Pt 1
THIS WAS VERY LONG POST, SO ITS GONNA BE A PT 1 & PT 2
PART 1:
Hey my brothers and sisters in Christ!
This is Katzie's daughter, Kelly and I felt compelled to respond to this post myself, since it is after all, about me.
I wanted to first and foremost those who responded and gave their advice and opinions, it was greatly appreciated by my mother and also to me. She shared it with me today and it made me want to start signing back on TalkJesus again. I hadn't been on TalkJesus since August and it was long overdue (I left for a drug rehab facility in August and I just recently came home a couple weeks ago and haven't had acess to a computer regulary until a couple days ago). Okay, so heres the deal, my story.
I was away for 3 months in a very strict therapuetic community drug facility. It was a very hard thing to go thru, probably one of the hardest things I have ever had to endure in my entire life and I have went thru a lot of hard things in my life from living on the streets (due to my addiction), to being in jail several upon several times(again, due to bad decision making due to my addiction) and this was probably the worst believe it or not. This was a secular program, I had prayed and prayed to the Lord on help and guidance in trying to get me into the right program for myself, the one that was going to benefit me the best.
Over the past 3 years, myself and my family had been trying to get myself into treatment, and there was always something that happened that got into my way w/getting into treatment.
Over the summer upon going into treatment, I had spent a majority of time with my good friends Anthony, Gerry and Krissy. Anthony, I had met in the rooms of NA early in the summer, and he had expressed his love for the Lord and him and I shared the same faith, so it was nice to meet someone in NA (Narcotics Anonymous) who shared the same love for Jesus, b/c NA is a spiritual program, not a religious program, and religion and God is not spoken about much there. It's more so, "Higher Power" and so forth.
So, I was very excited to meet Anthony.
He had recently gotten saved a month or two prior to me meeting him and he was really on fire for the Lord, but very early in his walk. I have been saved since 1997, but have back slide time and time again, but in May of 08, I decided to really rededicate my life to the Lord. So, meeting Anthony was a true blessing for me, because I had finally found someone I could fellowship in the Lord with, and we would spend countless hours on the phone going over scripture and for awhile, he was my only close friend besides my mother I could really fellowship in the Lord with.
I started attending his church every Sunday and then every Tuesday and Thursday go to Praise and Worship services. At that point, I had met a christian female from that church named Krissy, who I became good friends with as well. But, her friendship wasn't as tight as Anthony and I's.
Then during the middle of the summer, at a church event, Krissy had invited her friend Gerry and as it turned out, I knew Gerry from my ex b/f Mike, and I always knew him to be this strong man of God, and there were several times over the years, I would go on Myspace and see Gerry's myspace and want to reach out to him about getting back involved in the church and walk with God and stuff, but I never did, so I was excited with this oppurtinity to see him again.
From this day on, myself, Gerry, Anthony, and Krissy began to hang out all the time. Gerry took a extreme liking to Anthony and asked Anthony if he wanted to be a disciple under him. Anthony had been struggling with a lot of lust issues, looking @ porn, having sex, lustful desires in general, masturbation, etc etc, cursing, smoking cigarettes, etc. As time went on, and he really pressed into God and was being disciplined under Gerry, he started to be delivered from a lot of these things. As the summer went on for me, I was back and forth, back and forth. Gerry had said how he used to be addicted to drugs, and had to take medication for mental disease and how he used to be a homosexual and have HIV and Jesus healed him from all these things and how He can do the same from me as well.
I began to feel very incompetent around my friends, including Anthony because although even though I backslide in my life, I always felt strong in my faith and knew I loved Jesus with all my heart and did the best I could, at times, I felt like it wasn't good enough and I was a "less than" Christian then them because I didn't pray in tongues, and the rest of them did.
Gerry infact told me that every Christian needs to pray in tongues and if they don't, they aren't truly praying because they aren't being spirit filled. It made me feel very bad about myself and my walk with God because in all my years, I've never spoke in tongues, and I never recalled hearing anywhere that you needed to speak in tongues in order to "truly" pray and from what I know and recall, God gives people gifts, some people have the gift of tongues, some have of translation of tongues, some of prophecy, some of discernment, etc. I have the gift of discernment, and for the long time the enemy made me believe that the discernment was actually paranoia and I was always thinking that I was just thinking crazy thoughts and I never wanted to share my gift because I was afraid to.
But, anyways, Gerry would always battle me about that with some scripture and his churches beliefs, and since Anthony also spoke in tongues now too, I felt like it was pointless for me to continue arguing about that anymore. So, I tried to do other things instead. I tried to stop taking my medication for bi-polar disorder because Gerry said mental disease is a demon anyways, and Jesus is a healer and if I truly believe, then I can be healed. And of course, I wanted to be healed.
Gerry, Anthony and Krissy would pray for me often, and also pray for healing for my addiction.
They also tried to tell me that going to NA wasn't exactly good for me anymore because NA doesn't have many Christians there and Jesus is a healer and He can help me better then any room full of addicts, sinful living addicts can, so I pretty much stopped going to NA meetings and would just go to church and church services during the week and maybe I would attend a church based 12 step meeting but unfortunately it wasn't my time and it all backfired in my face basically and it led me to go back out there and relapse towards the end of the summer and start using drugs and display my normal addict behavior of lying. Because I was trying to live a double life for awhile and convince everyone that what I was doing was working because I felt like if I told anyone it wasn't working and I did relapse that it would just prove to them all again how "less than" of a Christian I really was.
