BOB’S: JOURNEY
BOB: Good afternoon, Jim.
JEH: Thank you for agreeing to sit down with me and talk about your journey, I very much appreciate it.
BOB: My pleasure.
JEH: Bob, could you tell the readers your last name please.
BOB: Sure, it’s Coderre, C-O-D-E-R-R-E.
JEH: How old are you?
BOB: I’m 58, just turned 58.
JEH: Where were you born?
BOB: I was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Memorial Hospital.
JEH: Do you have any siblings?
BOB: I do. I’m the oldest, and then my brother Tom is a year younger than me, and my sister Karen is three years younger than me.
JEH: So, tell me about your mom and dad.
BOB: My mom is still alive, my dad passed away in 2019. My mom and dad, when they retired from working, they moved down to Florida. In 2018 my dad got sick with kidney cancer, and he passed away in 2019, and my mom moved back up here with us, and we’ve been caring for her, she’s currently struggling with Alzheimer’s. And she’s living in Providence at the Bethany Home, we’re caregiving for her over there pretty much every day.
JEH: How old is she?
BOB: My mom is going to be 79 this year.
JEH: Let’s talk about your childhood, what kind of childhood did you have?
BOB: Well, I grew up in Pawtucket. My mom moved to Pawtucket from Providence when she married my dad in 1968, and my dad was born and raised in Pawtucket. I had a pretty good childhood for the most part. My mom was home when I was young and took care of me and my brother and sister, and my dad worked two jobs to take care of the family. We lived in a multi-family house, so my grandmother and my uncle lived upstairs, so that was kind of neat.
I went to public school; I went to elementary school and junior high school in Pawtucket. My dad got me involved in sports at a young age, so I played baseball and football. I met a lot of kids through sports from the time I was 7 or 8 years old. My mom used to drop us off at the boy’s club. When we turned 6 years old, we were able to go to the boy’s club without adult supervision. And that was kind of fun, we used to be able to go to the boy’s club like on a Saturday and spend four or five hours there playing pool or basketball or ping pong. So, I kind of grew up at the boy’s club, and I knew all the kids from the boy’s club.
In the summer we used to have a summer camp called Camp Ramsbottom out in Rehoboth, and spent many, many summers growing up, going to Camp Ramsbottom, where there was a pool, horseback riding and sports. It was a full, full summer of activities, which was really great.
We used to go for the whole summer, my parents couldn’t quite afford it, so they used to do a candy drive. They used to allow us to sell candy bars, and if we sold a certain amount of candy, we could get a break off the tuition for the summer camp. So, you can imagine our parents had us out selling candy bars, hundreds and hundreds of candy bars. So, it paid for me and my brother to go, it helped defray some of the cost.
It’s funny, I look back on it now and I think I had a really diverse childhood, which was really interesting growing up in Pawtucket. I met a lot of people and by the time I went to high school, I went to Saint Ray’s, Saint Raphael Academy is kind of like a sheltered community because it’s a small Catholic school, and it’s right in the heart of Pawtucket. And a lot of the kids that I grew up with, playing sports and going to public school, so I had to kind of make a lot of new friends when I went to St. Ray’s. My experience at St. Ray’s was really great, and I think that I was very fortunate. My parents, really again, didn’t really have the money. By this point, my mom had started working outside the home. My parents sacrificed an awful lot for me and my brother to go to St. Ray’s.
JEH: Did you have to wear uniforms?
BOB: We did, I had to wear a collared shirt, I had to wear, no jeans, I had to wear, no sneakers, I had to wear shoes or a work boot. I don’t think I had to wear a tie. Some days we had to wear a tie if there was a service or something that we had to go to. We had more of a dress code than a uniform.
JEH: Did you have any part-time jobs?
BOB: I did. I started working at a young age, probably when I was ten or twelve, I got a paper route for many years. And in typical Coderre fashion, we had a 300 Sunday paper route. I look back on it, my dad really taught me and my brother and sister hard work. He used to get up at 3:30 every Sunday morning and drive me to do the Sunday papers. And he allowed me to keep all the money, and he never asked for any gas money. He was kind of a little cheap when it came to spending his own money, and he liked having the paper route because he could read the Sunday paper for free, and he didn’t have to pay a dollar for it. The last paper route customer would get his read paper.
It’s funny, one of the things that I think about, and I thought about this when my dad passed away, and I was thinking about reflecting on his memory and what he meant to me. Besides instilling that work ethic, I hated the paper route, but he loved it. He had me as a captive audience for four hours in a car, and he would teach me all of these things as a dad and he would tell me stories about his own life, you know, he was passing on wisdom to me, things that he learned. His dad died when he was 21, and he didn’t really have a dad for a long period of time. He told me that if it wasn’t for his education at St. Ray’s, back in the 60’s, the brothers were really strict back then and they really kept him in line. He had a very strong moral compass. That paper route, we did it for 8 or 10 years.
JEH: Did it also teach you how to manage money?
