Gabrielle's Story

An ambulance rushed Gabrielle into the emergency room. The medical team worked all night to resuscitate her as her life hung in the balance. She had dangerously overdosed on drugs.

“I was severely strung out on heroin and meth. I couldn’t even breathe on my own,” Gabrielle remembers. Her body began shutting down after smoking that lethal combination.

Thankfully, the doctors saved her life that day. When she got out of the hospital, she went to jail for selling drugs with her ex-boyfriend. The season spent in jail gave Gabrielle time to think about her past and the choices that led her to incarceration. “By the time I was in 10th grade, I was a full-blown opiate addict,” she recalls.

“Then I started using meth at about the age of 18.” It’s hard for Gabrielle to pinpoint the exact reason why she turned to drugs. “First it was curiosity. Then I just started hanging out with people going the wrong direction,” she says. Her parents noticed a difference in her right away. “I was always running and not coming home, and they were worried.”

Unable to control Gabrielle’s behavior, her parents kicked her out of the house at the end of high school. Without a place to call home, Gabrielle was driven into an abusive relationship with a much older man.

She was taken advantage of regularly. “It was really dysfunctional. We ended up living in the woods in a tent. It was really cold,” Gabrielle remembers. Her sense of self-worth sank lower and lower until she felt like she had nothing left. She was willing to do whatever it took in order to stay high. There was even a time when she used her body in order to support her drug habit.

Homeless in the winter

Gabrielle’s addiction was so all-consuming that it robbed her of everything. She had no self-worth. The only thing she cared about was getting high. It was hard to stay warm and dry while living outdoors in the winter, she remembers. She often felt hungry. They were eating just once or twice a week. Just as bad, it was freezing cold. Gabrielle describes having to bathe in frosty weather as degrading. “I remember having to take a shower with a hose and bucket. It was really uncomfortable,” she says.

It wasn’t until Gabrielle’s close brush with death in the hospital — then her jail sentence for pushing drugs — that she came to this realization: “When I get out of jail, I need to make a change.”

From lost to found

True to her promise, after her release, Gabrielle went straight to Hope Place, the women’s recovery program at the Mission. Now, almost a year later, Gabrielle feels like a different person.

“I would never have imagined my life as it is today. I’m becoming a good friend, a good daughter, and a good sister. I have real values and morals. I have a desire for a new way of life,” she shares. Part of that new way of life for Gabrielle is trusting God.

Gabrielle is humbled by the fact that she was completely lost, but God sought her out. He met her in the midst of her brokenness, and He rescued her. Though she’d forgotten her worth, now she knows who she is: “I’m a new creation in Christ,” she declares. Today, Gabrielle’s walking forward in the freedom she’s discovered in God’s goodness and grace.