Ken Barun served President Ronald Reagan in the White House and helped found the Ronald McDonald House Charities, building it into one of the largest and most innovative charities in the world. Now he is the chief of staff for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. But for the first 25 years of his life, Barun showed very little evidence of these profound organizational abilities. He spent nearly a decade as a drug addict. He got clean and sober, but it took even longer for him to come to know Jesus Christ. We started our conversation by talking about the early years of his life.

We are in your office in Charlotte on the fabulous campus of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). But it hasn’t always been this way for you. For me, personally, it hasn’t always been like this. God has been such a blessing to me and my family, however, through some very difficult times. I grew up in New York. I’m a Jew. My parents were Orthodox Jews, grew up in the Bronx in New York. …

I grew up in New York City part of the time and moved to Westchester County. When I was there, I was trying to fit into a crowd. I wound up being an average athlete. I jumped in some basketball games. I wound up playing with some kids who decided they wanted to smoke pot. This is 1961 — a long time ago. I didn’t want to do it because I knew it was bad but finally gave into peer pressure and started smoking pot, which led into years of substance abuse and addiction, culminating, or climaxing, at one point around the time I was 18 years old. My parents disowned me, kicked me out. I went into a drug program in Houston as a result of a Catholic nun.

How did you end up in Houston from New York? By this time, I was addicted to heroin. My parents kicked me out, and I wound up going across country in a station wagon with a buddy of mine who got back from Vietnam. He wanted to help me get off of the heroin and thought that if we went on this trip he could help me do it. But I got deeper into it. …

This would’ve been the late 60s? This was ’69. … We’d gone through Texas on the way. I liked Texas. He decided he was going to go surfing in Hawaii, and that’s where we parted. I went back to Texas with about $20 in my pocket, looking for drugs and wound up there. I met my first wife there. In a flurry of romance and drugs, we got married. I was 21; she was 18. She got pregnant immediately, so we had a baby, then I went back on drugs. I got off for just a little while, then got back on drugs.

Even though you were raised as a Jew, I’m assuming that religion was not in your life at this point. Were you considering spiritual matters at all? It’s a great question because I did have a relationship with God, but God was more like my silent friend, my mysterious friend. I would always talk to God. I knew it was God. I was talking to God, but it was about things that were happening at the time. Please, God, do this. Please, God, do that.

Read the article “From Homeless Drug Addict to Ministry Leader” on worldmag.com.