So, I finally started getting honest, and I would get honest and do right for awhile and cry and beg and plead with God and have my friends pray over me and I would stay clean for a week or so and then I'd go and do the same thing.
I felt like such a failure because Anthony and I had met Gerry around the same time, and although when Anthony met Gerry, he had 18 months clean time already and I only had 2, our walk with God was pretty much similiar and he had just taken off and was on fire and just absorbed everything Gerry had to say to him and I felt like there was something wrong with me, so I felt a ,lot of shame and for the first time in my life, I felt like maybe I didn't have a good relationship with God like I thought I did because look at them and their relationship with God and look @ me?
So, finally I went into the rehab, after praying and praying and the doors opening up for this rehab 3 different occassions, I knew altho it was a secular program, it was the program God had wanted me to go into because there was things I needed to recieve there that I would not be able to receive other places I suppose.
Before going there, I had a little going away party and everyone was great to me, and told me how much they would miss me and everyone was crying and told me how they would be in prayer constantly for me and how they would write me etc etc. Even thru all this, and all the changes, Anthony and I still maintained a closer relationship, I still leaned on him more than anyone else, and we still even struggled with certain issues together. We both struggled bad with lust issues and at times, we struggled with them for each other, but never acted out on them, but sometimes we would watch movies together and cuddle and the cuddling would turn into more then friendly and one time we kissed, and we felt so convicted, I literally threw up and we both cried for hours and repented, and we got thru it.
Gerry had grown very jealous of our relationship and never wanted Anthony and I to ever hang out alone and if we did, he was always calling all the time, infact, Gerry never wanted Anthony out of his sight period, he just wanted to be around Anthony all the time, just claiming that he was his best friend, but discernment led me to feel something else, but I've never said anything. But, I believe Gerry might have more than a just friend feeling and I've had this feeling since the summer. But, anyways.
I went to the program, and at first I hated every minute of it and I hated that it was secular and not Christian and I really felt so much evil and demonic influences all around in there and it was destroying me at first. The enemy worked so hard at trying to keep me around from the Lord.
At first they completely banned reading the Bible other than in your room, and you had to be out of your room at 6:30am and back in your room at 9pm and lights out a half hour later and in that short time you had time to shower and read the bible. That really upset me and I was getting discouraged on a daily basis because I never had time to read the bible and I felt like I was really getting disconnected because there was barely any Christians there to fellowship with, but then there was a service that started to come every Sunday and they would come and do a bible study and other wonderful things, and it was really nice and it really helped out a lot.
The program itself had taught me a lot of things about myself that I would have never learned in any other program, it was all about behavior modification, and in this world and in my addictive lifestyle, I picked up many behaviors that I didn't even know I displayed, so this program pointed them out and then put you on a path to correct them. As much as you might have hated to hear it at first.
For a long time, men would always treat me like a piece of meat and very sexual, and I never could understand why. Yes, I became a sexual person later in life, but men would just treat me like that without me even saying two words out of my mouth and I would always wonder, "why?" This program taught me that the way I walked, talked, sat, etc, portrayed a sexual way about myself and that is why men treated me the way they did. It's not just words that come out of your mouth or how you dress, but things you don't even know that you are doing, like body language, tone in your voice, how you cross your legs, playing with your hair, everything!
When I entered that program, I had tons of lustful desires and struggled with that on a daily basis, this program was co-ed, but if you even so much as looked at a guy, you got in trouble, and if you talked to a guy, forget about it, even more trouble.
So, I learned how to completely control my lustful desires and then ultimately, they were removed. So, like I said, God puts us places for a reason, and I needed to be in this place for many reason, but those two reasons above were 2 big examples of how that place helped me in ways I didn't even think about because I was entering a drug rehab, I thought I would just get help on how to stay off drugs, I never would have imagined the other things. Not to mention how I found peace of mind from painful childhood memories by talking about things I never spoke about in my life, etc. It helped a lot.
Anyways, coming home from the program, I discovered Anthony and Gerry had cut Krissy off because she had chose to start going with a man who she was with previously who did nothing but use and abuse her and he was doing the same now, and it was causing her to lie and steal and do all sorts of messed up things, so Anthony and Gerry basically told her until you're ready to live for God, we can't be around you. I tried to contact her since I've been out, but she hasn't gotten back to me.
Upon coming home though, I might mention that Anthony and Gerry, my "best friends" wrote me all but 1 time, a letter that one of them typed out together that was one page. This is from 2 guys that haven't had a job the entire time I was gone, nor had one all summer, nor still have one and told me they would be there for me and write me all the time, and they wrote me one time. I gave that to God though and let that go, cuz I've been away before and never received a letter, but that was before I had Christian friends in my life and I was doing good, so I was told I should expect different this time, luckily I didn't, so I wasn't that let down.
While I was in this program, I also might add I finally felt like I could act like the Christian I felt inside. I felt comfortable praying outloud with girls who needed it because I didn't feel like I was going to be judged because I wasn't speaking it in tongues, and people in the facility were always complimenting me on my strong faith and always coming to me for spiritual guidance and it made me feel good inside that people thought I had something offer and I could help them, from what I normally felt on the outside around my friends, which was the spiritual weakling and hinderance.
NOT DONE -- CONTINUE ON TO PART 2 --:embarasse
