Feature by Andrea Laurita

Back to Table of Contents | Back to Main Index Previous Features | Send mail to The Voice Student helps addicts take the Teen Challenge Residents hang out and play pool at the Teen Challenge recreation room. -Mike Richeson, photo "Hallelujah!" Ryan Usher, 29, says every morning as he climbs out of his bunk and places his feet on the floor of an old converted motel room he shares with two roommates. The smell of espresso wafts through the air as vacuums hum from the rooms above where the residents are already going about their chores. Usher shuffles upstairs to check on the men living in the building. "It's my job to make sure they're up and have their feet on the floor at 6 o'clock every morning," he said about his work at Teen Challenge. He graduated from the Teen Challenge program on April 10 of last year, after God saved him from a long and devastating relationship with drugs. Now Usher is attending Multnomah Bible College while working on staff at Teen Challenge. But this is not Usher's first encounter with Multnomah. His first experience at MBC was at the age of 22 when he and a buddy pulled into the parking lot on campus to shoot up drugs. "It didn't bother me to be shooting up in a Bible College parking lot; I grew up in the church so I felt comfortable," he said. "Ryan was an average kid," his mom, Sue Weichert said. "He had a wall full of Ziploc bags filled with dead bugs and bats and snakes." Usher went to Sunday school, but by junior high, he no longer enjoyed church and hated God. "I started noticing changes in him when he was in the eighth grade. He became defiant," his mother said. Usher's mom told him if he was going to live in her house, he was going to have to participate. With that news, he ran away. "He was gone for one month," she said. By Usher's mid 20s, several of his friends had died from heroin overdoses including Jeremy, a good friend whose name is tattooed on the back of Usher's head. Through these tragedies, God began to wake him up. "I knew that God was trying to get someone's attention," he said. "I kept looking around, wondering who it was." Usher moved back in with his mom and attended church with her. Occasionally she saw signs of him softening. "It was winter, and he had been sleeping out in the cold," she said. "I wanted so badly for him to get straightened out." He was no longer interested in shocking the people in the church with crazy hairstyles and rebellious behavior. He felt a deep and growing need inside just to be accepted, to be loved. He found this love in church. At age 25, Usher quit using hard drugs and began to search for a relationship with his Maker. Unfortunately, his life of drug abuse picked up again after just four months of sobriety. On his birthday, while both he and his dad were high, they got into an argument. Usher had a gun and threatened to kill his father. The SWAT team arrived and found Usher passed out. They arrested him and took him to jail. Due to overcrowding in the prison, Usher was released. While attending a missions conference, he heard about the needs in the world and each Christian's responsibility to reach the lost. "I realized that's what God wanted me to do. God called me to go," Usher said. But he had paid a high price for the years lost to drug abuse. He was still enslaved to drugs when he received this call from God. "I had no delusions about what I was doing, but I couldn't stop using," he said. "I was crying out to God." When he was 27, he heard about a preview weekend at Multnomah and eagerly applied. During that cold February weekend at MBC, he would run into the bathroom between sessions and inject amphetamines into his body in order to feel human while attending the next meeting. Although Usher can't remember what was said during preview weekend, his impression of MBC hasn't faded. "When I left, I was glad that it was raining because I was crying," he said. "I had seen God. I knew going to Multnomah was his plan for me, and it didn't fit at all with my life. I remember saying to God, 'This is impossible, but would you please make it happen for me?' "Several times, I started to fill out the Multnomah application, but I always got stopped at the place where it asks the questions about using drugs within the past year," he said. Through his mother's prayers, Usher agreed to try Teen Challenge. During his year at Teen Challenge, he felt restored by God. "Ryan would write uplifting letters," his mom said. "He wasn't sullen anymore; he became extremely talkative. He was like the old Ryan, the Ryan we knew up until junior high." God reminded Usher of his call to missions, and Usher was amazed that God hadn't taken that opportunity away from him. Usher said: "I have learned that the infinite God of all reality remembers my birthday, knows my favorite color, and appoints angels like watchdogs to protect me from evil. That awesome God desires a close, personal, intimate relationship with me, even with me." Today, Usher helps the residents in the Teen Challenge program start their day and get through their devotions each morning. By working at Teen Challenge, Usher is able help others through their drug problems. He insists that he's not a counselor but a friend who can relate to the men he's living with. David, one of the men going through the program at Teen Challenge, wrote: "Ryan's life is like an arrow picked up out of the street and dropped into the quiver of the Lord, now being prepared to be shot into the darkness by the hand of the Almighty God himself. That's the kind of testimony I've seen and the kind of testimony I have to look forward to." Back to Table of Contents | Back to Main Index Previous Features | Top Of Page Send mail to The Voice| Journalism department website © 2003 The Voice. 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