BOB: It did, because sometimes people wouldn’t pay you. When I went back to pay them, I’d have to pay the Journal for the papers, and if I didn’t collect the money, it was on me. So, my dad was adamant that I keep a book and keep an accounting of everybody that paid and who didn’t pay, and then he would drive me back around to go see them and go knock on the door to make sure I got paid. What my dad taught me that when you give your word to someone you keep it and you do it.
When I was about 16, I got my first job at Stop & Shop. One of my mom’s friends knew the store manager there and she put a good word in for me, and I worked in the meat department at the local Stop & Shop. It was my senior year in high school, so I had that part-time job for a year or two.
JEH: You graduated high school, now what does the young Bob Coderre do?
BOB: Well, it’s funny, I was driving around with my dad on the paper route one Sunday morning, and he says to me, “So, what are you going to do for college?” It’s like March of my senior year, I’m ready to graduate in three months. I had no plan, no idea. You know these kids that have these scholarships and have this stuff, yeah, not me. So, he said to me, “Have you ever heard of Rhode Island College?” And I said, no, I have never heard of Rhode Island College. And he said, “Well, it’s a good school, it’s a public school, it’s a state school, affordable. I think you should apply to Rhode Island College and go on a visit.” So, I went and visited the school, and I liked it and I applied, and I got accepted, and in the fall of 1986, I started at RIC.
I went to school in the morning, and I worked in the afternoon. I found out towards halfway through my freshman year, one of my friends told me about a student exchange program, where you could study at any state, college or university across the country and you pay in-state tuition at RIC, and you just pay your room and board there. And she asked me if I was interested in maybe doing that with her. So, I said, yeah, let me talk to my parents about it, and I did; they thought it was a great idea. We chose Utah State as the school we wanted to go to.
JEH: And then you come back.
BOB: I came back to Rhode Island and did my junior year at RIC, and around that time is when I started to struggle. I had had a girlfriend at that time that I had been dating for a couple of years. I thought we were going to get married; we had a very serious relationship. I was starting to use; I was self-medicating with marijuana, and I was starting to drink a little more. And I was never a big drinker; I was more of a pot head than a drinker. I’d been smoking pot almost on a daily basis since I was 14 or 15. And now here I was 20 years old, and my girlfriend wanted me to stop drinking and stop drugging really. And she kind of gave me an ultimatum, and I told her that I’m not going to stop, so we broke up.
And my disease really progressed from that point; I really kind of fell into a kind of depression and started to drink much more heavily, and I made a decision to drop out of school after my junior year, before my senior year started. I decided I was going to take a semester off. And basically, what that entails were, me living at my friend’s house and sleeping on his couch and drinking all day and all night, and just kind of partying all the time.
JEH: What about the drugging?
BOB: Yeah, the drugging had started to progress, where I was using other drugs, hallucinogenics, cocaine and other things like that. The marijuana was really my go-to; I called it, my medicine, because I used it every day. It kind of calmed me down, it calmed my thoughts. But it was getting to a point where it was starting to turn on me a little bit, instead of helping me, it was starting to hurt me.
And I was noticing that I was unable to go to school, I quit my job at UPS, I had a really good job at UPS over a stupid fight. I just walked off the job one day after two years of being there. I was a union steward and I just quit the job. And I was working at Shaw’s, sweeping floors. And I remembered that my ex-girlfriend, her father and stepmother came into the store, and they saw me. They said hello to me and asked how I was doing, and I gave them this big, long story about how great I was doing. And I remember saying to myself, I hate myself after that, after lying.
JEH: What did you think, did you think you were doing okay?
BOB: I knew that there was a problem, but I used to always tell myself that if it ever becomes a problem — because people had been telling me for a year or two, “You may have a problem.” And I was starting to say, my come back was always, well, when it becomes a problem then I’ll do something about it, but right now I don’t think it’s a problem. And then what was happening was slowly but surely things started happening in my life that I couldn’t control. Like the job at Shaw’s, sweeping the floors, I was on 30 days probation. The manager of the store came to me and said, “I have some bad news for you, you didn’t pass your 30-day probation, we’re going to fire you.”
JEH: What didn’t you pass?
BOB: You know, I wasn’t showing up on time; I was calling out sick; I just wasn’t being a good employee. When I was there, I would work, but you know. They said, “We’ll give you another 30 days if you want, and you try another 30 days.” And I was so embarrassed that here I was with this wonderful future that my parents had kind of hoped and planned for me, going to St. Ray’s and going to RIC. One of the jobs; I worked at the State House, I loved that job. I worked at the State House for a period of time. I’m sure my parents had quite a future planned for me, maybe even law school, something like that. And here I was, not in school, dropped out before I completed my degree.
JEH: How old were you at this point in your life?
