“I was 13 years old when I started smoking pot,” Debora says. “And then I had some trauma in my teen years. I was raped four times between the age of 14 and 16, and I turned to drugs to cope and survive. It was very hard on me. I felt very lost. I felt my soul had left my body. I was so empty and so confused and so lonely. I didn’t know where to turn.”
“I thought it was my fault for so, so long.”
Debora loved going to Sunday School as a child. Whenever her mom and stepdad stayed out late partying, she would pray that her mom would come home safely. Eventually, she stopped praying and when her mom died in a car crash, Debora blamed herself. “I thought it was my fault for so, so long,” she says. “The misery and the sorrow and the suffering I endured, and the trauma was just horrendous. And I thought she was gone because of me, because I stopped praying.”
Debora’s mom’s death, along with the abuse she suffered, drove her to despair. “Using drugs was the only way I could cope and live to just survive to try to be normal because I didn’t feel normal,” she says. “I felt I had a sign on my forehead that said, ‘Hurt me, mess with me.’ And I buried that deep, deep inside. I never told anybody about my trauma.”
"I had nowhere to go.”
Though Debora kept her experiences secret, the impact of the trauma she’d experienced was evident. “It was just manifesting itself in very many ways,” she says. “Mostly it increased my vices … I started smoking meth when I was 41, and that lingered for 25 years where I was smoking it every day, lost myself, almost lost my life. I thought God had left me.”
In early 2019, Debora became suicidal when her boyfriend of 20 years broke up with her. “I became very suicidal and wound up on the psych ward (two times) for suicidal tendencies,” she says.
Debora became homeless. “I was homeless once I left the relationship and went to the psych ward, then coming out of the hospital, I had nowhere to go,” she says.
"For the first time in a long, long time, I felt love.”
Debora gave her life to Jesus in May of 2019. Not long after, she was accepted into the Mission’s Women’s Recovery Program at Hope Place. “When I first got here, everybody just had open arms and was so encouraging and so polite and complimentary,” she says, “and it just started to fill my heart … And it was so inviting and so warm and so comfortable. And for the first time in a long, long time, I felt love.”
Debora says the most impactful thing about being at Hope Place has been getting to know the other women, her core sisters. “Growing up, I didn’t have very many friends,” she says. “I didn’t know how to take care of myself. And through looking at my core sisters and how beautiful they are and how strong they were, and my big sister, when I first got here was beautiful. And I thought, I want to be like her. And it was just so encouraging.”
"I’m so excited for the future.”
Debora says she is usually the first one downstairs in the morning. She loves having her coffee and greeting the other women as they make their ways downstairs throughout the morning as well.
Debora’s relationship with God has grown since coming to the Mission. “I am walking with the Holy Spirit,” she says. “I’m becoming more Christlike every day. I feel the joy and the peace of Jesus Christ in my heart.”
Debora knows God has a plan for her. Recently, she was accepted into the Mission’s Graduate Internship Program, a 12-month program for recovery program graduates who want to serve in ministry. “God has fulfilled my prayers,” she says. “It’s a miracle. I’m so happy to be here and … I’m so excited for the future.”
