At 7 Springs Ministries, our ministry is dedicated to giving hope to the hopeless. After Sheena came to Esther House, our long-term residential women’s ministry located in Anniston, Alabama, she experienced the transformational love of God, rescuing her from a life of self-defeating behavior. This is her story.
I was adopted by my aunt when I was about two and a half years old because my parents were drug addicts. My aunt did the best she could, but my sister and I bounced back and forth between her house and my parents’. By the time I was a freshman, I had been to 16 different schools.
From the age of 15 until my 20s, I was on some sort of pill. It didn’t matter what kind it was—I would take it. I got clean in 2013 after two years at a clinic, and I stayed clean for four and a half years. Then I started taking meth.
I wound up in jail, and one day the girl in the bunk next to me received an application for 7 Springs Ministries’ recovery program. I got my son’s father to give them a call, and they said they had a bed for me. When we went to court, the DA and my probation officer wanted me to go to prison, but my lawyer requested rehab. Since I had been clean for about five months, the judge gave me a chance to prove myself. I had to sit in jail for another month, and then I was court-ordered to 7 Springs.
I remember my first day at Esther House like it was yesterday. I met a sweet woman who became one of my best friends. She could tell I was scared, so she took me under her wing and helped me settle in. She made the transition much easier.
I tell all the girls in here, “This place will change your life if you let it. You just have to listen and have an open mind.”
If I didn’t have God, I wouldn’t be able to do this. In the past, when I got clean, I did it for other people or because I had to. This time, it was different.
The first Sunday I came to Word Alive, I went to the altar and a woman from the worship team prayed with me. I’ve never cried so hard in my life, and after that, I just had a peace about me.
I had been angry with God for a long time, and I didn’t think that he could love somebody like me. But when that woman prayed for me, she said things that no one could have known but God, so at that moment, I knew He was real.
After that, things started happening. My mom and dad, whom I hadn’t seen in five years, came to visit me. At Thanksgiving, I got to see one of my children for the first time in over a year and a half. It was the most amazing feeling just to hug him.
My best advice is: Give it to God. Trust Him with everything, even if you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Trust Him. It might not work out in your timing, but it will work out.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11.)