BOB: I just turned 21, and I was drinking every day, and going out with my friends, and not talking to my parents, and just not being around the house. It got to a point where I said, maybe I have a problem, so maybe I should stop drinking or maybe I should do something about it. And what scared the heck out of me, was I tried to stop drinking and I couldn’t. Now, I didn’t confide that in anybody at the time, I kept it to myself. I knew that I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t, and I knew I needed help, but I didn’t know how to get it, and I didn’t know how to voice that to anybody.
JEH: Let me ask you this, was this beer or liquor?
BOB: Both, I never really enjoyed alcohol, I never drank for the taste, I drank for the effect. So, in other words, whatever was around, I could drink beer, I could drink hard liquor, I wasn’t really a hard liquor person. It was just not to feel.
I don’t share this with a lot of people, you know, when I was 12, I was sexually assaulted, I was sexually abused. It was a big secret that I never told anybody. It was a person from the community, and it was snowing out one night, I was at the Boy’s Club, I was walking home, and a priest pulled up in a car and offered to give me a ride in a snowstorm. And I took the ride home not knowing what was going to happen, and when it happened the shame and the guilt and the fear was so immense, the emotions, because I was only 12, that I didn’t know how to handle it, and I didn’t know how to tell anybody because I felt that I was going to get blamed because I never should have gotten into a stranger’s car. But they pulled the window down, I saw it was a priest, it was snowing out. I could have walked the 10 or 15 minutes in the snowstorm home, but you know, I just never imagined that that would happen.
And so, I was carrying that secret around, and I was trying to run from it and hide. I was trying to self-medicate it away, and it got to a point where it wasn’t really working anymore. The alcohol and the weed weren’t really, you know, I was still struggling with it.
JEH: Did you ever tell anyone?
BOB: Yeah, so what happened was, in early December in 1989, I went to visit a friend up at Vassar College, a girl I went to high school with. And I took the train, and I had my first credit card, I didn’t have any money, but I had a credit card, and I bought a train ticket up to Poughkeepsie, and I went to visit her for a weekend, she was one of my closest friends in high school.
And she just happened to have a friend visiting her that weekend. And we went out to the bar on campus, and we’re sitting there the three of us talking, and I confided to her that I thought that I may have a problem drinking. And this girl, Kim, her mom worked in a treatment program in Connecticut. And she said, “Oh my goodness, Bob, if you need help; I can get you help.” She said, “I don’t know how, but my mom will get the help that you need.” And that was the first time I ever told someone that I had a problem. She took me home, instead of taking the train to Poughkeepsie, she drove me to New Haven. I never spoke to her since. She sent me a card; she told me that she loved me and cared about me.
What happened was, it gave me the impetus, it gave me the courage a few days later to tell my mom that I thought I had a problem. And I didn’t know how I was going to tell my mom, because I thought she was going to be so embarrassed and so upset. My mom wasn’t an angry person, just disappointed. And when I said, mom, I think I have a problem with drugs. She said, in a very sarcastic tone, “No kidding.” I said, I want to go into treatment, but I need your BlueCross card to go into treatment.
So, I called Edgehill, and I got on the phone with them, and it was miraculous how it happened because for the first time in my life I started to get honest, and I told the people on the phone at Edgehill that I was having trouble with drinking and alcohol. And as they were getting my insurance cleared, she asked me where I was in school. And I said, oh, I took a semester off at college. She said, “If you’re not in school then you’re no longer covered on your parent’s insurance.” So, I wasn’t able to go into treatment because they denied my coverage.
JEH: So, now what?
BOB: I went out drinking with my friends that night, and one of my friends who also worked at UPS, said, “You know, UPS pays your insurance premium quarterly, you know. You may still have coverage from UPS even though you quit two months ago. You should call up BlueCross and see if your coverage is still active.” Sure, enough it was, and I called Edgehill back and, on that Monday, it was December 11th, 1989, I went into Edgehill.
And that was kind of where my journey began. My mom drove me there, it was a 6:00 p.m. appointment in Newport, with a bag of clothes, a 30-day program. And I was fairly sober that day, I didn’t go drinking and drugging that day.
JEH: You were about 22 at this time?
BOB: 21, I just got legal, I just got legal, I could drink. So, here I was, I went in there. The first time you go there they bring you into detox for a couple of days to medically clear you. And while I was there, I went into a group the next morning, and there was a big sign on the wall that said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” I scoffed at that sign, I laughed at it. And everyone was going around and saying that they were an alcoholic or a drug addict, and I didn’t know what any of that meant, I didn’t really believe it.
In a day or two I got transferred to the unit, and I met my counsellor. And this is where the story gets very interesting. The night before I was to have my counselling appointment with my counsellor, this guy, John, who lived down the corridor from me, he grabbed me and he said, “Are you the new guy?” He said, “Come here, come in my room, I want to talk to you for a minute.” He said, “Listen, tomorrow morning you’re going to have your first counselling session with counsellor.” And he said, “I don’t know what your story is, but clearly you need to get honest with your counsellor. You’ve got some secret, something that you’ve been carrying around.” And I’m thinking to myself, how does this guy know.
