God Is Rewriting My Story

The Testimony of Jessica

I’m not sharing my testimony because I got everything right.

I’m sharing it because God never gave up on me.

Philippians 1:6 says that He who began a good work in us will carry it on to completion. When I look back over my life, I can see something now that I couldn’t see while I was living through it:

God was working long before I understood what He was doing.

Seeds Planted in Broken Ground

My parents tried to raise me knowing God. My mother’s side of the family was Catholic, while my dad studied the Word but chose not to follow a denomination.

But my childhood was also surrounded by addiction.

Both of my parents struggled with it. I was very young when I became aware that my parents and many of the people around them were using drugs. There was fighting, instability, confusion, and the constant feeling that I never quite knew what was going to happen next.

When I was seven, my dad fell at work and slipped a disc in his lower back. He became disabled and, for a long time, could barely walk.

We eventually stopped attending church regularly, but my dad continued teaching us about God at home.

Those seeds mattered.

Proverbs 22:6 speaks about training a child in the way they should go. I believe something was planted inside me during those years that remained there even when I later ran as far from God as I possibly could.

The Wreck That Should Have Changed Everything

When I was eight, my parents decided to move our family from Shreveport to Niagara Falls, New York.

They wanted a fresh start.

But while traveling through Arkansas, the truck and trailer my dad and older brother were driving flipped three times on the highway directly in front of us.

I watched it happen.

My dad broke his neck and came dangerously close to paralysis, yet he walked out of the hospital that same day.

My brother went through the windshield and somehow came away with only a scratch above his eyebrow.

We lost almost everything we owned.

But we didn't lose them.

Even as a child, something inside me knew God had intervened.

I remember feeling that we were supposed to turn around and go home.

We continued to New York anyway.

And what was supposed to be our new beginning became another season of pain.

Pain I Didn't Know How to Carry

The following Fourth of July, my grandparents came to visit.

At midnight, my grandmother died.

Something changed in my mother after that. She was physically present, but emotionally and spiritually, it felt as though I had lost her too.

Then, during that same year, I was molested by a family member.

I was a child.

I didn't know how to process what had happened. I didn't know how to talk about it. So instead of dealing with my pain, I began learning how to escape it.

Cigarettes.

Weed.

Alcohol.

Stealing.

Eventually, witchcraft and the supernatural.

I was looking for something, although I didn't understand what I was looking for.

And underneath all of it, I still knew God was real.

At nine years old, I attended a birthday party where some girls were using a Ouija board. I refused to touch it because I believed there was something real behind it.

I was wandering into darkness while simultaneously knowing there was a God I was turning away from.

That contradiction would follow me for years.

I Learned How to Run

As I got older, I found healthier ways to escape too.

Tae Kwon Do helped me learn to defend myself after being bullied. I began running. I played musical instruments. I could play several by ear and read music.

God had given me gifts.

But I didn't understand their purpose.

Running especially became important to me. Looking back, there were moments while running when I believe God was meeting me there.

Yet I kept running from Him.

By twelve years old, I was selling drugs.

What began as destructive choices made by a hurting child eventually became a lifestyle that lasted approximately twenty years.

I thought I was controlling my life.

In reality, the things I thought I controlled were beginning to control me.

Motherhood Didn't Instantly Heal Me

During my senior year of high school, I became pregnant with my first daughter.

I graduated six months pregnant.

Pregnancy meant I couldn't continue running competitively, and opportunities I had worked toward disappeared.

But I received something infinitely more important:

I became a mother.

I wish I could say motherhood immediately changed everything.

It didn't.

I was still wounded.

After betrayal in my relationship, I returned to drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity because numbing pain was easier than confronting it.

For years, I moved from state to state, relationship to relationship, situation to situation.

Until eventually, everything caught up with me.

I Finally Prayed

A drug deal went bad, and I was arrested in New York.

I found myself facing fifteen years on charges involving home invasion, burglary, and assault.

And sitting inside that jail cell, something happened.

For the first time in probably ten years, I prayed.

Jeremiah 33:3 says:

“Call unto me, and I will answer thee.”

So I called.

And God answered.

But I need to be truthful about what happened next.

I wasn't completely surrendered.

I wanted God to rescue me from the consequences of my decisions, but I wasn't necessarily ready for God to change the person making those decisions.

