Trajectory of Life Changed by the Love of God

“We'd go out in the woods together, we'd play together, he'd read me books – he'd read me books, we did a lot together. I loved him,” Fred recalls of his early years.

Fred Weymouth was 6 when his parents opened their home to a troubled teenaged relative, whom Fred looked up to like a big brother. “My father tried to bring him in and give him some direction, some discipline, so he was around a lot,” says Fred. Then the molesting started and would continue for years. Fred told no one. “When those things were happening to me it made me feel weird. It made me feel different. I didn't want people to look at me like I was weird.”

Especially his dad, a caring, loving man he looked up to and admired. Fred recalls, “I did not want my dad to know, because I wanted nothing more than my dad to say he loved me and that he was proud of me. I wanted to please my father. I felt like I had done something wrong.”

Finally, he told the boy to stop, and he did. Something though, had changed. Fred recalls how he felt deep inside, “Something went off in me and I closed down; I shut the world out. I was no longer this happy-go-lucky person that just, you know, just loved life, you know. It was gone.” The distance between himself and his dad growing.

Fred found acceptance through his peers at school. He also discovered alcohol. “The alcohol quickly became this crutch, if you will, for me that made me feel in control of my life, it helped me to feel good,” says Fred. And in his words, normal.

By his senior year Fred, known as the happy-go-lucky guy, had gone from drinking, to smoking weed, to heroin. Fred shares how the drugs and alcohol made him feel. “It made me feel like nothing in the world mattered. You get so high that any – I don't care what it is – that you're going through is not there anymore. It's just completely gone.”

Meanwhile, Fred’s relationship with his father had eroded. They fought often. One day at 17, after Fred missed another curfew the night before, they had words. Then it turned into a fight. When it ended a few minutes later, his dad told him to leave. Fred shares the moments after the fight with his father, “I felt terrible about myself because I felt like I had laid my hands on my dad and I had tried to hurt him like this. Like this thing in me, man, all this stuff and all these things that had happened, it wasn't his fault. It really wasn't his fault. But I felt at that moment I took out my whole life on him, and I felt bad about it.”

Fred got his own apartment, graduated high school, and actually started to mend his relationship with his father. He even started working for him at his insurance company. He also married his high school sweetheart and had a son. All the while, battling his alcohol and heroin addiction. “I wanted to feel love, accepted, normal and nothing in me felt normal.”

Finally, his dad convinced him to get into rehab and, afterwards, enlist in the coast guard. Although Fred left the drugs behind during his 8 years of service, alcohol became his main addiction. After an honorable discharge in 2004, Fred went back to work for his father. Just four weeks after Fred came home, his father died from colon cancer. With his father gone, Fred turned right back to heroin.

“None of it was enough. The money wasn't enough, my family wasn't enough. My family's business wasn't enough. Nothing could fill that void in me,” says Fred. In just two years, Fred lost his wife, his children, his home, and even his father’s business. He ended up sleeping in the woods behind a gas station. “I was so angry. I'd lost it all; I was sleeping on cardboard boxes,” recalls Fred.

Fred blamed his pain, his addictions, his losses, everything on God. And for the next 10 years, Fred spent every day, every moment, every dollar getting high or drunk. “All that pain and that misery, I was numb to everything. And I would fight over not wanting to use but couldn't stop,” says Fred.

During those 10 years, Fred would go into rehab several times, only to fail. “I had gotten to this point that I had given up, because I wanted to die,” Fred says.

It wasn’t until after his last rehab in 2014 that things changed. He was serving jail time for an assault charge, when he heard a message in a chapel service that got his attention; God could use even bad things for good. That night reading a borrowed bible, he found the answer to his pain, and a purpose.

Fred recalls, “and when I read that He could use the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, I said, well, that's me because I'm a fool. I'm weak. I don't know what I'm doing or how to do it but God, you say you can use me, and I believe that; and I know that I gave my life to Christ completely in a jail cell. I remember calling out to Him. And surrendered my – everything to him. I felt those feelings. I felt the love, I felt like I belonged. It felt good. I felt like I had a chance.”

As Fred began living his life drug-free, he remarried, reconciled with his family, and before his abuser passed way – Fred extended loving forgiveness. “God loves the whole world and he wants you to cry out to Him. The heart trouble is different for everyone, but He gives us an answer and a cure for the heart trouble, and it's Christ.”

Now a co-pastor at The Fix Ministry in Richmond, Virginia, he’s still that happy-go-lucky guy, only with a purpose - helping addicted men find their healing in Christ. “You can find the love that you're seeking in Christ and Him alone in the cross, and I want people to be able to have a chance of that experience,” says Fred.