So, I went back to my room, and I thought about it. So, the next morning I go in to meet with my counsellor, and I told her the truth, I told her about the sexual abuse and what had happened, and what I had been running from for the last ten years, and what the real problem was, this is what the core problem was as far as why I’ve been drinking and drugging so much. I got honest with Dori, my counsellor, and within 5 minutes she convinced me I was an alcoholic and that I had a problem. The only question she had for me was, was I willing to do something about it.
She said, “There’s a program in Fall River, it’s a 1-year treatment program.” And she said, “You know nothing about alcoholism or addiction, and you know nothing about recovery. If you walk out of here without a treatment plan, you’re going to fail. So, I’m going to ask you this question, if I could promise you a lifetime of sobriety for a year of your life, would you, do it?” I said, well, you know, I got college, I got one more year left. She said, “You just sat here and told me how you’re not in school, you’re living on your friend’s couch, you don’t have a job; you could do the program.” She said, “You’ve got five minutes to decide, because clearly I’m not going to work with you if you don’t want the help, I’ll just get the next person in here that wants help.” I said, okay, I’ll go for the interview.
I went to the interview; I went on the waiting list. When I completed Edgehill I went back home to Pawtucket for a couple of weeks, and that’s where the rubber had to meet the road, because I had to go back home before the bed was available in the treatment program. And I had to call twice a week so that they knew that I was serious about wanting it. And then in the end of January 1990 I went into Fall River Steppingstone. It was a 6-month halfway house and a 6-month three quarters house; I spent a year there.
JEH: So, from what you’ve told me so far, I can see God intervening throughout your young life, do you have any indication that God was working in your life up to that point?
BOB: None. If you asked me if I believed in God at that time, I would say, yes, because I wasn’t a fool in the sense, I’d grown up in the church and I had believed in God; I knew he existed, but I didn’t really know him. I felt like he was like a punishing God, he was kind of a God that was kind of keeping score, and quite frankly I was behind in the game.
JEH: I understand.
BOB: The only way I learned about God was through AA and NA meetings in Edgehill. The groups had come in and put on these meetings. And one of the guys that turned out to be one of my sponsors, said, “Listen, you don’t necessarily have to believe in God, but do you believe that I believe in God?” And I said, yeah, I can see that you believe in God. “Well, why don’t you believe in my God? So, here’s what I want you to do; I want you to get down on your knees every morning and ask my God to keep you sober. And if my God keeps you sober that day, I want you to get down on your knees at the end of the day and thank Him. So, every day I want you to do this.”
And it was kind of odd at first because the first day I did it, it was just going through the motions. All right, he told me to do it, he’s my sponsor, Brian’s God, will you please keep me sober. And then at the end of the day after being sober, get down on my knees and say, Brian’s God, thank you for keeping me sober. And all of a sudden, 10 days went by, and I was sober. The longest I’d been sober in ten years. And then 23 days went by, and I was sober.
Slowly and surely, it was like this faith thing started to — again, I still didn’t really know God, I had heard people share their faith, which was good. I heard other people talking about their higher power, and I was interested in it, and I was curious, but it took a while for me to get that part of the program. And then I slowly started to realize that whatever this power was that my friend Brian believed in, it was starting to work for me, and I didn’t really know how to make it my own, but I was using his.
There were people along the way that began to witness to me the Gospel, and I wasn’t ready to be honest. My friend Gary had shared his faith with me and told me about what Jesus had done for him in his life, and he was so happy, and he was so radiant, and he had so much peace and I could just see it on his face, I knew there was something different about him. And what he said to me angered me very much; I’m not even going to tell you what I said to him because I swore at him. But he said, “Bob, I want to tell you that I’m really sad.” And I said, Gary, why are you sad? He said, “I’m sad because I know that when I die and go to heaven you’re not going to be there.” And I was two years sober at that time and I still wasn’t ready to come to Christ.
JEH: So, you completed the one year, right?
BOB: I completed the one year in the half-way house, and then I got an apartment, I was living on my own, I’d gotten engaged.
JEH: Did you have a job?
BOB: I got a job, my first real job out of the half-way house, was an assistant manager’s job for a rental car company. And it was a great job, salary, potentially a company car, upper mobility, good money, health insurance.
JEH: You’re on your way.
BOB: I was on my way, and I worked at that job for four years, I ended up becoming an office manager, becoming pretty successful in the rental car business. So, once I completed the year at the half-way house, I was 22, 23 years old, living on my own in Fall River. I’d gotten engaged and my fiancée and I were living together, then we moved back to Pawtucket. And I was working at the rental car company, doing well, and they relocated me out to Connecticut for a couple of years.
JEH: Are we still sober?
BOB: Still sober, still going to meetings, sort of. But out of my comfort zone because I wasn’t really — all my sober network was in Pawtucket and Rhode Island. Yep, still sober. My oldest son, Joey was born out in Manchester, Connecticut. And then after a while the company started to down-size, they started to close offices and they started to take benefits away. We decided to move back to Rhode Island.
