One Moment Brought Pain, One Encounter Brought Freedom

“I pretty much wrote God off and said, I don't want you. This is just the life that 
I'm going to live. I'm just going to be a drug addict to the day I die,” says John Riddle. At just three years old, he was found unresponsive, floating in the still waters of his family's backyard pool. His mother performed CPR saving his life. Though his heart beat once more, the shadows of that near-death moment never truly left him.
John thinks back, “From that drowning incident, I believe that I may have had some brain damage where some chemical imbalances may have developed. And all throughout my childhood, elementary and middle school, I would find myself crying. And I never could really pinpoint a reason for crying. I was just depressed, and at times not wanting to be around anymore.”  

Though his family faithfully attended church and he gave his life to God at a young age, he still battled depression. During high school, he began to associate with the wrong crowd.  “I remember smoking a joint for the first time my senior year and drinking alcohol. And I remember feeling a release and this, this release from what I had had experienced my entire life with depression. And I remember having this very thought, oh, wow, this is the answer to all of my problems,” says John.

He drifted through several colleges, each one marking a deeper descent into addiction. 

“The stronger the drug, the more relief I felt – when I began to experiment with cocaine and ecstasy, ecstasy was amazing in my mind. But then I remember thinking that crystal meth was probably the best that I had ever felt.”

Over the next decade, John's life unraveled with relentless momentum — a chaos marked by four sons born to three different women and a string of arrests. He found himself lost in the wreckage of his own choices.

John remembers, “At this point, I'm homeless and I'm moving around from house to house. Different dope houses - 20 people in a trailer somewhere or down the road with 15 people in it and everybody's high, nobody's sleeping. People are nodding out from heroin or speeding on on crystal methamphetamine. Very dirty, very dark places from very, very, very gruesome things I've seen in these homes. But I didn't have any other choice. I got what I wanted there, and I was willing to deal with whatever it was I had to deal with inside of that home in order to get the drug that I craved.”
He was arrested and sent to rehab time and again, each incident splashing across headlines and casting a long, embarrassing shadow over his father — a prominent district attorney for the state of Louisiana.

“There were often times when my dad cried to me, he would look at me and he would say, 
“why can't you just stop, son? Look what you're doing to your family.”

He was humiliated; it was embarrassing. He had to answer for it. He had to write articles in the paper about it. And he pretty much had to tell everyone that he's doing all that he can to help me. But nothing and no one was able to help me. My family couldn't help me. The judicial system couldn't help me. No rehabs were able to help me,” says John.

He was arrested once more for drug possession, but this time, something shifted. After two weeks in jail, he was sent to the Salvation Army’s year-long rehabilitation program — a turning point that felt different from the rest.

“I was three months into, the one year Salvation Army program, the bootstrap program. And there were these, four African American preachers who would come in every Thursday evening. One evening they come in and they're preaching the Word of God, and the word of God fell on me and convicted me and stirred something up in my heart where I stood up, unwillingly. Something just stood me up, and I began to confess all of my sins and how fed up I was with the drug addiction life. And I was just going on and on and on about how much I want God. And I'm tired of drugs and I can't live this life anymore. And I'm tired of looking like a fool and looking like a bum and some hobo. And I want what God wants for my life.”

During the next 6 months at the Salvation Army, John’s heart continued to change as he read through the entire Bible. “When I finished reading the Bible, I said, Lord, I accept this to be your word. Make it come to life inside of me. Your word says that it is alive and active. I want it to be alive and active inside of this vessel. And, Lord, I ask you to do one thing for me. If you're up there and you hear me, I pray. And I ask you to take away my craving for drugs and to replace it with a craving for your word,” says John.

His deep hunger to understand the Bible led him to earn a bachelor's degree from 
Louisiana Christian University. Today, he is a husband and the pastor of Lifepoint Baptist Church, leading others with the same hope that once saved him.

“He gave me everything that I didn't have before that Satan robbed me of. He has restored my relationship with my brothers, my father, all the people that I have hurt in the past with all of my sons, all of their mothers, we all get along. God has reconciled those torn and broken relationships. He gave me everything that I needed to have in order to pastor the church that I'm currently pastoring.”

From front-page scandals to humbled servant, John’s story came full circle when he was named Bi-Vocational Pastor of the Year.