My name is Frank Rector. I came to the Bread of Life Rescue Mission the first week of May 2001. I was a homeless person. I was born and raised here in Crossville. There were 12 children in my family. I first drank alcohol at the age of 8. I was taught to drive at that age and would drive my father and uncles and their friends around to bootleggers. So, the bootleggers got to know me and, by lying to them, I could get alcohol.
At age 11, I went to jail for running away from home. I saw a movie about hobos jumping on trains and so I tried it. Three days later when I got back to Crossville is when I went to jail.
I wanted things that my parents couldn’t buy me. So, I started stealing, and I kept going to jail and getting put on probation. At one time, the principal of the high school had me sent to a mental hospital to be evaluated. He thought I was a chronic kleptomaniac, which was fine with me because it kept me from going to reform school. I learned to “play” people early.
I started pot when I was 12 and tried everything else that hit the Plateau in the late 60’s and early 70’s. A friend of mine was run over by a semi in 1971 while he was doing acid. Although, that time, I was at home in bed, I was taken to jail because the police thought I was with him and pushed him in front of the truck.
At 17, the first week of May 1972, I was saved in the Chapel that is now the Bread of Life Chapel. At that time, it was the Church of the Nazarene. I was working a third shift job and a day job. I started possessing all kinds of material things I had never had before. I thought I had this on my own and didn’t give the credit to God. I went back to stealing with the “old crew”. Three months after I turned 18, I went to prison. I went to (The Walls) the main prison in Nashville, Tennessee. At that time, “classification” normally took three weeks. It took me four months. I spent most of that time in “the hole” for fighting. “The hole” is what it really was – darkness and a hole in the floor. I thought I was tough, but I figured out that the fighting wasn’t doing me any good. My first day in population, I stabbed a man many times. This sounds awful, but the awful things were yet to come. For the next 25 years, I was in and out of prison six times, a total of 21 years. For five of those years, I was a junkie. I did not miss one day without sticking a needle in my arm. If I couldn’t buy the drugs, I carried a bigger “shank” than the drug dealers and just took it and did not worry about the consequences until later. I quit the drugs and needle June 12, 1986.
I started my fifth trip to prison with a very long sentence. Nine years later it was cut in half in court by having two jury verdicts overturned. Then three more years later, I got out. I stayed out two years before I went back for my sixth trip. I did two calendar years for a can of beer.
I know you have heard of someone having a cold or a hard heart. Well, I had a cold, evil heart. I had been robbed of my youth by seeing and doing many evil things over the years. I didn’t care about anyone, not even myself. Satan had tricked me into believing that I wasn’t saved anymore and that I was going to Hell with him!
"What am I doing back here?"
I got out of prison for the last time June 19, 1998. The first thing my parole officer asked me was, “When are you going back?” My past record showed that I was “institutionalized”. No hope for the future.
This was the first time I was allowed back in Cumberland County “legally” in over fourteen years. I was banned because the co-defendant in one of my cases testified against me, and he had written a letter to the parole board saying that he was in fear of his life if I came back here. The only reason I was allowed to come back was because he died!
For the next two years and four months, I worked and drank. I lived with my mother – this was the first time I had really spent with her since 1980. In October of 2000, I backed into a car and left the scene of an accident. I started running from the police then and staying in the woods near the old home place. On November 7, 2000, I snuck in to visit my mother and found her lying on the floor. She had had a heart attack and stroke. I called my sister and an ambulance. When they took her to the hospital, I went back to the woods. She died eight days later. We moved her trailer, and I tried staying with my brother and then my sister and her family. Because of the alcohol problem, I ended up back in the woods. After surviving all the cold weather months, I got rained on by a mini-tornado in May, and all my stuff got wet. I lay up in a barn loft naked all night and at daylight, I decided I needed a new plan. All my socks were wet and ruined and so were my boots. I had blisters on my feet. I found an old pair of brown gloves in the barn and cut the fingers out of them and made me some “booty socks”. I stashed all my weapons and got out and started walking. I didn’t know where I was headed but I was going anyway.
My first stop was St. Alphonsus’ Service Center. They gave me food and a voucher to go to Good Samaritans for clothes. They also told me about Ralph starting the Mission. I stopped at my only aunt’s on my dad’s side, left my food there and went on to Good Samaritans, where I got clothes and shoes. I went back to my aunt’s and showered and changed clothes. Then, I took off to find where Ralph and this “Mission” were. It rained so I went back to my aunt’s. The next day I tried again. It started to rain again but I kept going. I didn’t know where First Baptist Church was exactly because I had been gone so long. I finally found it and Ralph. Ralph and I grew up together. He said he didn’t have a bed for me but he would try to do something. He had his wife, Connie, take me to the “Mission”.