And I talked with my mom about potentially applying for a state job, at least I could get good health insurance. I had a son at this point. I decided to get a different job, I took a little less money to go and work for the State, but I got hired down at the district court, this was in 1994. Three months into that job my wife at the time told me that she didn’t love me anymore and she wanted a divorce. And I was horrified because I didn’t see it coming. She said, “I’ve been going to counselling and I’m just not happy; I just don’t want to be with you anymore.” I went from being a dad and a husband and in a week or two my whole identity was shot; I didn’t know who I was.
JEH: Did she leave with your son?
BOB: Yeah, she went back to her parents, and I went back to my parents. So, we got divorced, that was very, very difficult. That was kind of the wake-up call for me to come and know the Lord, it really broke me. I moved on from her, I was sitting up in my parent’s third floor apartment, by myself, didn’t know who I was, my identity was shot, I was in a fog, and I was going through some old photographs that ,my parents had up in the attic, of my childhood.
And I started thinking back to who I was, and I started thinking about how I used to go to church, and there were pictures of my first communion and confirmation. And all of this stuff I started seeing and I got down on my knees and I said, God, I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t know you. And I said, but the problem is not with you, the problem’s with me. I don’t know you God because I haven’t spent any time with you, I tried to get to know you. And that’s going to change from her on out, I want to know you, I want to have a relationship with you, please reveal yourself to me. That was a simple prayer.
And about a couple of weeks later I went to a retreat, it was a Catholic men’s retreat down in South Kingstown for AA. I started going back to Catholic Church again and it wasn’t resonating with me. Everything I learned for five years in AA about spirituality, and humility and ego deflation, all of these things I learned in the program, I wasn’t really getting it there and they invited me to a men’s retreat, and when I went to the men’s retreat; I really tried to find God there and I couldn’t find him, he didn’t speak to me. So, I knew that wasn’t where I should look.
And out of the blue I get a phone call from a friend of mine who wanted to have dinner. Sue and I went out to dinner, and she shared the Gospel with me night. It’s very interesting, God had to be very subtle with me, he almost had to catch me off-guard, if he had come directly at me, I would have just pushed him away. So, I started telling Sue all about my life the last three years, and how I’d gotten married and got divorced, had a kid, got a new job. All of these big things were happening.
I said, what’s going on with you? She said, “Really, not much, the only thing that’s happened to me in the last three years is this church I’ve been going to.” I said, don’t you go to St. Mark’s up the street from you? She said, “No, I go to a non-denominational church.” Oh my God, Sue, please tell me you’re not one of these born-again Christians? And she says to me, “Actually, I am. Do you even know what a born-again Christian is?” I said, quite frankly, no. Then she said to me, don’t you think it’s ironic that you don’t even know what a born-again Christian is but you don’t want me to be one? So, I said, “Ok Sue tell me what’s a born-again Christian?”
And she began to witness to me, she didn’t have a bible in front of her, it just came out of her heart. I knew I was in the presence of something serious, this was once in a lifetime conversation. I had questions, and the more she was talking the more I had questions. At the end of the dinner, I said, Sue, can I go to church with you? And she said, “No, it doesn’t work like that.” Now, she doesn’t know that for the last couple of months I’ve been seeking. I’ve met somebody that actually knows God personally. It was clear from the way she spoke to me that she knew the Lord.
Well, Sue, please tell me how it works. She said, “Well, my pastor records the messages on cassette tapes, and what I’ll do, when I go to church, I’ll get you a cassette tape and I’ll let you listen to it, and if you like it then you can come to church.” I said, okay, that’s fair. So, she got me the tape, I listened to the tape. I was blown away by it, I’d never heard bible teaching like this. I didn’t necessarily believe what he believed, but he certainly did. And I was like, wow, somebody that has faith and somebody that knows God. Now, I’ve got two people who know God, and I started going to that church. And that was in 1994, so that was all within that time period, I got the new job in May, I got separated in August, and in October I started going to this new church and came to faith in Christ.
JEH: And it all started on the third floor, looking at those old photos.
BOB: It did. When I got down on my knees and had that one prayer with God, I was honest and open with him. It wasn’t like a biblical prayer; it was just me talking to God on my knees. Now, I’m at this new church, I’m still, Bob, the Bob that swears, the Bob that’s in the flesh, and the Bob that doesn’t know the Lord. Everybody at work is making fun of me, I’m telling them that I’m saved, telling them they’re going to hell, and they’ve got to come to Jesus.
I end up going on a retreat, another AA retreat up in Maine, and I meet some people up there. And one of the girls that I met up there, I knew her mom. And I was telling some friends of mine about it, and they said, “We should go out New Years Eve like a double date.” We went out to eat on New Years Eve and we had a nice time, and then we followed it up about a couple of weeks later with a second date, where we went with one of my best friends, and his wife, because I wanted them to meet her and see what they thought, and they liked her.
