Healing Waters

Life was playing out like a reality TV show gone horribly wrong.

“You know those TV shows about extreme hoarders or about severe interventions? It was like that,” Adam Waters ’16 MDiv ’18 says.

His drug use began in his teen years, but it wasn’t controlling his life—yet. “In high school, I was what I would call a social drug user. Maybe around 15, I started experimenting with marijuana and then eventually other things like mushrooms and alcohol.”

In his senior year of high school, Adam’s girlfriend told him she was pregnant. The two married in 1997 when both he and his new wife were 18 years old. As Adam puts it, the relationship had no chemistry.  “It was obligatory,” he says.

‘I landed in a family’

Chemistry or not, Adam felt a strong sense of responsibility to provide for his family. He decided to enter the military, and he started with a visit to the local Marine recruitment office. He distinctly remembers that first recruitment meeting.

“They wanted me to run. They wanted me to carry packs,” Adam says. “I thought, There's got to be an easier way. So I went next door to the Navy recruiter’s office. And I said, ‘Do you carry a pack?’ They said, ‘Nope, never carry a pack.’ I said, ‘Do I get paid the same amount as a Marine?’ ‘Yup,’ they said, ‘you get paid the same amount as a Marine.’” He promptly signed up.

Adam had a keen interest in the medical field, and the Navy assigned him to an extensive corpsman training program. Ironically, he was later told that he would be assigned to a Marine unit. “They told me, ‘By the way, now you’re going to carry two packs—your pack plus the medical bag!’”

Though he was frustrated about the turn of events, he was more fearful about adapting to life with Marines. “But when I got there,” he says, “I landed in a family. I found the connection and community that I had always hoped I would have. To this day, all of my friends are Marines.”

There was one downside. “A lot of partying goes on. You work hard, you play hard in the Marines,” Adam says. “If you get out there and get it done, you get rewarded for it. And we rewarded ourselves richly when we came back. My addiction moved to alcohol at that point in the Marine Corps.”

Divorce and drug use

Long deployments and a shaky foundation took their toll on Adam’s marriage. While he sought the comfort of alcohol, his wife sought her own comforts. Six years after their child was born, the couple divorced.

Not long after the divorce, Adam reconnected with a woman from his past, and unlike his first marriage, he felt that chemistry for her that he had always longed for. Though she had previous drug issues, she had stopped using. “She wasn't an active user at the time we started dating,” Adam says. “With my misconceptions about addiction, I just assumed abstinence was equivalent to recovery. It’s not.”

The two married in 2004, and it didn’t take long for old habits to overtake them both. Adam’s role as an Independent Duty Corpsman (comparable to a physician’s assistant) gave him access to medications. That access led to Adam stealing and using the sick bay’s drugs.

Near-death experience

“We were off the coast of Cuba, and in my addict’s mind, I convinced myself it was a good idea to begin taking the morphine that was on the ship,” he says. It wasn’t long before Adam had used all of the ship’s morphine supply. To cover his tracks, he filled empty morphine ampules with saline solution.

Adam says, “Here I am, an E-6. I'm responsible for 400 people's well-being. I could have shipmates who could be gravely wounded, and I would be giving them shots of water, telling them that it's going to help. I realized what I had done, and I couldn’t live with my wreck of a life. I committed at that moment to killing myself.”

At 2:00 one morning in March of 2006, Adam went topside and headed for the back of the ship to jump off. On his way, he passed a new shipmate on night watch. Adam knew that the young woman had been struggling with military life since she signed on and that being the last person to see him alive would be too hard on the young sailor.

Turning back, he sought out the commanding officer. “The CO was on the bridge, and I went up to him and said, ‘Sir, I've used all the drugs on the ship. I'm an opiate addict, and I’ve used all the morphine.’ He thought it was a joke because it was so contrary to the reputation that I had built to the people around me.”

