Neglected child broke addict’s heart so God could heal it

REDWATER—A painted mural on the wall of a rural northeast Texas chapel covers a name, scribbled on sheetrock by a young boy on behalf of his father. Few if any in the small, ever-changing congregation know it’s there. But James Cooley does.

He has since lost track of the boy and his father, but he believes, someday, the man will return to the chapel seeking relief from drug and alcohol addiction just as his son prayed he would when he wrote his name on the wall.

Cooley understands addiction’s draw and its destruction, not only on the addict but anyone foolish (or merciful) enough to care for the person who has lost all concern for himself. Incarcerated three times, married just as many, and in and out of drug rehabilitation facilities, Cooley’s existence centered on drugs. But in one sobering experience, when Cooley realized he was to blame for the unconscionable plight of a little girl, he heard God speak. It was his Damascus Road.

That was 17 years ago. Now Cooley and his long-suffering wife, Donna, encourage those on the path they once traveled as addict and enabler, respectively, to be overcomers in and through Jesus.

Their work is accomplished through the ministry of Damascus Home of Redwater, a 90-day, Christ-centered residential treatment program in Bowie County. The program borrows its name and operational model from a facility in North Carolina where Cooley finally found healing. So grateful was he for his release from drug and alcohol addiction that Cooley knew he had to help others.

In hindsight, it is little wonder that substance abuse defined Cooley’s life. He grew up on a North Carolina tobacco farm and often pondered as a child how his farming family was always the first to have the latest toys and gadgets. Eventually he discovered the family’s more substantive source of income, bootleg whiskey. The business expanded, moving into the more lucrative market of marijuana and illegal narcotics.

Cooley ended up in prison before his 20th birthday.

Then he met Donna. They married in 1972, divorced in 1983. Married again in 1989. Divorced again in 1993. And remarried, for keeps, in 1996. When asked which day they celebrate as their anniversary, Cooley quickly responded, April 19, 1995—the day God saved him. The couple has two adult sons, Jamie and Tracy.

Yet it wasn’t the plight of his own children that ultimately broke his heart and spirit after years of drug abuse and three terms in prison, but that of a stranger’s daughter.

Cooley said he was a functional addict, using alcohol and cocaine while holding down a job when he wasn’t in prison. The couple, both from North Carolina, moved back and forth from Carolina to Texas during the course of their marriages and divorces. Each time Donna took Cooley back, she thought, surely, her life would be better.

But her husband remained a slave to his addictions. In retrospect, Donna said she played the role of enabler. The more she tried to change her husband the worse he seemed to get.

“I was playing God. I was trying to fix him,” she said.

In 1993, at an especially low mark in their second try at marriage, Cooley was not working but he was abusing drugs excessively. Donna had had enough. Exasperated that her husband was not heeding her pleas for change and frustrated with God for not moving in their lives, she filed for divorce. Cooley left the family in Redwater and went back to North Carolina and the family business.

“I wanted to quit. I went in and out of treatment centers like going in and out of Wal-Mart,” Cooley said. “I was a drug dealer and had become my own best customer.”

It was the experience in a crack house with other addicts that did for Cooley what no state-run treatment facility could do. After three days of a drug-induced stupor, Cooley decided to leave and go back to his sister’s house. But as he shuffled through the group of unconscious and semi-conscious addicts, Cooley was startled into lucidity.

“I saw this little girl. She was swinging this [baby] bottle and crying,” he said. The child’s parents, his customers, were unresponsive to her cries.

Cooley knew he had not eaten in three days and presumed the toddler had not either. A search for food in the refrigerator revealed only roaches and clabbered milk. He left the house to get her something to eat.

“On the way to McDonald’s God began to deal with me. ‘Son, you’re a much better man than this,’” he recalled hearing in his head.

Cooley felt sorry for the hungry child and God did not pull any punches in speaking to his heart.

“Yeah, she can’t eat,” God told Cooley. “You took her mom and dad’s money.”

Cooley returned to the crack house with the fast food, gave it to the girl, and left. He drove to his sister’s house and parked in front of the house. In his moments of consciousness he cried out to God.

