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Three years ago, Jeffery Shepherd had no idea what was about to befall him.
He knew it was tough being a parent of teenagers—after all, he had three of them. He was well acquainted with the fear of his toddlers being kidnapped, the fear of injuries as they got older, and the fear of car accidents after they started driving.
But when his oldest child—a daughter named Jade—turned 18, the fear that held his heart in an icy vice, the one so bad he almost dared not name it, became a reality.
“My daughter was very rebellious,” Jeffery says. “She turned 18 and you couldn’t tell her anything. She was running with a wild crowd, heavy into drugs. It got to the point where I finally had to ask her to leave my home because she was being so rebellious. The last conversation we had, I told her one of my greatest fears was that I was going to get a call one night and have to come identify her body.
“Seven months later, I got that call—that there was a body to identify.”
Because of her drug use, it wasn’t unusual for Jade to disappear for a month at a time, Jeffery says. But this time, three months went by—and then her skeletal remains were found under an abandoned house in a bad neighborhood in Oakland, Calif. She had been murdered.
“This sent my whole world into a tailspin,” Jeffery says. “Naturally, I blamed myself. Having asked her to leave my house, I felt like I could have done something to prevent what happened. I punished myself.”
Jeffery took a three-month leave of absence from his job as the administrative assistant to the president of Oakland’s local public broadcasting television station—and when it was over, he didn’t go back. Instead, he gave away everything he owned. And about a month after his daughter’s remains were found, he called some acquaintances and told them he wanted to try meth.
“I had never tried it,” he explains. “I had smoked marijuana. Being [raised in] Berkeley, of course I had tried marijuana—I think they blew it into our bassinettes in the nursery.”
Meth, he quickly found, was nothing like marijuana, or the antidepressants his doctor had prescribed.
“I liked the up that it gave me, and it didn’t make me think about what had happened and what I was going through,” he says. “But then I had to keep coming down.
“And when I came down, I started buying it.”
Though his friends and family members didn’t suspect it, Jeffery’s grief and self-condemnation had him careening toward self-destruction.
“I wanted to see how far down I could go,” he says now. “I wanted to see if I could lose everything, because I had always been able to get everything so easily. I wanted to see if I didn’t pay my rent if they’d really evict me. I wanted to see if I didn’t make my car payment if they’d really repossess it. And all that stuff happened.”
Nothing in Jeffery’s background would have suggested he would suddenly turn to drugs at the age of 44. Raised in the Methodist church, he became a born-again Christian and began attending charismatic churches when he was 17, then got involved in youth work and worship ministry when he was 25. Tidy and articulate, naturally gregarious and optimistic, he had always held jobs that were decidedly upper-middle-class.
But grief respects no one, and despite being able to keep up appearances at his increasingly sparse get-togethers with family and friends, inside, Jeffery was falling apart.
“Little by little, I was starting to lose time,” he says. “I went into my bathroom one day at 9 in the morning, and then looked up and it was 1 in the afternoon. I got on the subway to go a couple of stops, and then when I came to myself, I was walking down the street in San Francisco.”
People tried to help, as much as they knew how—but Jeffery wasn’t having it. When his landlord worked out an agreement for him to pay $70 extra a month to catch up on his back rent, Jeffery signed it—then tore it up as soon as his landlord left.
Father’s Day the year after Jade’s death was hard—and the next day, even harder. That’s when Jeffery had a complete nervous breakdown. He spent 10 days in the hospital, where the drugs were discovered in his system. The charade was over.
The seeds of Jeffery’s recovery were sown over the next several months. After he got out of the hospital, he moved to Larkspur, Colo., to work for an aunt and uncle in their trucking business. Hey stayed sober for four months initially, but then fell back into using. His uncle finally confronted him, urging him to consider the recovery program at Springs Rescue Mission.
After his release, Jeffery moved to Larkspur, Colo., to work for an aunt and uncle in their trucking business. It was a good place, and the right time, to start over. He stayed four months and didn’t use drugs at all.
