One-Time Addict’s Unlikely Friendship with Cop

“I felt like everything's been taken from me. I felt like there was no coming back from where I was. So the only way I knew to do with that was, well, it's over now. I might as well end it all,” says Trey York. His life was filled with darkness and drug use from an early age. Both of his parents struggled with addictions and Trey followed in their footsteps.
  
“My mom, she let me, you know, party, smoke, drink,” says Trey. “At 17 I would go the pain doctors, would go to the emergency rooms, get prescription pain pills, whatever we had to do to get them, and we would sell them and use them. And we eventually started using meth together. To me it got to a place where it was normal. I mean, I never really thought anything other because I wanted to get high. I liked to get high and I knew what I liked.”

Trey did whatever it took to get money for drugs, including rampant criminal activity. He recalls, “I went in, broke into cars, stole money, emptied out people's bank accounts the next day with their debit cards. And then that's where I met David.”
            
David Vovcheck remembers, “I met Trey in the police department. I was an investigator going to his house, arresting him several times for stealing.” After months of arrests David felt compassion for Trey, knowing he was trapped in the cycle of addiction. He decided to share a way out. “I sat down with him in an interview room and I talked to him about Jesus and that God had plans for his life and God was able to restore him and break the strongholds that were on his life.”
            
Trey thinks back to that day, “He ministered to me, prayed over me about my life, that so many things could change if I were just to give my life to the Lord. But I didn't. At that point in time I was reading the Bible in jail. But when I got out, I left God in the jail and I went through a continuous thing of drugs, getting around the wrong people again, falling into the same thing and going back to jail, seeing David again, getting out and redoing all that over again.”

“He was very rebellious," says David. “He was in a lot of trouble. He would always cuss at all of us . . . out there, he was definitely angry, angry at the world. It seemed like.”

“I got to the place where I became a monster,” Trey solemnly states. “When I looked in the mirror, I hated who I had become. And I thought that my life was thrown in the trash can. There's no coming back. I've been in trouble so much, I'm not going to be able to get a job. There's just no hope out there. I was in a hotel room. I was homeless. I had nothing to my name, and I was running the streets with the same people who we were homeless, bouncing from hotel to hotel, just trying to survive and get high, doing wherever we had to do to get high. And I had been up for ten days on meth at this point and I cried out to the Lord and I said, 'Lord, if you don't save me, I'm going to die like this.' And three weeks later I ended up in Bartow County Jail and that's where I came back in front of David again.”
            
David ministered to Trey in jail for several months. When Trey was released to a faith based recovery program his life began to dramatically change. “There was a service while I was in there and a guy was preaching and I felt like I needed to go up there and have him pray for me. And when I did, that's when I gave my life to the Lord, a full-on commitment to Him. And ever since then, I've never turned back,” says Trey.  

“I was always in the Word. I was always praying; I was always reading. My language changed, anger started changing, I had a whole different demeanor. I mean the way I dress changed, everything about me changed because I knew that God was number one in my life and I knew that I was going to live for Him. And I was sold out to the Lord at that point, my life.”
 
“He called me and he we talked on the phone and he was talking about the power of God and how God was restoring his life,” says David. “And he'd asked if I would check up on him and kind of be a mentor to him. And I just thought that was amazing. It was it was truly God. It kind of shocked me because of how much trouble he'd been in.”

Today, the two men work together as an unlikely pair in ministry, reaching out with hope in Jesus to those who are trapped in addiction or behind bars. 

“God is doing something great. He's put me and David back together as pastors in the same ministry as the associate pastor, he's the head pastor and God uses us to go back in the jail together to minister to the inmates that I used to be in jail with and that David used to arrest,” says Trey. “God has blessed me with the opportunity to go and see people get changed firsthand. So when we go into the jail, people not only hear the message, but we're watching people give their lives to the Lord. We're watching people lay down their life for God, make a commitment for God and get out and actually watch God transform their whole life. And I think that is the most fulfilling part of the ministry, is seeing where people were, and where they're at now, and where I see God taking them down the road.”

David smiles and says, “To have a criminal and a law enforcement working together. God can only do that, and bringing them to the very people that needed it the most that were in bondage, and to preach the word of God together and to see God transform tons of lives. It's a miracle, total miracle.”
            
Trey says, “I was held in a deception all of my life, thinking that this the world and everything that I was in was the way it is and this is the way it's going to be. And he showed me the truth. And the truth is, Jesus, He showed me His self. God showed me who I am in His lens, and it changed everything.”