So, Renee and I had gone for our divorce, but we were in the process of waiting for the divorce to be finalize, and I met Cindy, and Cindy ends up pregnant after our second date. For a young Christian, that wasn’t quite the testimony that I was hoping to give. What we thought we would do is hide it, because that’s sort of what Adam and Eve did when they sinned. We’d just go to the abortion clinic and get an abortion, and nobody needs to know.
So, that’s what we did, we made an appointment, it was her idea, she wanted to do it, she was a nanny at the time, she didn’t really know me, I didn’t really know her. And what happened was, I had been going to church, and she had started coming to my church with me, and she had made an appointment with the pastor the night before we were to go for the appointment. And the pastor at the time counselled her and she made the decision not to go through with the abortion.
And at that point, we had a decision to make, if she was going to keep the child, I would pay child support and support the child, or were we going to try and put a relationship together and see what God’s will was in this. So, we started to go through that process, and we made a decision to get engaged and get married. We got married before my daughter, Hannah was born.
One of the best days of my life was the day that we were able to get up in front of the church, after this great sin, and in front of a thousand people, tell our story, and have Hannah there to be dedicated to the Lord. And we told the congregation our testimonies of what happened and how we’d fallen into sin, and how we wanted to run and hide from our sin, but we chose not to. The church gave us grace, the church gave us a standing ovation.
So, then Cindy and I were married for seven years. So, Joey was my son from my first marriage. And Hannah, they were about two years apart, so they used to play a lot and hang out together. Cindy said, “Maybe we should have one more child, we’re getting into our late 20’s, let’s have one more child. And God blessed us with twins, so that was quite a shock. So, Jack and David were born.
It was probably the hardest part of my life that I’ve had to go through, because Cindy was home and unable to work. I was working as a clerk, not making a whole lot of money, really struggling to make ends meet, having to rely on fiends and family just to pay our basic bills. It’s hard when you’re in need and you have a family. I was working two jobs, I still wasn’t making it, I was exhausted, I thought I was going to have a stroke, I was so stressed out.
What ended up happening is, you know, Cindy had some issues, some mental health issues, some struggles that she had. We ended up making the decision to separate for both of our well-being. And it was a contentious divorce, we spent nine months in family court, and I ended up getting custody of the three kids. So, on July 1st of 2003, I got custody of Hannah, Jack, and David.
JEH: So, how old are you at this point?
BOB: So, at that point I am 35. And I had moved back home with my parents in Pawtucket, and I was sharing basically a bedroom with my twins, my twins had a bunk bed, and I had an air mattress, and Hannah had a bedroom upstairs. I felt it was God’s will for me to go after custody for them, because I wanted to give them a better life than I had or at least a good of a life that I had.
JEH: Where are you with regard to your sobriety and your faith?
BOB: I’m 15 years sober and I’ve known the Lord for 8 years, bible college and everything, and I’m saying, why me, Lord, why am I going through this stuff, what’s the purpose here, Lord?
JEH: Did you feel like Job?
BOB: I don’t know that I felt like Job, but I felt like, here I was trying to do the best I could, and yet I was a little bit of a screw up in certain areas. There were certain areas of my life that were going really well. For instance, 15 years sobriety was quite an accomplishment, but two failed marriages was not. I could justify the first divorce because I wasn’t saved at that point, but now, once I was saved, I really felt that this was a huge failure on my part.
I made a decision at that point; I wasn’t going to get into any more relationships at that point. My job right now is to raise these kids, that was the priority. So, for the next 10 or 12 years that’s kind of what I did. All three of my kids went to St. Ray’s. It was a team effort with me and my mom and my dad.
JEH: So, now you’re 45, 46 years old, take it from there, what happens now.
BOB: Well, I’m thinking like, now what, here I am, I’m young enough where I might want to get into a relationship. I started to work on personal growth and personal development when I was around 41, 42 years old. So, with my recovery program and the willingness to work the 12 steps, I knew there were other personal growth opportunities out there to look at myself. So, I started to create that possibility to getting into a relationship.
So, I got a yellow piece of paper out and started writing down what I wanted. So, first on the checklist was, she’s got to be a person of faith, a Christian, a believer, and I wanted someone who was a hard worker, someone who was self-supporting. I also wanted somebody who was into personal growth, somebody who was working on themselves. I had all these things written down. So, I went on a couple of dates with some people that I worked with, and I could tell that it just wasn’t a fit, and it wasn’t from God. I was praying to God; it was pretty much God and myself at this point in my life.
I’d gotten a message on Facebook from Neicy. I had met her a year before, she worked for my brother up at the state house, and she had a ticket in Providence that caused a problem for her license. My brother called me and said, “There’s a young lady that works for me here, she’s bilingual, she’s Dominican, English is her second language, and she’s a little confused. She thinks she may have a problem with her license, can you look into it and help her out?” So, I did, I looked it up and I found out what the problem was, and we corrected it for her. She came down, I met her, and I helped her out. So, her and I had talked a couple of times, we had gone out for coffee, but I could tell she was looking for a serious relationship, at this time I really wasn’t.
