SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT HELPS BREAK METHAMPHETAMINE BOND

In the parking lot of Fire Station No. 8 Friday night, headlights caught
the silhouettes of two women: one, with three feet of curly chestnut brown
hair, hugged a shorter brunette: "If you're afraid, come in with us," the
taller woman pleaded. "We'll drive you home."

The shorter woman had tried to walk home when a car began following her.
"Please," the taller woman, Teresa Dillard, said, "let us drive you home."
The other woman wouldn't budge, but with a hug from Dillard, she promised
she would come in if she felt threatened. Dillard went inside. Time to
rescue others.

Inside the station's community room was the cleanest-cut group of people
you could picture: Dillard, her face radiant, wearing a T-shirt and jeans;
Jesse Wyatt, his blond hair in a crew cut, adjusting his boombox to play
the new worship CD he'd brought; his little girl scooting around the room
playing, and his mother, Tracy Essick, helping Dillard arrange flyers,
posters and books on a table; and a couple who asked that their names not
be used, because they didn't want their kids identified. Their daughter and
son had been methamphetamine addicts.

They gathered, as they do every Friday, Bibles in hands, for a calling
Dillard has: Reach out. Save the others. Someone threw a lifeline to her,
she believes, and God showed her what the experts don't know:

Meth ain't your ordinary dope, your ordinary high. With its web of
gathering and mixing poisons, the power trip it brings to the "cook," the
promises of riches and control unmatched in jobs the cook has tried before,
meth becomes a form of sorcery - inviting demons to invade the user's life.

Dillard's life is chilling testimony. She believes her freedom came from
the recognition that she was the pawn of demons. Her story reads like
something out of Stephen King.

"It was a different demon with every different batch of meth," says
Dillard, a calm, pretty 40-year-old with whom it's hard to reconcile the
monster she says she was. "One batch, all I'd want to do is steal - not
things I wanted, they weren't even things I needed."

"Another batch, all I thought about was perverted sex." That, too, wasn't
something she wanted before becoming a meth addict soon after her 20th
birthday, she says.

"I've been in rehabs, mental institutions, prison, nothin' worked for me,"
she says. She'd get out of rehab and head to a bar. She became a Christian
and on the day she was baptized, she got high.

It wasn't until she violated parole and went to prison that something
changed. A friend sent her a book by Steve Box, an ex-meth dealer turned
evangelist who's dedicated himself to pulling addicts out of the muck that
eludes conventional law enforcement and therapists.

"I realized I was under demonic possession," Dillard says now. "I had
prayed to be delivered from drugs, but then I prayed to be delivered from
the possession. I was still craving meth, and I'd been in prison for a year
and a half, but from that moment on, I've never craved it."

Since her parole from prison, Dillard has been sponsored by the Springfield
chapter of Praise Keepers, a nonprofit Christian organization that reaches
out to women in need.

With their help, she started a ministry to reach out to meth addicts. At
6:30 p.m. Saturday, she and her support group will hold their first
Survivors Against Meth rally at Faith Assembly of God, 3001 W. Division St.
Box will be guest speaker and interpretation for the deaf will be provided.

"I tried everything," Dillard said. "This is the only thing that worked for
me."