Wedgwood. A former

This is a story about a football player who had dropped out of high school, Jeremiah. He moved out of his parents’ house at 18 and quickly fell in with—to use his word—”gangstas.” His got his girlfriend Shellie, 16, pregnant and he asked her to move in with him. Convictions on charges of theft and assault landed Jeremiah on probation. He lost his job, and the guy who shared his apartment, Jeremiah says, skipped out on the rent.

“I was two days from being evicted from my apartment,” he remembers, adding that to keep the apartment, he would have had to come up with more than $600. His rope was getting short when he remembered someone who had once told Jeremiah to call if he ever needed anything: Adam Hammond.

Mr. Hammond had pastored Jeremiah in the South Wayside youth group when Jeremiah was 14. When Jeremiah turned to “the wild life,” the two drifted apart for more than a year. But when Jeremiah needed help, Mr. Hammond was there. The same day Jeremiah called him, a Wednesday in July, Mr. Hammond helped him find a job and a cheaper apartment.

But Jeremiah did not have $75 to pay the deposit on the apartment. As it turned out, Mr. Hammond and the youth group had been picking up trash as part of a community-service project and someone discovered a $100 bill among the refuse. The kids all prayed that God would give them a chance to use the money for some ministry need. Mr. Hammond kept the bill in his desk drawer—until Jeremiah’s need surfaced.

To pay the deposit, he handed Jeremiah the cash. “Here’s a hundred dollars from God,” Mr. Hammond said.

Jeremiah says that while he called Mr. Hammond looking for money, what he found in the end was love. “The kids in my youth group were so happy to see me,” he says. “They were like, ‘Jeremiah! Jeremiah!’ and just hugging me and everything. I realized I do have good friends who really care about me, unlike the gangstas I was hanging out with before. I also realized that God was the most important thing in my life and that I had lost that. I needed to regain that relationship I had with God before I quit going to church.”

Jeremiah now comes to church and spends 30 minutes a day praying and reading his Bible. Shellie is due to deliver Jessica Elizabeth any day and Jeremiah is looking forward to being a father. The couple knows now that their current arrangement of living together conflicts with God’s design for families.