But fast forward, nine months later, now I’m starting to think about a relationship, I get a weird message at 10:00 o’clock at night on Facebook from Neicy, inviting me to come and see her new apartment in Cranston. I’m like, I don’t even know this girl, she works for my brother. And then I’m saying, God, is this you? You just don’t know, so I said, I’ll play along, I’ll just play along and see where this goes. We texted back on Facebook for a while. I don’t know what made me agree to go over there. I met her and her daughter before that as well.
So, I go over there, and she says, “My pastor and his wife, they helped me move all this furniture into my apartment.” She said, “I’m very active in my church. My pastor and his wife, they’re praying for me to find a Godly man.” And then she says, “I work at the state house, I work for your brother, they just hired me full-time, I’ve got a good job now with benefits and a good retirement. And I’ve been taking classes on-line at the University of Phoenix, I’m trying to get my degree, because I’m really into personal growth and personal development.”
Now, I’m getting really nervous, because now I’m like, God, this is a little too real for me. So, I said, okay, I’ll see where this goes. It took a while, we had 7 or 8 years of dating before we could kind of — it took a long time for God to really, for us to get married. There was still a lot of stuff in my life that had to kind of get cleaned out and worked out. I will tell you, when we started dating, you know, we clearly had a lot of love for each other when we started dating, it seemed like this was a wonderful thing, and yet there’s a little bit of a 12-year age gap. She doesn’t get my sarcasm, she doesn’t get my jokes, I’ve got a lot of baggage, I’ve got four kids, she’s got a daughter, different cultures, different foods. There was a lot to kind of blend together to try and see if this could work.
I remember having a conversation with my friend, Kathy, and I said to Kathy, I think I might buy her a ring, and she says, “What’s stopping you?” She said, “How long have you been dating?” I said, oh, about 7 ½ years. She said, “Are you kidding me, do you love her?” I said, yeah, I love her. “Well, then buy the ring.” It’s that simple, that easy? She said, “Yeah, buy the ring.” That was the end of the conversation. I went out about a month or two later and bought the ring. And I was supposed to have this elaborate proposal, where you’re at a park, with a sunset, with pictures, you know, roses and all of this stuff.
JEH: Okay.
BOB: I had breakfast with her daughter, now at this point, Sashi was probably about 9 or 10 and I took Sashi out to breakfast and asked her, and said, listen, you know I love your mom and you know I love you, and I’d like to marry your mom, but I’d like your permission first. And she said, yes. As soon as I got the ring and saw how beautiful the diamond was, I drove right to the state house, and I got my brother to come outside and bring Neicy outside and I proposed to her right in the parking lot. Of course, instead of saying, yes, she said, “Finally.” We’ve got it all on video, it’s hilarious.
The two of us, we had broken up at one point, we had several times where we had broken up, we had broken up for about 8 or 9 months. To me, it was all over, we were done. And I was sick, I was at Rhode Island Hospital, I have a muscle disease, like a potassium thing, it was a serious case of the flu. She had blocked me, so I could never have reached out to her even if I wanted to talk to her, we had no communication.
Out of the blue, while I’m in the hospital, room, 7:30 one morning, I get a text from her, “Are you okay?” She said, “I had a bad dream that something had happened to you and that you were sick, or something was going on. I can’t get it out of my mind, are you okay?” I told her, I was in the hospital, and I was sick. And from that point on, we made the decision to try and work through whatever our issues were, whatever we had to figure out. And about 6 or 8 months later we got engaged.
JEH: As you matured in your faith, did your relationship with Neicy get better?
BOB: Yeah, I think what happens is, we both have our ways of serving the Lord. As you know, I serve as a deacon at Harvest, I enjoy teaching the bible, I enjoy teaching the adult Sunday school, every so often I get to preach a message, fill in for Pastor G. You know, we’ve built a life together, Neicy and I. We have so many wonderful moving parts, like her mom, her mom came to live with us, so we support her mom, her mom, Elsa lives upstairs. We live in a 3-family house in Pawtucket, and we have Neicy and I on the first floor, my mother-in-law and Sashi on the second floor, and my son, Joey is up on the third floor, so we have all three floors.
JEH: You’re repeating what you grew up with.
BOB: I am, which is kind of great. What my dad did for his mom I’m doing, and I think it’s wonderful, the same house. I love Pawtucket and I love my house. I bought my parents’ house when they moved to Florida. So, Neicy didn’t want to move to Pawtucket, that was one of the reasons we broke it off.
JEH: Where was she from?
BOB: She was at the time living in Johnston, she bought a house in Johnston, she wanted me to sell the house in Pawtucket and move to Johnston. We both have political jobs, I work at the Traffic Tribunal in Cranston, and she works up at the state house. I wasn’t going to feel comfortable living in another community at this point in my life. It took a lot for me to kind of sell her on coming to Pawtucket.
