Where I Came From

My childhood was not the kind people talk about easily.

We spent a lot of time either homeless or without running water or electricity. Stability was something other families had. My parents were deep in addiction — drugs and alcohol — and the chaos that follows that kind of bondage followed us everywhere. I dropped out of school in the sixth grade to care for my younger brother and sister. Not because I wanted to. Because there was no one else.

When I was 16, my dad went to prison. A week later, my mom was taken to county jail. And just like that, I was the adult in the room — a teenager with no diploma, no safety net, and two kids depending on me to hold things together.

I learned early how to keep going when there was no good reason to. I learned how to hold things together on the outside while quietly falling apart on the inside. And I learned, in the most painful way possible, that a home can be a place of deep wounding — or, with God's help, a place of profound healing.

The Road to Rescue

The years that followed were hard in ways I am still learning to name. Without the foundation I needed, I wandered into a life I am not proud of. Sin has a way of finding the wounded, and I was very wounded.

But God.

I met my then-boyfriend, now-husband, and God rescued both of us — at the same time, in the same season, as if He had planned it that way all along. I was saved in 2010, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Saved from the life I was living. Saved from the path I was on. Saved by a grace I had done nothing to deserve.

The losses did not stop after salvation. My best friend was murdered and left in a cow field. To this day, no one knows exactly what happened to her. A cousin by marriage overdosed on drugs. Grief has visited this life more than once, and it has not always been gentle.

The siblings I dropped out of school to protect are still in the middle of their own storms. My brother is in prison. My sister — the little girl I held together when our parents couldn't — got pregnant at twelve, and today she is fighting both a strong addiction and stage 4 lung cancer. My dad, still struggling with the damage decades of hard living have done to his body, now needs a full lung transplant to survive.

And yet — in the middle of all of it — God has allowed me to lead both my brother and my dad to salvation. That is not a small thing. That is everything. They still struggle. The prison bars are still real. The medical reports are still hard. But their souls belong to Jesus, and nothing can take that away.

I tell you these things not for sympathy, but for honesty. Because I know there are women reading this who are also watching people they love suffer in ways they cannot fix. Who are praying the same prayers year after year and wondering if God is listening. He is. I do not always understand His timing or His methods. But I have seen Him show up in the darkest places too many times to stop trusting Him now.

My parents are only now beginning to come out of the addiction that defined so much of our story — slowly, painfully, still struggling. There is no tidy ending to write there. Just ongoing grace, ongoing prayer, and a God who is not finished with any of us.

We are living miracles. My husband and I both know it.