “I was new, but I was still a piece of work. I gave the Mission staff a hard time. But they saw something in me that I couldn’t see. And they loved me through the hard days that followed. They told me to be ‘me’ and that I would be better soon. Now I’ve graduated from their programs but my heart is with the Mission. They taught me to love other people and make something of my life.”

It’s more than 12 years since June 11th 1996. Since then Steve has excelled academically. He is married, with children and works as a drug and alcohol therapist in Pittsburgh. He also keeps close ties with life-long friends at the Mission.