“I need you to come into my life and change me or take me out,” he prayed. That was April 19, 1995. Cooley went into his sister’s house, showered, packed a small bag and left for a state-run rehabilitation facility. On his way out the door he spotted his mother’s Bible. She had died at 50 years from complications of alcoholism. He grabbed the book and pushed it into his bag and silently prayed God would send him someone who could help him understand it.

At the facility a man gave him a flier for a Christian-based treatment center, something Cooley had never heard of. He slipped the brochure in his Bible and soon forgot it. But later, in prayer, God reminded him of the clinic and told Cooley he would receive relief from his drug addiction there.

After his obligatory time at the state-run facility, Cooley wanted desperately to enroll in the Christian clinic. Calls by his counselor revealed the unit was full and Cooley would have to wait. He believed if he did not get into the clinic his life would be over.

When his sister picked him up she told Cooley they would be going to the Christian treatment center—an emergency bed had been opened just for him.

There, he learned to live drug free—fully dependent on Christ. Damascus House taught him how to live in a way that life, family, and friends had not.

His life renewed, Cooley wanted nothing more than to reunite with his wife and sons. But Donna was hesitant. For years she had prayed for this very moment and yet she was afraid to take him back. She finally acquiesced and Cooley returned to Redwater.

Back in Texas, Cooley attended First Baptist Church of Redwater with Donna, where he discovered that he had been the focus of prayers over many years. And the church that had prayed him through the turmoil would share in the vision God had placed on his heart—to open a treatment center and transitional living home in Bowie County. He would call it Damascus Home.

Cory Calicutt, associate pastor of FBC Redwater, was new to the church when the Cooleys began seeking counsel for the direction of their ministry.

“I didn’t know the Jimmie Cooley with race-track arms, who was in and out of prison and a dead-beat dad. I didn’t know his story,” Calicutt said.

He knew Cooley as a man passionate about the needs of addicts, though. The new ministry’s home was a reclaimed drug house relocated to the Cooley’s five-acre lot. Then, a 10-acre dilapidated facility with a main house and cabins in Maud, Texas was donated to the ministry. After an unsuccessful first run by another organization, Cooley was asked to direct the program that came to be called Straight Street. It was the realization of the vision God gave him following his stay at Damascus House in North Carolina.

Not long after, the couple was able to expand the ministry to women when an empty nursing home near Atlanta, Texas became available. All of the buildings are owned debt-free. As money and volunteers were available, the complexes were turned into livable homes for clients seeking admission into the 90-day program.

At the center in Maud, Cooley wanted to turn an empty building into a chapel. All he needed, as with the other projects, was people and money. God supplied both in a way that continues to touch his heart.

During the course of the remodeling effort, work came to a halt for lack of funds. At FBC Redwater, Cooley put out the plea for funds. He needed 40 panels of sheet rock at $10 each. Surely, he thought, there were 40 people in his congregation with $10 in their pockets.

A boy approached Cooley with a sock in his hand and asked the man if he could borrow 80 cents. Why, Cooley asked?

The boy had cleaned out his piggy bank and offered Cooley all he had, $9.20. With 80 cents more, the boy explained, he could pay for a panel of sheet rock so that his father, an addict, could go to the new chapel at Damascus Home.

Offerings from the church were more than enough to finish the chapel. Before one wall of the room was painted with a recreation of Thomas Blackshear’s popular painting “Forgiven,” Cooley had the boy write his dad’s name there and pray that he would someday be among the men who daily worshiped Jesus and thanked him for their healing.

He has since lost track of the boy and his dad. But he prays and believes that God will bring that dad back to Damascus Home of Redwater in answer to that little boy’s prayer.

Since 1995, God has worked through the Cooleys to bring hope to what Cooley says is an “unreached” people group in far northeast Texas. The couple serves as Mission Service Corps volunteers with the North American Mission Board, bringing tough love and the dogged determination of Christian conviction to men and women lost in the haze of drug and alcohol addiction.

But they have not done it alone. The support and love that FBC Redwater once gave a mom, her two boys and her wayward husband now is transferred to the men and women who have become a part of their church family.

“As I began to bring these men to church they fell in love with them,” said Cooley of the members of FBC Redwater. “God has used this ministry to change our church.”