I started selling drugs. Cocaine. Of course I got addicted to it, and started losing money. I started forging checks against my Grandmother’s account. I still deal with much guilt with that choice. God still deals with me about that. Forgery was my charge to begin with. The first year was about $300,000.00 I forged on her account. Then it got to where I was breaking into her house. Then I started buying checks from people, and forging people’s names on everyone else’s checks. Then the burglaries began. Wow, I’ve been charged with over a hundred felonies.
It wasn’t until I lost my grandmother that I started really feeling the hurt and pain. I went NUTS! I starting doing anything I could do to get money. I was running from the Law for about a year. When I finally ended up in jail for the fourth time in my life at forty-four years old I was bent and broken and scared. I didn’t want to go on anymore. It was like, “God, I’m ready to die.”
I can remember laying on the top bunk in jail, and I had two hundred Ativan pills [for anxiety disorder]. I took all of them. I had repeatedly tried to kill myself three or four times over last twenty-five years, but God intervened every time, and said, “No, I’ve got something for you.” This time I was serious. I really wanted to die because I did not want to go back to prison again. So I took the two hundred pills. The last thing I remember saying is, “God, I’m ready to die.” All I could think of at that moment,-I couldn’t breathe. I just closed my eyes. I woke up in a hospital. God had intervened again. You know, the Devil is a liar. It was like God saying, “You’re not going anywhere. You’re my child.” That’s when I was introduced to the Transformation Project. I remember sitting in jail, and them talking to me. I was, like, “These people are so happy. They’ve got something that I want.”
I remember getting on my knees in my jail cell. I said, “God, I know I’m going to prison, but I don’t want to go to prison feeling broken.” They [Transformation Project personnel] just picked me up and loved me. They were there for me all through prison. I took the class repeatedly, and got all the healing I could get. I was gone for three-and-a-half years, this last time. When I came out they were there with open arms. My first day out I went to Transformation…, and I haven’t stopped going. I graduated from the program. I’m now a facilitator, and I want to share my story with people, and love them until they learn to love themselves, just like they did for me.
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