CHRISTIANITY HELPED ADDICT REFORM

Jesus Ran a Gang.

"Hey, I had a Grade 5 education," Serge LeClerc said, a little
apologetically, to the hundreds assembled Wednesday for the annual
Saskatchewan Prayer Breakfast.

"I had to put it into terms that I understood."

What LeClerc understood back in 1985 was crime and surviving on the street.

Born to a Cree mother who'd been raped in Toronto's seamy core, he
grew up in that city's housing projects, was sent to a religious
reform school (where he was cruelly beaten) and by 15 was carrying a gun.

But there was something else.

Somehow, he'd learned to read even before he started his five years
of schooling, He had a mother who loved him, took him to church and
judged him a worthwhile human being.

These were somewhere in the back of his mind as he went from crime to
jail, then back to crime.

He entered a penitentiary (for the first of many times) at 19, was
shot twice, once broke a guard's jaw and eventually headed a
70-person international drug-smuggling-and-distribution gang in Hamilton.

What got him thinking were three men. There was a prison volunteer
who spoke kindly to him, a young convict -- a user of LeClerc's drugs
- -- who committed suicide in jail, and finally, there was a former
hitman who was in jail for life but had found freedom through Christian faith.

LeClerc said he came to realize he could cite all the excuses in the
world -- poverty, racism, drugs, abuse -- but ultimately he was
responsible for the lousy decisions he'd made.

He also came to realize he was not "a two-legged animal," but someone
who'd have to account for past sins when he met his maker. Could he
do something to balance all the bad things he'd done?

He also thought about Jesus's gang of 11: Yes, they went into hiding
after Jesus was killed. But unlike LeClerc's own gang, they emerged
and preached, even though this endangered their lives.

Suckers -- or special men?

LeClerc began changing, kept reading voraciously and soon was doing
university classes by correspondence.

He earned a BA, transformed his life and now is director of Teen
Challenge Saskatchewan, a faith-based residential recovery program
for substance abusers in Saskatoon. In this one-time drug addict's
introduction (by the lieutenant-governor, no less) it was described
as "one of the most successful long-term substance abuse programs in
the world."

LeClerc left his audience with this thought: Take stock of what
you've got "and you'll find that God has blessed you abundantly."