I grew up in the Bible Belt, and if you had asked me growing up, if I knew Jesus, I would have told you “yes,” but I didn’t actually know much about Jesus. My father was an alcoholic, and my parents were really young. They did the best they could. My mom came to know the Lord when I was about 16. By that time, my dad was struggling with his own addiction; my brother and I were battling our addictions. My mom just started planting seeds of the gospel in my life, but I didn’t want anything to do with it.
I spent most of my adult life looking for things outside of myself to bring me comfort. During that time, I slowly started to lose everything. I lost my job, I lost my house, I lost my car, I lost my family. I lost custody of my son. It was this place of just complete brokenness. I got to a point where the only job I could hold down was a bartending job, and that was just because I could go to work and drink and do drugs.
And I think at that moment I got to the end of myself, and I was so broken. And like I said, my mom had been planting seeds of the gospel in my life since I was 16 years old. So, I cried out to God who I didn’t really know or understand, and I asked Him to change me. I didn’t want to continue to live the way I was living.
The Lord started to change things. I knew that I couldn’t go back to that bartending job. So, I got on a Greyhound bus the next day to Georgia to be with my mom because I knew that she was the only person that I knew that knew the Lord.
As a teenager, I had watched God change her life completely. So, I went there, and I went to her church. There were all these gray-haired, little, old ladies, and I looked crazy covered in tattoos. All I could think was these women are going to judge me. But when I got to that altar to let them know, “Hey, I’m following Jesus one way or another,” those women wrapped their arms around me. They said, “We’ve been praying for you for 15 years.”
Those women had been praying for me since my mom came to know the Lord when I was 16 years old. And they just loved me, and they discipled me through the Word, and they were very kind. And it wasn’t like, you shouldn’t wear that, or maybe you shouldn’t get so many tattoos. They just showed me what the Word said. They loved me. They pointed me to Jesus. They taught me how to be a woman of God.
I can tell you that the local church is equipped; the local church is equipped to deal with addiction because it’s the Word of God and, it’s discipleship that changes people.