Jesus House puts focus on addiction recovery, mental health

April 25--Jesse Dean remembers sitting in the foyer of the Jesus House filled with anxiety.

Dean, 23, said he needed drug and alcohol rehabilitation but he had debt and he didn't have the money to enter the treatment facilities he knew would simply create more bills. The Norman man said he had heard that he could go to the Jesus House for free becoming clean and sober so he showed up outside the cream-colored brick building with the green awning, walked in and signed up for an addiction recovery program.

"I remember sitting right over there freaking out because I had no idea what to expect," he said as he recently walked through the hallways of the nonprofit, 1335 W Sheridan.

Seven months later, Dean said he is on the path to a better life because of the Jesus House's Life Transformation program.

Alexis Buchalski, 26, said she, too, came to the Jesus House nervous but determined to get help for her methamphetamine addiction. The Moore resident said she'd been addicted to the drug since she was 13 but it wasn't until her three children were taken away from her that she arrived at the Jesus House resolved to get sober through the agency's Life Transformation program.

The addiction recovery program is now the faith-based organization's primary focus.

For years, the Jesus House fed, clothed and took in the down and out who walked in off the streets of Oklahoma City with nowhere else to go.

However, with the Life Transformation program, it has made a notable change in the past 18 months.

The Jesus House is no longer a homeless shelter in the traditional sense, said Executive Director Michael Bateman.

Instead, the nonprofit is primarily a recovery program that comes to the aid of people experiencing and addiction and mental health issues such as Dean and Buchalski.

Bateman said some of the people enrolled in the program are homeless when they walk through the doors, but not all of them.

He said each program participant is required to stay on site and adhere to all of the program's rules, with several key goals: sobriety, employment and housing.

Bateman said a national accreditation committee evaluated the shelter about a year and a half ago and examined the organization's procedures, staff, bylaws, board members and clients.

He said the committee members were most impressed with the Life Transformation program and recommended that the Jesus House make it the nonprofit's primary focus.

He said he and the Jesus House board of directors met and discussed the committee's recommendation and decided the suggestion was a positive step forward for the agency.

"We didn't want it to be a place where people would camp out for the night and then leave," he said.

Larry Davenport, chairman of the board, said the Life Transformation program is in keeping with the organization's commitment to helping individuals face and overcome struggles that lead to homelessness and poverty.

"It all pulls together and works for the rehabilitation of the person," he said. "You couple that with a godly center and there's no way individuals can't come out better than they were before."

Both Bateman and Davenport said it's important to note that the Jesus House has continued longtime outreach programs to the homeless and indigent.

Davenport said the Jesus House still serves between 10,000 and 12,000 free meals to the poor each month. Bateman said the nonprofit also offers free groceries and clothing each week as well as an Adopt-A-Block program that offer free lawn mowing, food and other aid to families living in neighborhoods surrounding the Jesus House. And he said the organization's holiday food basket program continues to draw hundreds of families each year.

Meeting grace

Life Transformation is coordinated by Melissa Johnson, a former schoolteacher and social worker who says her role as the program's lead case manager means she's often becomes the "house mama" for participants trying to relearn or sometimes learn for the first time how to live life sober and connected to their families and society in a positive way that they denied themselves when they were immersed in the addled world of substance abuse.

She said each participant is given free food and shelter and required to attend a variety of meetings -- both faith-based and those dealing specifically with substance abuse and other addictions, such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Johnson said they also attend life skills classes, codependency classes, budgeting classes and GED classes at the nonprofit's new GED classroom.

The program is a type of work study where participants also are required to perform duties to keep the Jesus House in working order. Some, like Dean, work in the organization's warehouse or perhaps security, or they may work in the kitchen or be assigned to a cleanup crew.

Johnson said at its heart, Life Transformation is designed to help participants discover the reasons they got caught up in the substance abuse cycle so they can break free of it.

"It's getting to the core of what it was that they were trying to block so that they began to use," Johnson said.

"Grace will meet you where you're at. If I get them in here, God will work on their hearts. It's just giving things a chance."

Dean said he feels like he now has a chance to succeed.

He said he initially needed the constant round of meetings and classes and work and he still enjoys doing that. Dean said he also needed to get away from the people he was hanging out with.

These days, he is attending church with his family on weekends, enjoys playing disc golf in the backyard of the Jesus House and has begun to look for a job. He said he hopes to get back to biking, a favorite pastime and he eventually wants to return to college.

"I finally got to step back and focus on myself. I've done a lot of growing up," Dean said.

He hopes to graduate from the Life Transformation program sometime in the summer.

"I want to finish something. I haven't finished something in so long," he said smiling.

Buchalski is now a case manager working with Johnson to help others turn their lives around. She said she is expected to get custody of her children again once school is out for the summer.

The young woman said the Jesus House's addiction recovery program became a lifeline for her.

She laughed as she recalled that she didn't think she would stay as long as she did -- about eight months.

"My plan was to come and do 45 days but this place provided structure. Here, I felt like everyone was my family and they loved me," Buchalski said.

She said she has a special place in her heart for mothers like Elaine Powell, who is now part of the program.

"I just think they can all make it. I believe in them. This place is amazing because it helped me be a better mom," she said.

Powell, 39, of Tulsa, said she's in no hurry to leave the security of the recovery program which she has been part of since December 2015. She said she drank and did drugs before joining the program at the Jesus House but spent New Year's Eve there -- sober and prayerful.

Powell is the mother of four children. One is grown, and the others live in another state with their father, Powell's ex-husband.

She said she learned about the program from a promotional billboard on the highway and thought it would be good to get treatment that included Bible teaching. She said she enjoys the Bible study times and faith gatherings and she is now immersed in GED classes.

"I love this program," Powell said.

"We get to study His word while we're in treatment and that's great."

___

(c)2016 The Oklahoman

Visit The Oklahoman at www.newsok.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.