Hitting rock bottom . . . and looking up

The Navy sent Adam to a 30-day treatment program, but Adam says, “It was like a squirt gun on a forest fire.” Not long after, Adam was discharged and struggled to fit in to civilian life after eight years of service. Within a year of his discharge, both he and his wife were not only actively using, their lives were controlled by the demands of their habit.

“We started committing crimes to generate money for drugs. We were spending about $1,000 a day on heroin. We got so brazen out of our desperation to not be sick. That's one of the misconceptions about drug use, especially heroin,” Adam explains. “You’re not using to get a good feeling anymore. You’re using to not get sick. It’s desperation.”

Eventually, Adam and his wife were both caught and jailed. She spent 18 months in jail. Adam went to prison for six years. The couple separated. It was the darkest period of Adam’s life. But God was about to send Adam a ray of light.

“Early in my incarceration, I needed a phone call, and no one's going to give you anything in jail. But I knew if I asked the chaplain, he was paid to be nice to people,” Adam recalls. The chaplain intervened, and Adam got his phone call.  

“After I was done—and I don’t know why he said it like this—the chaplain said, ‘You seem to have native intelligence. Would you be interested in some reading material?’ I was convinced that he was going to bring me John Grisham novels. I thought, ‘Well, I have nothing but time. Why not?’”

An unexpected gift

But chaplain Burton Ashland ’55 had different reading material in mind for Adam. “He came down with a bag of books the next day, and I went to my cell and opened it,” Adam says. “The first book I pulled out was Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther. The second book was Augustine’s Confessions, then Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin.

“I look back on it now and think that he had to be moved by the Spirit to do that because those are not the books I would have brought to an inmate. One of the books was Berkhof’s Systematic Theology, and some of it was in Dutch!”

Adam’s parents were people of faith, and as a child he had gone to church regularly with his family. But Adam never believed. “By the time I was in middle school, I thought everything [biblical] was a fairy tale. It was just wishful thinking and dangerous.”

He had no intention of reading the chaplain’s books, but as Adam puts it, “In the middle of the night in a cell in a jail, there’s nothing to do, and those books were there. What ended up happening was I realized that Christianity had coherence, that it was not illogical. There was a logic and an internal coherence to it that I had not realized existed. I didn’t believe it yet, but at least it made sense.”

‘For the first time I was seeing in color’

After weeks of reading Burt Ashland’s books, borrowing a Bible from another inmate to cross-check, and reading some more, Adam believed. It happened in the middle of the night on May 1, 2007. 

“I got up that day, and it felt like for the first time I was seeing in color,” he says. “There had always been this kind of fog that had been over me. All that was gone. It was like clarity for the first time in a long time.”

Adam’s faith grew in prison. He attended Bible studies and continued a relationship with the chaplain. As his release date grew nearer, he determined to be a new man and to somehow reconcile with his wife, even if she never believed.

When his parents picked him up and drove him home on March 15, 2013, there were tears of joy in the car. But after his first few hours at home, he saw tears of another kind in his parents’ eyes. They were struggling with how to tell him: His wife had died of cancer just yesterday—one day before his release.

Adam began the hard process of assimilating back into a life of freedom. He started attending Grace Bible Church in Elmhurst, Illinois, with his parents. “I was tithing to that church when I was in prison. I made $43.10 a month, so I sent $4.31 a month from prison to the church with a little letter. When I showed up, they already had some sense of who I was.”

He had also studied counseling through a distance education program, and the church put his intelligence and his talents to work.

“My mother had been in small groups and had prayed for me, so they were aware of my story,” Adam says. “They were happy to integrate me, and that was really good for me at the time.”

Entering biblical education

In 2015, Adam married Elaine Baer, who had been attending Grace Bible Church since she was two years old. Feeling a call to ministry, he began exploring a biblical education. As a kid, Adam had visited Moody a few times with his church youth group. And one Moody grad in particular had made a profound impact on Adam’s spiritual life: Chaplain Burton Ashland.

