A Message & Confession from a Miserable, Ungrateful Woman
I was a thirteen-year-old alcoholic who drank myself into oblivion. After multiple rounds of alcohol poisoning, sexual assault, and close calls with being beaten to death with a crowbar and trafficked at the Mexico border, my reckless, rebellious lifestyle came to an excruciating end at the age of nineteen.
God went easy on me in the beginning: He let me go to juvenile after a high-speed police chase instead of letting me die in the crash—I didn’t learn anything. He saved me from the poisoning, the crowbar, and the truck driver who’d intended to sell me in Mexico—I didn’t learn anything, then, either. He even gave me a baby boy, which straightened me out a lot, but I still drank. When all of that didn’t work, He allowed me to go through the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life. I ended up in a hospital for four days with pancreatitis, where the doctor warned me that if I ever drank again, it’d probably kill me.
I did stop drinking, cold turkey, but it took so much more than it should have to wake me up from that madness.
But I still lived for the world and not for God, the One Who saved me from myself.
I smoked my first cigarette at age eleven and didn’t stop until my lung collapsed at thirty. Five days in a hospital bed with a tube hanging from my chest that made an awful sucking noise finally woke me from the self-abuse, and I never smoked again.
But I still lived for the world and not for God, the One Who saved me from myself.
After half a lifetime of rebellion and poverty, God blessed me with a bestselling book and more money than I knew what to do with in 2012. This may not seem in the same category as alcoholism, lung collapses, and brushes with death, but I assure you, in its own twisted way, it is.
For the next eleven years, I slowly lost the close bond I once had with my young children, letting the world raise, guide, and comfort them in my place. I forgot how to be frugal and grew wasteful. I forgot the woman I had been raised to be, one who had little yet thrived in poverty, because she knew no other way. Money changed me. It manipulated me, drained me, and opened yet another door for others to use and take advantage of me.
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