now a professional administrator, and some on his staff had state certification in counseling, social work, and nursing. For him, though, it was significant that he had been addicted.
There are so many churches in the South of Puerto Rico, but few rehabilitation programs. It’s hard work. You have to have had the experience (of addiction) and feel it in your heart.1
Menocal pulled over a staff member, Juan, a round man with a round face and a closely cut greying afro. “This one is a university student,” Menocal said with a grin. “You have a lot in common.” Juan led me across the compound to a room with plastic flowers framing the doorway and a metal desk in the center. The moist air weighed down on us.
He launched into testimonio (testimony) with no further prompting: this was his third time at Restoration House. The first time he came from jail. His mother was Catholic, and the Catholics let you smoke and drink, they don’t teach that God is against that. Then he heard who Jesus was. Holding up a cup, Juan explained “I was like an empty glass. If you want to change, you have to do it inside,” pointing inside the cup. “When I came, I cried for three days, I didn’t know why. I heard ‘Who wants Jesus? He’ll change your life.’ I said ‘Me!’ ”
Juan saw the events of his conversion as auspicious.
Why three days the first time? Because Jesus rose in three days! . . . I was in the program three days, closed my eyes, woke up on the floor. I wanted [Jesus] from the bottom of my heart. I wanted to talk with God. I read the Bible two times in three years. I learn so much.
Juan explained that what he and the other men who come to the program need is love. When he converted, he asked for God’s love, but did not know he had it until he physically felt God’s presence: “One day I asked Him to raise me. [He] took me by hand and (lifted) me, like a drug, then I said God is real.”
God began to use Juan, to grant him powers to see and talk with spirits. When he first came to the program, someone was selling drugs inside the program. He prayed in a chain with a group of men through the night, each man taking a one-hour shift to lead prayer. With his eyes closed, he saw demons inside the program’s walls. Channeling the Holy Spirit, he called them out and exorcised them.
Since then, Juan had been working with new recruits who were en frio (quitting “cold turkey”), and suffering through withdrawal with chills, aching bone pain, and insomnia. He saw how God was using him with them; when he laid his hand on their foreheads their withdrawal symptoms disappeared.
The first time he graduated from the program, Juan initially did well. “I went home, went to church every day. [I said] ‘God, I want to study.’ ” God answered this prayer, and Juan enrolled in the Inter-American University. “I had [high grades] in the University, I had money. Why? Because I was praying every day. If not I’d lose everything.”
Juan continued to guide others as he had in Restoration House: “I worked as a tutor for the handicapped. I liked it so much. I had to explain the sky and constellations to a ciega (blind person) using a pen.”
He pointed to ridges on a pen, to indicate spatial relationships: “Here is to here as there is to there.” Those times still inspired Juan. “I want to be a missionary, go to Africa, help the people. I can do that through the Pentecostal church.”
Despite the possibilities he saw for himself in the church, however, after graduating from the first time Juan still struggled with temptation and disillusionment.
“When I had a relapse it was like God had one hand and [the Devil] the other. ‘He’s mine—no he’s mine.’ I felt like that.”
Back to using cocaine after accepting Christ, Juan’s faith was tested like never before.
“Jesus says ‘It’s much better not to know me than to know me and leave me.’ In my church, they tell me pray, pray. They knew I was relapsing.”
After a few months of crack use, Juan came back to Restoration House and begged for re-admission. “God is never late.”
Juan found Restoration House to be a quiet place where the voice of God could be heard.
I like to pray at 4 a.m. You’ll have a wonderful day if you pray at 4 a.m. God says, “they’ll find me when they wake up early in the morning.” When you feel the bed shaking, it’s God. He’s waking you to pray.
Surviving the spiritual war that tested Juan required him to sharpen new senses.
God gave you spiritual eyes and ears . . . [you] have to know Satan [was once] an angel. To know the difference, who is lying. If you want to do this work you have to know when a person wants to change.
I left Restoration House that day knowing that Juan would be an important guide. He was connected to a spiritual dimension not visible to outsiders leading secular, everyday lives. For fleeting moments, he was possessed by the Holy Spirit, and the memory of those moments kept him seeking more, moving him from a singular focus on drugs to a singular focus on the Spirit. Juan had offered me an astronomy lesson; I was to be his ciega (“blind person”), to whom he would describe the constellations using ridges on a pen.
SPIRITUAL EYES AND EARS
One night, after two months of attending evening culto, the worship service, at Restoration House, I found myself listening to testimony after a round of “You Are Sacred,” a salsa-inspired hymn—complete with conga drums and timbales. The chapel pulsated with men’s voices and percussion on drums, cowbells, and hands slapping the backs of metal folding chairs. Bright light spilled out into heavy night air, blanketed by nothing but the calls of tree frogs and crickets for miles. The music ended, and the men leafed restlessly through their Bibles. They looked over their shoulders for signs of the usual Wednesday night preacher, a graduate of Restoration House who was now a pastor in Guayama several miles away.
While they waited for the preacher, a program leader introduced the young man who was to give testimony to relapse as part of recuperation. The young man began with a shy smile, joking about Menocal’s discipline. After three months at Restoration House, because he used drugs again, he was held for eighteen days alone in a room. He praised the Lord for waking him up during those eighteen days of isolation.
Juan plopped down next to me. His face was grey and drawn; he had been up around the clock with a new recruit who was “rompiendo en frio” (“going cold turkey”). As the pastor’s car pulled up to the chapel, Juan explained that the young man giving testimony was sent by the drug court, and that if he had one more relapse he would spend twenty years in prison.
The pastor from Guayama entered, flanked by guests from his church. A trim, middle-aged man professionally dressed in wire-frame glasses, a pressed white shirt, and a bright yellow tie setting off his dark skin, he called on guests from his church to speak. A man in his thirties in shirt and tie gave his personal testimony. He had grown up in the church, but when he married he wanted to know the world and he forgot the church. It was the Devil saying the world is better. He began to drink a little, and then more, eventually he lost his job and his wife moved to the United States with their three children. He was watching a Christian program on TV one day and felt tear tracks on his face.
I knew the message was for me. God was saying “I still love you.” I went to the U.S. to find my wife and kids. ¡Gloria a Dios! [“Glory to God!”] I returned with them to Puerto Rico and my old job took me back. [But then] I found a blank check at work, I signed it and cashed it. . . . I went to prison, and my father signed away his house to bail me out. On the street corner, someone said “There is an answer
