FARGO – Stepheny Verhoeven had been clean and sober a solid year when she got into her car one day and, in a moment of frustration, hastily backed out of her driveway, nudging a passerby from behind.
Getting out, she realized it wasn’t a stranger, but someone from her old life. The man was OK but agitated about something. “Will you hold this for a few minutes?” he asked, handing Verhoeven a bag before dashing off.
If she’d been a sugar addict, it would have been like asking her to hold a platter of decadent desserts. But it was fentanyl — Verhoeven’s most recent vice — and in an instant, the willpower she’d been clinging to for 12 months vanished.
“My last thought was, ‘I wish I could hold a bag of fentanyl like a normal person,’” she says, realizing later that most “normal people” don’t hold illegal drugs. “I snorted the fentanyl and died.”
With the help of a 911 call and Narcan, Verhoeven was revived, but was soon arrested and brought to the Cass County Jail.
Despite promising her 5-year-old she’d never miss another birthday, once again, Verhoeven would be behind bars instead of watching her daughter blow out candles on her cake.
“There’s such a stigma of addiction, breaking the law, being a felon, and having to raise your kids with a past,” she says. “I’ve been in the paper before, but never for anything good.”
But since finding Jesus in jail, through Jail Chaplains ministry, the shame is over.
Verhoeven recalls hearing a volunteer talk about Jesus “as if he was the love of her life.” “I love my children, and I love my fiancé, but I didn’t love myself. And the passion that these women spoke about Jesus—I wanted that, too.”
Road to addiction
Verhoeven wasn’t raised in a drug culture and hadn’t touched an illegal drug for the first 27 years of her life. But when her first husband abandoned her and her children, a switch flipped.
“He came home on New Year’s Eve and said he didn’t love me anymore and wanted a divorce,” she recounts. “I was severely depressed and overweight,” and vulnerable, so when a neighbor, who’d come over to fix her sink, offered her some meth, she thought, “Why not?”
“Less than 72 hours later, I was driving to Iowa to pick up my first pound of meth,” Verhoeven says. “It went downhill so fast…and completely took over my life.”
Before hitting the two-year mark, she had caught a federal indictment. The collision course continued until January of this year when Jail Chaplains entered the picture.
But it wasn’t an instant draw. “I wasn’t looking to find Jesus,” she admits. “I was so mad at myself and so full of shame, and just so angry, because I felt cheated.”
Initially, Verhoeven says, she attended the sessions just to get out of confinement. “Even just a change of scenery, of walking down the hall,” was appealing. But in time, God reached her.
“When we walk around with the Holy Spirit inside of us, he’s always with us and he’ll never leave us, and every good thing is possible through Christ,” Verhoeven says. “It just clicked. If I love Jesus, then I have to love myself, also, because Jesus lives in me…”
A volunteer’s perspective
Before volunteering with Jail Chaplains, Tina Bender worked as an emergency-room, psychiatric nurse and, later, a caretaker for her ailing husband. “I knew the population,” she says.
A few months after Steve’s death in February 2022, Bender discovered Jail Chaplains, realizing it was an answered prayer to serve God in a new way. Soon, she was training to lead Bible studies and support groups, ultimately entering a two-year chaplaincy training program, which she’ll complete in November.
She’s also a trained Compassionate Visitor, a newer aspect of Jail Chaplains in which volunteers offer inmates spiritual advising and more individualized support. The program has been successful, Bender says, with Verhoeven being one example.
“When I think of Stepheny, I think of someone who caught fire,” Bender says. “Her passion lit and spread while she was still inside. All of a sudden, what was disjointed…was cohesive, and now the women are getting together and reading their Bibles at night or praying or taking what they’re learning in the support groups and applying it.”
Bender has been touched by how open the women have been—more so than the general population, she says. “There’s a beautiful softness, and they’re seeking and they’re searching. When you’re in jail, the maladaptive coping mechanisms are removed, so there’s no artificial buffering of the emotion and pain.”
She’s also found the ministry personally rewarding, rejuvenating to her own soul, especially in grief. “It stopped the spiral into darkness,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, I still occasionally burst into tears sometimes in the grocery store, but that intense grief that looks like a really dark, black hole, I couldn’t have pulled myself out of there on my own.”
The director’s perspective
Since Mike Little assumed the position of Jail Chaplains executive director in March 2023, his heart has been transformed, though that had begun before he accepted the job.
Something was missing, he says, and he’d been praying to begin seeing others through God’s eyes. “It’s been a year and a half of tremendous, profound closeness to God, and seeing Jesus move in ways I’d only read about before, but never got to see directly.”
The ministry is grounded in prayer, with “each step just a small step of going where the Holy Spirit is telling us to go—and listening and obeying.”
Little says humanity’s limitations are not confined to inmates; we’re all bound by strongholds that need Jesus’ healing touch, adding that most of the incarcerated have experienced brokenness in key relationships, often manifesting as drug abuse, and ultimately, incarceration.
For those ready, Jail Chaplains can begin a positive transformation, he says, calling it a ripe mission field. “We have over 85 volunteers supporting us with this work,” who view the incarcerated as fellow human beings with needs—and a future.
“We’re realizing that at the core, criminals aren’t the enemies; they’re held captive by our true enemy,” Little says, “And we’ve come to set them free in the name of Jesus Christ.”
The local ministry comprises over eight groups meeting for Bible studies in the jail, and dozens of small groups among the community open to all. They ultimately aim to reach the core—the family—Little says, because when an incarcerated family member is restored, they bring that back to their loved ones, and the whole community wins.
“I think we have a fear of those who’ve been incarcerated. We want to push them away and forget about them,” Little says. But we miss out. “We have people getting off heroin and meth and those who’ve left gangs and are now chasing after Jesus,” with entire families getting baptized.
Little says freedom from addiction requires shifting the focus from what we’re trying to stop to looking at something more powerful and attractive. “We need to be hungrier for Jesus than anyone else. Then, the things of earth grow strangely dim. They start to lose their power and luster and fall away.”
Verhoeven agrees, calling addiction “straight from hell.” “I tell people all the time that addiction is pure feelings, and they’re fake feelings.”
Borrowing a friend’s analogy, she says, it’s like sitting in a virtual reality ride in the mall that makes you feel like you’re riding a rollercoaster. “You’re sitting next to other people in the box, and it’s fun. You’re screaming and it’s great. But everyone outside knows you’re just in a box; it’s not real.”
Verhoeven continues, “I want to go on real rollercoasters with my children and experience real feelings, real joy.”
Bender says it’s a thrill watching hope light up in someone’s eyes. “I pray that we send them all off with an ember that can’t be extinguished; a little seed of Jesus in their heart,” she says. “The rest is up to him.”
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on June 8, 2024.]
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