My wife’s faith is so strong. As we have grown together, we’re a tremendous team. What’s interesting for me, this is one of the first times I can say this truly, we’re a good match, we compliment each other. There’s a lot of things that she’ll do that serves me, and there’s a lot of things that I can do to serve her, we look out for each other, we have each other’s back. She’s very loyal, it’s nice to have somebody, she’s only 45 but she’s old school, she’s kind of like an old school person when it comes to that kind of values.
JEH: So, how did you find Harvest Community Church?
BOB: Okay, so that’s a great question. So, what happened was, that church that I got saved in was a church in Swansea called Grace Gospel Church, that’s where I first met Gene Giguere. Gene was an elder at the time, and he was the vice-principal of the New England Christian Academy. I started attending there in October of ’94, and in the fall of ’95 they started a bible college, called New England Bible Institute, and I started attending bible college, Gene was the president of the bible college, and he ran the bookstore at the church, which he always got me good books, he got me my first bible. The Holy Spirit was really illuminating me at this time. I got baptized, it was a fun church to be in.
There were about 700 members at that time and probably 400 of them were under the age of 30, so it was a young church. After being at bible college for a few years, even though I felt that God had a call on my life potentially to be a pastor or to be a missionary or to do something in the field, I really prayed about it and really got some confirmation from God that my first ministry was really my family.
At this point I had four kids. Because I was ready to walk away from my state job. I’d only been working for the state for 3 or 4 years at that point. And even though I knew that I had a job and that I could have a career and a pension and great retirement and all of that, I was willing to walk away from that for the Lord, the Lord had given me that, I wanted to pioneer a work, which is what I wanted to do. And the pastor at that church did not think it was a good idea, he thought it was a horrible idea and he kind of talked me out of it, he was not supportive at all. Because I wanted to do what kind of what Gene’s done in Woonsocket for his community, I wanted to do in Pawtucket, I wanted the Gospel of Grace to come to Pawtucket.
So, it became obvious to me that I was going to stay with the state and go to bible college and kind of learn to become a teacher. I was teaching Sunday school for many, many years there. And then around 2001 we started having some issues at the church, and about 300 people left, like a little bit of a church split. And what happened was, at the time there was a bible study going on in North Smithfield that Gene were leading at the Vary’s house, Mr. and Mrs. Vary in North Smithfield. They had about 45 people at the Vary’s house, it was like a little church.
What happened was, Gene had been on the mission field for a couple of years, and then when he came back, he had that calling to pioneer a ministry and they decided they wanted to pioneer it in Woonsocket. I stayed at the Grace Gospel church for six months to a year when that happened; I wasn’t part of the initial church split. God started to show me that he wanted me out of there. I started going to New Life which was in Swansea as well. So, I started probably in 2002 going to Harvest. Once we bought the new building on North Main Street, that was probably 2002/2003.
So, once that happened, my mom had run a homeless shelter in Central Falls for about 15 years, so I had some experience with running a homeless shelter, and I talked to both the pastors about that, so I’ve been serving in that ministry since it started. I probably didn’t start serving as a deacon until about 10 years ago. That was how I got to Harvest.
JEH: Is there anything that I forgot to ask you that you would like to touch upon?
BOB: The only thing I’ll say is that I shared recently a couple of weeks ago at church about this purpose that I developed at this stage of my life. Which is, to kind of take my years of sobriety, my years in the recovery community, and kind of match that with people who are looking to have a personal relationship with God. And instead of trying to force an outcome, to try and force it on people, to look for people where God is working in their lives.
And like I said, God was very subtle with me, he kind of got me in through the back door, because I was not expecting that night when I went out with Sue, to have a conversation that would change my life, but it did, clearly. You know, here it is 33 years later. One of things spiritual maturity has taught me is that I now know that not only does God speak; he speaks very personally to me.
Because when I get that nudge or that feeling I know that’s the Holy Spirit working in my life. I’ve seen the results over the many years. One of the things I shared this morning at my recovery meeting is that the grace of God came into my life when I first got sober back in 1989. Now, I didn’t become a believer until 5 years after that. But the grace of God is such an amazing awesome power. To have God’s grace working in my life, that I couldn’t imagine not having it. I think that for me I’m at that point in my life where when I read the epistles of Paul, and he talks about, “Stay firm till the end,” or “Endure to the end.”
Whatever time the Lord gives me I want to use that to glorify him. So, I really am grateful and thankful for you, Jim, for this opportunity to tell my story. I haven’t done this really ever, so this has been a really great experience for me.
JEH: Well, I’m glad. It takes courage to sit down and talk about yourself and to be honest, and talk about everything, it leaves you vulnerable. Well, Bob, this has been a pleasure, I thank you sitting with me and telling me about your life.
BOB: Thanks, Jim, I really appreciate your time.
Jim Huling