But when he went back to California to take care of some business, intending to stay only two months, he found himself with the same set of friends he’d had before—dealers and meth users. He started using again almost immediately, and the two months turned into 12 before he returned to Larkspur in March 2005.
Because his aunt and uncle were often on the road for days on end, Jeffery had plenty of time to himself. And the day after Father’s Day, once again, proved too much for him to handle alone.
“I was playing on the Internet and found a chat room that said, ‘party,’ ” he explains. “In my experience, that means meth. So I sent an e-mail, and it was [to] somebody who was a drug dealer. Within 24 hours, I had copped a bag of dope and was sing again.
“But this time, it was just completely different. There was no joy in it, no pleasure in it. I was in my aunt and uncle’s house. They are devout Christians, and I just felt totally convicted.”
When his uncle got home, he took one look at Jeffery and asked him if he’d been using again. Jeffery’s silence was his only answer. Then his uncle told him about the Springs Rescue Mission and its recovery program, “and something clicked,” Jeffery says.
“Something clicked,” Jeffery says now. “I kept hearing from the Holy Spirit, ‘Go to Colorado Springs. Go to Colorado Springs,’ ” he says. “I kept seeing this building that looked like an office building with a cross on it. I knew it wasn’t a church, but I didn’t know what it was.”
Shortly afterward, Jeffery drove to Colorado Springs, checked into a motel and got the address for the Springs Rescue Mission—a four-story office building with a cross on top.
“When I came down the street and saw the building, I was just like, ‘Wow! This is the place I’ve been seeing in my spirit.’ ”
Still, Jeffery struggled with some misgivings. His first experience with the staff was at a Friday afternoon barbecue July 22, which catered not only to the recovering addicts in the men’s New Life Program (NLP)—the year-long group residency his uncle had told him about—but also to the transients and homeless the mission helps.
“My first notion was, ‘This is not for me,’ ” Jeffery recalls. “I thought the residents were kept upstairs [in the office building]—I didn’t realize they were spread over the city. I thought, ‘If you’re going to be in a program, you need to be someplace like Betty Ford!’ ”
But Jeffery stayed long enough to meet some counselors and NLP members, who told him to come back Monday for the morning devotionals. He went—and found he was in the right place after all.
“The Spirit of the Lord said, ‘This is it, Jeffery,’ and I knew immediately,” he says. “Even if I didn’t get [into the NLP], because of the three hours of Bible study that I had sat through, I was rejuvenated. I knew that whatever was going to happen after that, I was going to make it.”
Jeffery was admitted to the program later that day, and has made steady progress—both with his addiction and his guilt over Jade’s death—since. He’s himself again—the gregarious party-planner who enjoys being with other people, sending relatives cards and letting them know how he’s doing. Through the NLP’s culinary arts program, he’s learning to become a chef, and hopes to open his own restaurant in New Orleans one day.
But most importantly, Jeffery’s relationship with God has been restored.
“Even through my drug use, I always leaned on the Lord, never stopped studying the Bible, even when I was high. I know that sounds kind of weird, but it’s what kept me,” he says. “It’s what kept me from going down even farther than I did. If I had not had the anchor of Jesus throughout my drug usage, I would have been out on the street, in even worse situations. He always gave me a toehold, whether it was a relative or a good friend. I’ve never spent one night outside, never missed a meal, never been to jail, and I attribute all those things to God, and only Him. I was seeing people all around me lose everything they had, to the point where they weren’t even sleeping in a car—they were outside, on the ground. They were getting arrested, overdosing, dying. So He kept me, event through my worst points. Even though I knew I was doing wrong, I believed He was still looking at my heart.
“This is a good place,” he continues, looking around the Springs Rescue Mission’s modestly appointed ground-floor conference room. “It’s a caring place. It’s a place where you’re not lumped into a group. They deal with individuals here. It’s a place to develop good relationships, a place to let go of things you’ve been holding onto.
“The New Life Program is a good name, because you can have a new life here.”