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Ben’s Story

If you met 49-year-old Ben today and got a glimpse of his life—the love he has for his wife and newborn son, the satisfaction he finds in his career as an electrician, his active church involvement—you might find it hard to believe he was ever behind bars, discouraged and alone.

I’d gone down a really dark path,” he remembers. “It was addiction. It was the whole drug scene.”

That scene landed Ben in jail, and then prison. Looking back, he admits it was his own destructive choices that led him to where he ended up. “I’ve always had my parents in my life. We were raised with values. But I just rebelled at a certain age. I got mixed up with the wrong things.”

Ben’s struggles with addiction followed him into adulthood. “A lot of people spiral really fast and out of control. But I was always able to maintain my job. For me, it was slower, but it was still definitely a spiral.”

It was at the lowest point in that spiral, when he was alone in a cell, that Ben felt something begin to change. “I had a roommate that was big into the Word. They took him out of the pod I was in and he left a book behind. It was a spiritual book and so one day I just started reading it. And I wanted more.”

Thankfully, a volunteer who regularly visited the inmates fed Ben’s desire for more faith-based reading. “He looked so familiar,” Ben recalls, “and it turned out, he was someone I’d met at church back in 2012!”

The faith Ben had first begun to explore years before started to come alive in a new way, even while he was still incarcerated. And when he went on parole and came to Hope Ministries, it became the anchor he depended on as he joined our life recovery program.

“The staff here don’t just look at your past. They look at your now. They encourage you and guide you in the right way to build a relationship with God.” —BEN

“I knew it was possible to live differently. I just had to surrender,” he says. “What happened for me at Hope Ministries is exactly what the program is set up to do. It takes the entire world away and gives you the time and the peace to build a relationship with Christ.

Today, Ben says it’s his dependence on Christ that changed everything for him, helping him to overcome his addiction and rebuild his life. And the life he’s built in the four years since he graduated from our program in November 2020 is a beautiful one! He recently earned his journeyman’s license and he says the electrical company he’s employed by now, a company he first started working for near the end of his time at Hope Ministries, is “the best I’ve company I’ve ever worked for in my entire electrical career.”

And best of all, he’s become a proud family man. Ben and his wife, Olivia, became friends in 2016 when they were both still into the drug scene. They kept in touch through the years and while Ben was in our program, Olivia participated in another local recovery program. “I prayed to meet someone who was on the same path as me. It turned out to be her.”

Ben graduated from our program around the same time Olivia completed her program, and they began dating. Ben proposed about six months later, and they were married on November 13, 2021.

And this summer, they welcomed their baby boy, Wayne Richard! This will be their first Christmas as a family of three, and Ben couldn’t be happier about it.

“My hope is that he’ll grow up knowing Christ, that I’ll be able to teach him and he can learn from my stories and his mother’s stories,” Ben says. “I want him to feel the presence of Christ in him.”

“This changed my life,” he adds. “It helped me build a relationship with Christ and allowed me to be counseled and guided in ways I don’t think any other program would be able to do. Best decision I ever made!’