I Surrender All is based on the true story of battling and beating an addiction to meth and cocaine. It is a five-step program, and what's great about it is that it actually works. Be prepared to laugh, cry, and sit on the edge of your seat as you take this journey of recovery with me. You will truly feel something you have never felt in your entire life. If you are suffering from any type of addiction or know of someone who is, you are now holding the cure from God. I promise that if you will follow these five steps, you will be healed from your addiction. This book is the most unusual approach to recovery ever taken. No amends are necessary, only a desire to get better. So join with me, venture through, and you too will surrender.

I Surrender All

A 5 Step Recovery ProgramBy JOHN FURR

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 John Furr
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4634-8734-8

Chapter One

The Promise That Awaits

March 23, 2009, was what I would say was one of the most powerful nights in my life. I was getting used to my freedom; I had just been released from a county jail in Utah and was in what's called the reentry program—basically a halfway house. I was awaiting sentencing for a gun charge that I thought had been dismissed, but I found out that it had been refiled as a felony. I had not been charged with anything since all my drug charges in 1999. I hadn't been in jail since 2002, and I was in a place unlike any other I had experienced in my life. I was actually sober for the first time since my 2007 relapse in Hawaii. I was unemployed, broke, and totally dependent on my faith in God for the first time on the outside. I had depended on God in jail, but it had been a long time. I am telling you this because it was on this night that I finally realized that God was actively involved in my day-to-day life, right down to the decisions I was making about my life. It was at this time that God promised me that if I would follow his teachings, I would prosper. I was facing more time in prison, a possibility that was, to say the least, unattractive to me. I had thought that my life of crime was over, but when I relapsed, it started all over again. I was trying so hard to not relapse into my drug addiction, and I really wanted to figure out where God wanted me—or, for that matter, if he wanted me anymore. I was lost but thought I could somehow pull something off in court that would save me one more time. I mean, I really wanted to change. The time I spent behind bars apparently hadn't worked, so I wanted this time to be a fresh start. I decided to ask the judge for assignment to a rehab program in California called Teen Challenge. It's a yearlong program but can be longer if needed. Participants can go to the program's Bible college for another year, graduate, and become staff members at any one of their more than two hundred centers. I really was excited about this possibility.

I was attending church regularly—weekly, in fact—reading my Bible daily, and doing everything I thought was necessary. I would walk through town every day in an attempt to find employment, but God wasn't speaking to me at all. My then mentor, or second mom—who is now my mother-in-law—was doing all she knew to do to point out where I was messing up in my thinking. She kept saying something to me that didn't make any sense at all. I'll never forget how she would say over and over again, "Son, surrender!"

I had owned a transmission repair center and had expanded it to seven locations. At one point in my life, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and yet there I sat in a hole-in-the-wall, one-room, government-assisted halfway house with no job, no hope, no car, no money, and no prospects. And she was telling me that I needed to surrender. She would come by daily to check on me, and most of the time she would even invite me to her home to eat or would somehow bring leftovers almost nightly. I can't begin to convey how important her visits were. I had not yet gotten my food stamps, and food was nice. By taking that worry off of me, she offered me a huge relief that's almost unexplainable. She would also pick me up and take me to do my laundry. I remember one time when she picked me up and took me to a thrift store called Deseret Industries, which is the Mormon church's version of Goodwill or the Salvation Army. She spent almost the entire day getting me free clothes and bedding. I had only one change of clothes when I was released because I had been arrested in Seattle and then taken to Utah, where my charges had been filed. What a bold and God-loving person she was. I believed that she didn't have a clue about what I was going through, that she couldn't know how much God had been humbling me over the previous several months. Boy, was I wrong. God had chosen her to be the person to help place and keep me on the right track.

When you have nowhere else to turn and you least expect it, God will appear there. He can appear in the smile of a child or as a passerby on the street. My mentor took me under her wing and showed me what love is supposed to be like in a family. She was of humble means, but she never missed a chance to feed me a meal, nor did she ever neglect to pick me up for Bible study or any church activity. She truly led by her example of what a walk with Christ looks like. But all she kept saying to me was, "Son, surrender."

I was not totally clear on what she meant by that until one night when she came by and played a song called "Surrender" by Janis Freeman. This song was written during the recovery of an addict who was from the same area in Utah. I remember as plain as day the feelings I had when she played this song. Tears began to run down my face, and then I began sobbing uncontrollably. I was weeping. I couldn't believe that those words were being sung by an angel who, like myself, had once fallen from grace and now was being used by God himself, telling me to surrender all to God.

The song "Surrender" is copyrighted and available for you to download for free—courtesy of the artist, Janis Freeman—on our website, http://heavenlyoaksretreat.com. I placed the song there for readers to hear so that it could help set the tone for the rest of the book. This entire book could be about certain people and the roles they have played in my life, but it is not about me and my life; it's about you and your life. It's about how God awaits your call. It's about how, if you simply ask, it will simply be given to you. I had never been able to understand that concept until recently: God's desire is for your dreams of happiness and success to be fulfilled.

It's like when you see your son hit his first home run or watch your daughter graduate with honors from college or make the winning shot in overtime. It's a feeling unlike anything other. When you feel so good about something, it warms you up inside. That's the feeling I want you to try to feel when you read that we were created to bring joy unto God. He delights in our seeking him, and he finds pleasure in our success. So if we were created to bring him joy, how do we go about doing that? It's simply in the way we choose to seek him in anything that we do, and that's done by including him in everything we do.

It's my goal that after you read this book, you will be better than when you began and will have healed from the most dangerous disease on this earth, addiction. But most important, it's my prayer that you begin the most intimate relationship available to mankind, that involving the love of the heavenly father. It is my prayer that you will begin this relationship that is so long overdue. Words can't express and tears can't measure the love that is awaiting you from the god of all things created.

Look around you—everything you see has been created by him simply for your enjoyment. Pets were made for your comfort, and mountains, lakes, streams, oceans—all of these things were made by him for you. If that doesn't blow your mind, then nothing will. So please begin this book with the following prayer, which I feel will help you set the tone. I do encourage you to set the book down from time to time and plead with God, praying for his presence to be with you.

God, I thank you for the chance you have...