On a cool, sunny day, a little over 2 years ago my life changed irrevocably. That was the day Christ left the 99 to rescue me. I'll tell you all about it, but first a little background about myself. While I didn’t have a dream childhood, it wasn't a horrible childhood either. I grew up fast with a couple of different traumatic events that happened to me. The event that affected me most as a childhood sexual abuse. This led to years of guilt, shame, broken and toxic relationships, and promiscuity from an early age.
For many years, my identity was shaped by what he had done to me. I felt like I needed to be in a relationship in order to be validated and that it was okay to be sexually active. At a very tender age, I thought that a sense of completion and comfort was going to be found in the way I used my body. Because of the shame, I never told my family. I feared that they might not believe what I said, or worse, they would believe me and I would be the reason my family was turned upside down. So, I kept it to myself until recently.
In addition to that, several of my family members struggled with alcohol addiction. I blocked most of it out, but there are still memories of yelling, fighting, and holes being punched in the wall. In the summer of 2002, my whole family’s lives took a turn none of us would expect. My brother was the baby of our family: fun-loving and social. We didn’t realize how much pain that he was in, but it was evidently more than he could bear. On July 13th my baby brother put a shotgun to his head and took his life.
My heart and soul died that day with him. My heart ceased to live and I began to spiral down into a depression that I didn’t think I could ever come out of. I became a recluse and started missing work. All I wanted was to find a way to bury the pain. I had already been turning away from my Catholic upbringing, however at this point I turned completely away from God in pure anger. I completely blamed God, but the truth was, that the “blame” rested with my brother, and the pain he was in that drove him to do what he did. My biggest questions were “WHY?”
“Why did he take his life, why did he think suicide was the answer, why that day, and why at my grandmas? Why didn’t he put in more effort to seek help? What had hurt him so bad?
Could I have stopped him? Could I have helped him in some way? Did I play a part in this? Where was God?” I thought to myself, “If God was so great and all knowing and powerful, then why did He let this happen?!”
Less than a year later my offender also committed suicide. He had went missing for a handful of weeks until he was finally found, having hung himself in a pole barn. I was not able to mourn the loss because I was just beginning to mourn the loss of my brother. This is the point in my life when I gave up on any hope that there was anyone out there who could help me, let alone a greater being. I didn’t know anything about the gospel of Christ, so I turned to the one thing that gave me comfort. Drugs became the escape from my problems, starting with weed. At first, I was only using it on the weekends, but then it became once or twice a day. Eventually it became habitual.
During this time I fell hard for a guy from Cincinnati. Soon after, I moved there to be with him until I discovered he was cheating on me and the relationship fell apart. To cope, I went through a spell of partying and disregarding others. I was drinking, smoking pot, and popping pills. There was no care for the people I was sleeping with. I didn’t care about kicking them out the door, or how they felt, or whether or not I even liked them. All I knew is that I was hurt and hurting, and I once again turned to sex for answers.
I soon found though, that I didn't have the heart for city living and was failing at it epically. So, I decided to move back home. As they say, “you can take the girl out of the country but you can't take the country out of the girl”. Not long after I moved back to Indiana my life changed again: this time in a beautiful, wonderful way.
As soon as I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, I immediately stopped the “devil may care” lifestyle I was living. For the first 5 years, I raised her by myself. We struggled to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck and bouncing from place to place. Despite that, I loved motherhood. She was my angel baby. When she was 5, her dad and I decided that we wanted to try to be a family. A couple of years in, we got pregnant with our second huge blessing and he was great with the kids. But despite being a good father, he was not good for me.He was verbally and mentally abusive and it turned me into a shell of the person I had been. For the sake of our children, I tried to stay.
After our son was born, I was diagnosed with postpartum depression. On top of that, all of the things I had been burying came boiling up and I lost my mind. Tired of fighting and hurting, I lost myself to suicidal ideations. In some way, I started to understand why my brother had done what he did. After several trips to psych wards in crisis, I finally started pulling myself back together, but by that time it was too late to repair my family. After going through 2 suicides already in our family, I can’t begin to imagine what they were going through as I myself struggled with suicidal ideations.
The only bright things in my life were my children and I wasn’t stable enough in any way to care for them. They were the only reason I had had to get out of bed and they weren’t there. It took me even further down the spiral I was on. I had to literally leave them with their father and walk out of the door, turning my back. There was no way I could take them away from a stable life when I had no idea where I was going to lay my head, or where my next meal was coming from. I shattered that day, it was the beginning of my end.
During all of this, I was introduced to methamphetamine by my so-called best friend. With meth I could bury, numb and escape from all the pain and everything I was going through. I chose to play in the devil's playground and I got badly burned. It took me 1.5 seconds to ruin my life and it’s taking me years to get it back.
After their father and I split up, I embarked on a road of self-destruction that finally ended with me behind bars. Only this time, the drug use was more severe. This time, I was mentally broken all the way. I saw no way out and no light at the end of the tunnel. All I saw was a bleak future, alone, and without my kids. I couldn’t take it. Instead of dealing with it, I tried to bury it.