Adam was accepted to Moody in 2014. “Moody was very flexible in the classes that I could take and in the format. I was able to do online, on campus, and modular formats (15 weeks online and one week on campus) at the same time. Moody made a tremendous impact on me, and some of the classes I most appreciated were Dr. Bill Thrasher’s. I took a class on the theology of prayer with him, and it felt life-changing. I'm still drawing on pieces of that today.”

Adam completed his Bachelor of Science in Theological Studies and immediately began classes for a Master of Divinity at Moody Theological Seminary. Adam completed both degrees in an astonishing four years.

Dr. Ryan Cook, professor of Bible at Moody, remembers Adam serving as a role model for younger students in the classroom.

“Adam was driven and conscientious as a student. He really cared about both the subject matter we were studying and the other students in the class,” Dr. Cook says. “Other students looked up to him, and I often saw him talking with them after class or sharing a meal with them. Because he had some life experience to bring into the classroom, he would ask great questions and had the ability to focus on the issues that really mattered for life and ministry.”

Dr. Cook also got to know Adam as a member of Adam’s ordination board. “It was a blessing to be a part of that ordination experience and to see how his church rallied around and supported him in his role as a pastor,” he says. “You can tell that Adam really cares about people and about honoring the Lord in his ministry.”

Transformative training

Adam says his education at Moody fueled his passion for pastoral ministry and provided him with the tools and training he needed to reach, disciple, and shepherd others inside and outside the church walls.

“There was a deep sense within the student body and the faculty at Moody that there was a mission to be had,” he says. “And that mission needs to be done with zeal, and that mission has meaning. That was attractive to me. It was not empty academics.”

Dr. Cook saw that same passion for mission in Adam during his time at MTS. “In talking with Adam and seeing how he went about his work at seminary, I had the sense that he was making up for lost time,” Dr. Cook says. “He had the ability to focus on what really mattered both inside and outside of the classroom and with his family.”

‘The Lord continues to heal me’

Now the lead pastor at the church that welcomed him when he left prison in 2013, Adam is living on mission shepherding the congregation, preaching God’s Word from the pulpit, and leading the church’s outreach and evangelism efforts to the Elmhurst area. He is also still actively involved in addiction recovery as a mentor and speaker.

“You’re never going to address addiction by focusing on its effects,” he says. “It’s like trying to kill a tree by picking its fruit. The only way you’re going to kill the tree is by severing its roots. To really deal with addiction is to deal with the ‘why.’ That is the place where the gospel is seeking to work, that is the place that Christ wants to address in our lives.

“A big part of why I used was because it made me feel better about not feeling loved, and Satan attached a lie to that wound,” he says. “Even today, I continue to struggle with some of those questions about who I am. But dealing with addiction is all about addressing the core issues that only Christ can answer.”

For Adam, a life that used to feel like a reality show gone wrong now feels like a life of hope. “The Lord is healing me and continues to heal me.”

Drawing others to Christ

God is not only healing Adam, He’s redeeming those “rock bottom” years and using Adam’s story to draw others to Christ. “My favorite verse in the Bible is Psalm 119:71: ‘It was good for me to be afflicted, that I might learn Your statutes,’” Adam says. “A large part of my engagement with unbelievers is seeking to establish trusting relationships that allow me to look into their lives and hearts to the point of their need. That’s where the gospel speaks the loudest.”

As a pastor, Adam is passionate about reaching others with the gospel, a commitment that Moody honed in him during his education and training.

“As a church, Grace Bible believes in the redemptive power of Jesus,” he says. “I mean, they hired an ex-con to lead them. They know what Christ can do in the broken, needy, and willing heart. We’re trying to live in a way that puts Christ’s redemptive power on full display and showcases the blessings and joy that come from living in accordance with our ultimate design as reflections of a loving, gracious Father.

“I am always surprised at how God uses my story to reach ‘respectable’ people who would never think of drugs or prison or atheism. I guess we really are all the same.”