I wanted a Savior from my circumstances before I understood that I needed a Savior from my sin.

Eventually, conviction began settling into my spirit.

I knew I needed to return to New York and face what I had done.

So I left my six-year-old daughter with my parents in Shreveport and drove back.

I didn't know whether I was walking into years of incarceration.

And because I didn't know how much freedom I had left, I abused that freedom too.

I made more destructive decisions.

Then I became pregnant again.

But God

Those two words appear over and over throughout my story.

But God.

The criminal charges were eventually dismissed after the victim stopped appearing in court.

Once again, mercy found me.

But now I was facing another pregnancy I hadn't planned.

I even considered abortion. I researched the cost and the procedure.

But I couldn't go through with it.

Something inside me said there had to be a reason this child was here.

God had answered me before.

Maybe He had something up His sleeve that I couldn't see yet.

In August 2009, about eight weeks pregnant, I returned to Louisiana.

I believe God used that pregnancy and that journey to sober me up and give me another opportunity.

Another beginning.

Another chance.

And eventually...

I went right back.

The Revolving Door

In 2016, I was arrested.

I escaped.

Then I turned myself in.

I got out that December and returned to the same lifestyle.

In March 2017, I was arrested again and released that August. I stayed sober for seven months, but I was still selling drugs.

By the following March, I was using again.

Then came June 2018.

Another arrest.

Another possible fifteen-year sentence.

But this time something was different.

June 17, 2018 became my sobriety date.

The jail cell that looked like the end of my freedom became part of the place where God began setting me free.

When Prison Became a Pulpit

I spent the next twenty-six months in Concordia Parish.

In February 2019, I received an eight-year sentence.

I expected to be released April 3, 2020.

Instead, my probation time was ordered consecutively with my sentence, effectively turning eight years into ten.

Then COVID hit.

My release was delayed again.

I wasn't released until August 8, 2020.

At the time, I saw another setback.

God saw something else entirely.

COVID shut down outside access to the jail.

Church groups couldn't come in.

Normal services stopped.

People from outside couldn't minister the way they had before.

But the Gospel didn't stop.

God simply raised somebody up on the inside.

Me.

The woman who had spent years running from God began helping lead church inside the jail.

I led Bible studies.

I talked about Jesus.

I encouraged women who were sitting in the same kind of brokenness I understood firsthand.

God began showing me that He hadn't wasted any part of my story.

Second Corinthians 1:4 teaches that God comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort others.

Suddenly, I was beginning to understand.

God wasn't approving of what I had done.

He was redeeming what I had done.

There is a difference.

God Started Rebuilding Me

Inside those walls, God began changing me from the inside out.

He taught me about grace.

Mercy.

Forgiveness.

Patience.

Love.

Healing.

Restoration.

And perhaps one of the hardest lessons of all:

My past did not have the authority to determine what God could do with my future.

Joel 2:25 speaks of God restoring the years the locust has eaten.

I had lost years.

Years to addiction.

Years to crime.

Years to broken relationships.

Years to incarceration.

Years to running.

But God wasn't finished writing.

He began restoring my relationship with my children.

He began restoring my identity.

He began showing me purpose where I had previously seen only wreckage.

And slowly, I began understanding something:

Maybe God wasn't just bringing me out.

Maybe one day He was going to send me back.

Not back into addiction.

Not back into bondage.

Not back into the person I had been.

But back into the places I understood.

Back toward people sitting in jail cells.

Back toward addicts.

Back toward women carrying trauma they don't know how to talk about.

Back toward people who think they've ruined too much, sinned too much, relapsed too many times, or wandered too far for Jesus to want them.

Because I know what that wilderness looks like.

I've lived there.

And I also know the One who knows the way out.

My story isn't the story of a woman who finally got herself together.

It's the story of a God who kept pursuing someone who repeatedly ran away.

I ran.

God pursued.

I fell.

God showed mercy.

I went back.

God called again.

I wasted years.

God redeemed them.

I thought prison meant my story was over.

God turned it into a place of ministry.

And if there's one thing my life has taught me, it's this:

Never put a period where God is still writing.

My story wasn't finished in addiction.

It wasn't finished in a jail cell.

It wasn't finished with an eight-year sentence.

And it isn't finished today.

Neither is yours.

God is still rewriting my story.

And maybe, if you're reading this from the middle of your own wilderness, He's not finished writing yours either.