You should have seen my face when she pulled into the parking lot of the old Church of the Nazarene, which is now the Bread of Life Rescue Mission. I was standing in the parking lot looking up at the old church and asking myself, “What am I doing back here?”
They gave me something to eat; and within the first hour, I was working at the mission. By my own choice – or so I thought. During my first seven months at the mission, I worked hard, went to church, and tried to be happy. It didn’t work. I was miserable. I was trying to quit alcohol again, on my own, just like I had so many times in the past. Notice all of these “I”s I keep speaking of. That’s what was wrong. I was trying to quit and trying to take credit for everything good that was happening to me.
"Ralph...told me that he loved me..."
I left the mission for what was supposed to have been two days. This turned into nearly three months. I came back a few times and there were always problems because I was drinking. Ralph finally took me out to a motel one night and told me that he loved me but that I couldn’t come back until I quit drinking for real. So, I told him I wouldn’t.
Hung over and feeling rotten and sorry for myself, I came up with a Big Plan! I had always hated anyone who tried to or talked about committing suicide. So, I decided I would just lie in bed and die. If I didn’t eat or drink, I would just die. I thought that I could use my stubbornness to die. My stubbornness hadn’t ever failed me before. I lay in bed for three days without eating or drinking, in my own wastes. You’ve heard of hitting the bottom? I had crawled under the bottom.
On the third night of my stubbornness, a “loud voice” yelled at me, “Get up from there. I’m not through with you yet.” Yeah, God’s got to yell at me to get me to listen. I begged him to take the alcohol away. I cleaned myself up and when it got daylight, I slung my 100-pound bag on my shoulders and started walking through the snow to the mission to let everybody know. When I got to the mission, I unslung my bag and took off my insulated coveralls. I walked over to the dining area and everyone was sitting around rolling up change. No one said a word. They just looked. I got a cup of coffee and went back outside. I smoked a cigarette and drank my coffee, put my stuff back on and left. I knew it wasn’t time yet.
For the next 30 days, I stayed outside in a little tarpaper and pallet “hut” in single digit temperatures days and nights. I got flooded out one night and went to a bar. I knew I couldn’t drink and stay alive living outside in the cold. I fooled myself that I was weaning myself off. In the bar, I tried to drink my one beer a day that I thought I had to have but my table ended up full of beers people had bought for me. I just wanted to drink one in peace so I got up and went to the bar next door. When I walked in, I heard my name yelled out in the dark. I followed the voice to a table. I hadn’t seen the man sitting there for over 30 years, yet he recognized me in the dark. He got me a job and said I could stay at his house. On Saturday, I overindulged in my “one drink”. On Sunday, I woke up craving alcohol! I found a beer in the back floorboard of the car. I popped the top and tried to drink it, but I spit it out and heard “a voice” say, “You don’t even need one. Remember!!” I threw the can down and fast walked a few miles until I got back on Highway 127. The first car that passed me picked me up and brought me to Clear Creek Road. A truck almost ran over me, but the man backed up the truck and said, “Hey, Frank, where are you going?” Another man I had not seen in 30 years. We talked a lot about the past. When he stopped, we were at the Bread of Life.
"Lois...could see 'the light back on'."
I just started working at the Bread of Life. Everybody just stared at me and stayed away from me. Lois Ragsdale, the receptionist at the medical clinic, called me into her office and “scolded me good”. It had been two months since I had seen her. She could see “the light back on”. Ralph told me to find a bed. This was January 21, 2001. I have been at the mission ever since.
I am doing what God has called me to do – serve Him. I have my ups and downs. But I have something I didn’t have before. I have peace in my heart and the knowledge that I’m going to Heaven. Through my job here at the mission, I no longer have a cold, evil heart. God has given me a giving heart, and each day I learn to have a more loving heart.
In the last four years, people have seen a change in me. They say that I am a “success story”. But, I just tell them, “I won’t be a success story until I get to Heaven and I hear, ‘Well done, my son!’”
If God can take someone like me, who had become the “lowest life form on earth…Human Garbage!” and turn that “light back on”, He can do it for anyone. No matter how low down you think you are, just ask Him! He loves you, and He will forgive you!
Because of my Jesus, I can now stand in front of anyone and proudly say, “I am a blood-bought, not a store-bought, child of God.”
Frank Rector
Summer 2005
[Frank Rector is still employed at the Mission as Male House Manager as of June 2009. He signs in new male residents and gives them direction as to mission rules and programs that will help them turn their lives around. God uses him to mentor men of all ages.]
Frank Rector
