Leeth’s parents were pillars of Baptist Temple. Morgan and Lynn were deeply involved in teaching, music, and community ministry. But Jarrett was drifting in the opposite direction. “I was getting out of the church scene and going my own ways. Not good ways, doing bar scenes and such and going the wrong way,” he said. What began as casual drinking hardened into habit, and habit into dependence. He would later describe those years plainly: hurting other people, hurting himself, using friends and even his parents for money, and watching alcohol quietly dismantle both his work and his integrity.
He was a licensed journeyman plumber who learned his trade in the Navy as a Seabee. Plumbing was the one steady thing in his life. But even that began to erode. After a diabetes diagnosis, he refused to change his lifestyle. Medication came; the drinking continued. He let his plumbing license lapse and tried to begin again at Home Depot, imagining a steady career until retirement. Instead, he found himself working part-time at night stocking for modest wages, barely covering fuel costs.
He pivoted again, this time into sprinkler fitting. The work suited him. The drinking did not stop.
Then came the physical consequences. Diabetes advanced. Sores appeared on his feet and would not heal. A toe was amputated and still he drank. His nights blurred into mornings as he drank himself into brief unconsciousness only to begin again. Finally, it got so bad he was hospitalized for liver failure.
That was three years ago. “I don't even have the slightest thought of alcohol in my mind anymore,” he said.
Leeth quit cold turkey. No gradual taper. No negotiated compromise. March 14 will mark three years without a drop of alcohol. The early weeks were difficult, but the cravings eventually fell silent. Sobriety did more than restore clarity; it restored memory. With painful vividness he began to see the damage he had done—to himself, to others, to the life he might have lived.
Then he began to pray. He began to feel the Holy Spirit working in his life; a quiet conversation between him and God. He had been thinking about baptism for months before he spoke it aloud. He even considered marking the occasion on the third anniversary of his sobriety. Yet his deeper questions were not about ceremony but about direction. About following the way of Jesus.
He was baptized on February ninth, not just as a testimony of what he left behind but, also, a declaration of where he hopes to go. At fifty-five, Leeth describes himself as “wide awake.” Plumbing was his identity, the one thing he stuck to. But now, sober and alert, he feels the weight of larger questions: Where am I headed? What is the purpose of the years that remain?
He reads Scripture and seeks deeper understanding. He searches the stories for answers about life and eternity. He is seeking a way to make a difference. “Serving others, that’s probably what I'm looking for right there,” he said.
And the questions that once haunted him—about death, about direction, about meaning—are gradually giving way to something quieter and more enduring: the desire to belong to Christ and to spend what remains of his life serving others.
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