I was given up for adoption by my fifteen year-old mother. That began a life of feeling rejected and unwanted like I just didn’t fit in anywhere. I was raised in a Christian home and a very good environment. I had good parents. They tried to have children for ten years, I believe. They couldn’t and thought they never would, so they adopted me. Then within about a year, within two years, Mom was pregnant with Jeannie, my sister.
At fourteen I had sex for the first time, and I started smoking pot and drinking. I was doing all of those things that teenagers do. When I was sixteen, they signed for me to get married. They absolutely didn’t know what else to do with me. Time went on, and I divorced by the time I was eighteen and remarried three weeks later.
My husband went to jail for stealing. He had to do quite a bit of time, some years. When I was twenty-four or twenty-five, I began to enter relationships with women. I was desperately seeking love and affection from anybody that would give it. I had been hurt by men so much that I thought I could find that in women. So I was in a ten-year relationship with a woman, and in 2013 she died. I wanted to die, too. I wanted to die, too.
I was introduced to meth. Within a month of doing meth for the first time, I was using a needle. I got down to just over a hundred pounds. I was gray. I chose to stay in a house that had no lights and no water. There were roaches and rats, just utter darkness just to do the drug for free. It was free because we made it all day. That’s all we did.
After about eight months of that, I was arrested for writing a bad check on this lady. Praise God! This time, even though I had been in and out of jail a lot in my life, nine times out of ten my parents would pay the bond, and I wouldn’t have to stay, but this time, my Daddy left me there. Thank God he did. Somewhere in there, I began to cry out to God, the God that I had been taught about as a child. “If you’re real, I need help! I don’t want to live this way anymore. I don’t want to do drugs anymore. I don’t want to be an addict anymore. Please help me!”
I asked the court to send me to Women at the Well rather than sit in jail. Since I got there, God has wrecked my world. It doesn’t matter to me anymore what people think. I know who I am in Christ. I have learned how to stand on the word of God and put the enemy in his place. He can’t convince me that I’m not wanted anymore. He will not convince me of that ever again.
I went home for Christmas for the first time in five years. I saw my youngest daughter for the first time in four or five years. My sister and I had not spoken a word in four years. I spent Christmas with all of them. In my mind, they loved her more than me because she is not adopted. She’s their kid. I didn’t realize that I was chosen until recently, really. When I really learned what it meant to be adopted into God’s family, I made the connection of how much my parents really chose me and wanted me. They will drive down here to see me. It started out with just two-hour visits. They would drive for six hours both ways to come spend two hours with me.
The restoration is unbelievable. It used to be so uncomfortable to talk to my dad. To sit in a room with him was awkward and it was uncomfortable. You could cut the tension with a knife. We would be on the phone, and there would be these awful long silences of no words from either person. Now it seems there is not enough time to talk. I have so much to tell him, and he has so much to tell me. I truly feel loved by them.
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