This brings me, finally, to that cool late spring day that my life changed irrevocably forever. I had finally arrived at a place in my life where my children were able to visit for brief periods of time.Late in the evening that day, the cops and CPS showed up at the cabin where I and my children were staying. Upon serving a search warrant they found used paraphernalia in the home.
I plead guilty to a level 5 felony possession of meth in front of a minor and a level six felony neglect of a dependent charge due to my children being present during my arrest.
The guilt and shame I felt that day still rides me to this day. I entered my cell on my knees, lost, tired, and broken… Crying out to God for help, and God heard me. He heard my cries for help and he left the 99 to rescue me.
Matthew 18:12-14 says “What do you think, if a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the 99 on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off, and if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the 99 that did not wander off, and in the same way your father in Heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish”. I was that lost sheep.
The day I found out I was going to prison, I hit the bottom of my rock bottom. During that 9 months, God replaced my heart of stone with a heart of flesh and a desire to seek Him. I knew that I needed help and He was the last place for me to look for it. Ezekiel 36:26-27 says “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws”. And He did just that.
I filed a pro se modification to modify my sentence, so that I could be released to rehab. With a week to find and get accepted into an inpatient program, I had everybody I knew on the outside looking for any place but Through The Gate. I didn’t want to go there because I did not want to be away from my kids for another 8 months. However, door after door got slammed in my face, nothing would open. I filled my application out for Through The Gate and had my acceptance letter within a couple of hours. God knew exactly where He wanted me.
At this point in time I didn't know exactly how to respond to my new desires, but God had me in his palm. Through The Gate, and 8 month inpatient discipleship program was exactly what He had planned for me. I arrived there on November 3rd. On November 7th, I spoke the words that saved my soul. Upon hearing the gospel, accepting Christ as my savior and repenting of my sin, a feeling of absolute peace and warmth came over me that I had never felt before. The blood of Christ had washed my soul clean, and it was Christ's redeeming love washing over me that I was feeling.
Throughout my childhood, my views of religion were all works based. I believed that the Lord was unknowable and I could never be good enough to get to Him. No matter how hard I tried or what good I tried to do, nothing would have ever been good enough for me to get to heaven. It seemed like I was going to hell no matter what I did, so I decided to enjoy the trip.
The knowledge I have gained about the gospel has shown me how wrong those thought processes really were. I’m not going to hell, it’s not a works based thing. Jesus’s sacrifice saved us from the grave. All I had really needed to do was repent and confess my sins and let Christ into my life. I just needed to start following Him. Looking back, I can see God's hand in everything that happened; from His perfect protection in my past, to His timing in my arrest, to making me sit until I was truly over all parts of my past.
Dealing with my childhood sexual trauma, and the loss of my brother in such a violent and unexpected way, then bringing it out of the dark and into the light, has helped me break most of the chains that I had been living in. I’m now able to lay it down at the foot of the cross, just letting Him take it. I’ve since come to realize that it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t do anything to deserve it, and it’s not my guilt and shame to carry.
Those times are when I lean into God the most and know that He saves all of our tears in a jar. I remember that when we get to heaven there will be no more tears and all of the pain will be gone. Knowing that my grief and pain are temporary brings me comfort when I think of my brother.
At Through The Gate, I've learned how to give the gospel to others, how to correctly learn to read and study the Bible, and that it's okay to ask questions. I've also learned how to present the evidence of God in apologetics. The wisdom and knowledge I've gained at Through The Gate is immeasurable. I was tired, so tired, so lost and so, SO broken: living in the darkest depths of my own personal hell. The verses that speak the most to me are my life verses in Matthew 11:28-30. They read “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart. and you will find rest for your soul. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light”.
I am so thankful to Through the Gate for everything they have done for me. I am a born-again new creation thanks to God’s work there. The biggest challenge since graduating TTG has been spiritual discipline, keeping my routines in place. Now that I’m not in a controlled environment, it’s easier to make excuses. So, instead of hitting the snooze button, I have started setting my alarm for 6am. I know that I need that time with Him and being intentional about my prayer life.
Had somebody told me that I would be in this place 3 years ago, I would have told them they were crazy. Absolutely crazy! I had no belief in God, no inclinations of seeking Him, and I was deep in addiction. Now, He has totally turned my life around; when you do life God's way, things have a really strange way of working out. He uses all things for the good of those who love Him. Now I’m in a place in my life where I can thank God that I got in trouble when I did. With the path I was on, I would have ended up behind bars for much longer. That, or buried in a coffin.
I’m looking forward to being baptized with Rock Point Church at the creek baptism. I look at my baptism as my physical declaration of my faith and my choice to pursue the life God has for me. My blood family is slowly dwindling away, so to me, Church membership means ‘family’: brothers and sisters in Christ who can help keep me on the path I’m on.
I pray that my story helps you or someone in your life to find peace and comfort in Christ Jesus; for He is the way, the truth, and the life.
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