Man of faith

Robert Gott spent many of his days on the wrong side of the law. Now he works as a jail chaplain helping inmates find sobriety.

By Erica Ryberg

The South County Spotlight, Jul 29, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Erica Ryberg / The South County Spotlight

Robert Gott

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The sky lightened on Columbia Boulevard in St. Helens and exposed the crumpled figure in the road. An officer approached and tapped the man on the shoulder.

Robert, go get yourself another drink, the officer said.

Sometimes they picked him up for selling weed or for trespassing, but not this morning. This morning, the police just moved him along.

Robert Gott was happy to comply because his every thought was about how to get that next drink. His whole life had collapsed to that singularity. It was his daily ritual until his alcoholism collided with his hepatitis.

Drinking became a game of Russian roulette. Every time he opened a beer it sounded to him like the click of the hammer on an empty bullet chamber. He knew his luck was running out and that before long the pistol would fire.

He turned to God.

But he had turned to God many times before, had invited Jesus into his heart when he was a child. God, as far as he knew, was nowhere to be found.

“I remember screaming out to him in the middle of the addiction, ‘Take this needle out of my arm, take this addiction away from me,’” Gott recalled. “And it was like the heavens were brass. It didn’t happen.”

But Gott, the incorrigible drunk, did have help. He received food stamps and, here and there, a helping hand. A social worker had put him on her case load, but when he couldn’t show up sober to meet with her, she told him if he didn’t go to treatment she was cutting him loose.

He cussed her out and went to get another beer.

A doctor had once told him he would die in a matter of days. That night he sat outside, drinking his Olde English 800 to blackout as usual.

He looked up at the stars.

“God, can I live?” he asked.

It was the terror of death at the end of a life poorly lived that spurred him to fling the question into the blackness. He expected no answer. In 38 years, he had never gotten one. But inside of his heart, God spoke to him for the first time.

Yes, Robert, you can.

He left for treatment the next day and, through the help of a 12-step program, uncovered the root cause of his addiction. For the first time he accepted full responsibility for his actions. There was no room, he realized, to blame anyone else. And definitely no room to blame God.

Ten years later, the ravages of addiction and disabling liver disease are there, but not obvious. He is slender with a full, youthful head of dark, curly hair. Though he receives disability payments because of fatigue, he finds the energy to minister to drunks and addicts in the Columbia County Jail. He is a vessel of ministry, perfectly cracked.

In his early sobriety, Gott’s progress toward redemption was slow and imperfect. He had help from a church, Yankton Community Fellowship, and for three years he read the Holy Scripture with his fragile mind until he could quote biblical verses fluently.

At the Fellowship, he had simple jobs at first. Unfold chairs, dust up. He helped get other addicts to church by kick starting a van mission to haul them up the hill to Yankton.

The demographics of the church changed as a ministry to help heal addicts took its place next to ministries to Africa and to children’s programming. Some uncomfortable with the new direction left the church. Those who remained had a calling to sit chair-to-chair with those who had a criminal past; some 25 percent of the congregation has been in jail at some point, according to Pastor Fred Butcher.

“About the same time as we began to be involved in the jail ministry, we had a shift,” Butcher said. “We were pretty well focused inwardly on how to serve the people within the church. We have changed in the sense that we are really quite focused outside the church.”

Six years ago, when Butcher told Gott it was God’s will that he go back to the jail he’d been thrown into so many times, Gott balked at first.

“I said, ‘I can’t apply to get into jail.’ But he just kept saying it and the Lord was working on my heart, until finally one day I went down there and I got my application,’ Gott said. “I filled it out honestly and I thought there’s no way they’re gonna allow me into that jail, but I laid hands on it and I prayed over it and I said ‘OK Lord, if this is what you want me to do, this is about you, it’s not about me.’”

He didn’t want to go because he didn’t know what they’d think of him when he returned. Plus there were a lot of things they hadn’t caught him for and he wasn’t sure they’d let him back out again.

Regardless, the church ordained the former town drunk as a chaplain and sent him in.

The thousands of lives he would come to touch were, by and large, in the same desperate ruin Gott’s had been. But along with the devastation there was also the hope of restoration, and there was the high of seeing the light of understanding come into their eyes that was unlike any he’d had when he was using. He pursued his devotion to God’s purpose with the same single-mindedness he’d once pursued his next drink.

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