By Louise Knott Ahern
Lansing State Journal
EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- Judie VanderGalien hadn't heard Jennifer's voice in weeks, not since Christmas.
The visit hadn't gone well. This call, however, wasn't unexpected. Judie had just been praying for Jennifer, and she'd been a believer for too long to brush it off as coincidence.
"I'm done," Jennifer told her. "I don't want to do this anymore."
Judie paused, wanting to trust that it was true. They'd had this conversation so many times.
There had been promises, apologies and unsuccessful stints in rehab. Things that weren't supposed to touch polite, Christian homes.
But Judie was her mother. She might have cut off Jennifer financially and banned her from the house, but she wasn't going to give up. Not yet.
"I'll come get you," Judie finally said.
As she climbed in the car, she had her doubts it would turn out differently this time.
Jennifer did not. She says something had changed inside her, and for the first time she actually had hope that she could kick the addiction that had destroyed her life.
She was right.
At 39, Jennifer has been sober for five years and now runs a nonprofit called Shining a Light, designed to help poor women in Africa.
She credits God for her journey.
"I want to do something for him," Jennifer says. "Because look what he has done for me."
This is not a story about drugs.
Nor is it a story about religion.
It is, instead, a story about faith.
The journey started with Vicodin, prescribed by a doctor to treat endometriosis when Jennifer was 25.
She was addicted, she says, from the very first pill. It filled a void she didn't even know was there, she says; a void she'd been trying to fill for years with clothes, cars, trips, and men.
She was living in Detroit and was a rising hot-shot sales account manager. She loved the job, loved the fast-paced world of entertaining, persuading people and chasing money.
Vicodin made it even better. For eight years, it became her life force. She craved it, hated it, lied for it, spent $500 a day on it.
She got in car accidents, but walked away from them. She suffered overdoses, but recovered from them. She walked into drug houses in the middle of the night packed with strung-out men and walked out unscathed.
The stronger her addiction became, the less the pills gave her what she wanted.
When she went to rehab for the first time at 32, she met a young heroin addict. She knew exactly what she was doing when she let him and his girlfriend crash at her place.
The addict introduced Jennifer to his dealer in Detroit.
A week after that, she smoked her first rock of crack.
"We didn't know," says her father, Jim.
They knew about the Vicodin; Jennifer had been open about that. But not the harder stuff. Not until she was in a car accident and the police report said syringes had been found in the car.
They sought advice from people who had struggled with addiction.
Don't give her any money, they were told. Don't let her come home. If she calls, fill the silence with stories of everything she's missing.
The longer it went on, the more they began to fight with each other over what to do.
All the while, they hid it from everyone. Their church family at River Terrace, their Bible group, even their other children at times.
"I didn't want anyone to think badly of her," Judie says.
There were times when Judie was mad. Not just at Jennifer but at God. Judie had lived the life of a good, Christian woman. How could this possibly be God's plan for her or for Jennifer?
"All you can do," Jim says, "is pray."
Crack is a liar.
It makes promises it has no intention of keeping. It hits the bloodstream within seconds of inhaling and sends users soaring so high they wondered how they ever lived without the feeling. But just as quickly, they crash, hard and fast, further down than they were before, and they want more as soon as it's gone.
So they do it again. And again. And again.
In her darkest hours, she was a liar, a thief and a con artist.
She would visit friends and family and raid their medicine cabinets. She stole money and valuables.
She sold everything she had, everything a woman can, crossing lines that made her feel so far away from who she used to be and the faith her parents instilled in her growing up.
At night, Jennifer wrote letters to herself to read in the morning.
Why are you doing this?
You're killing yourself.
If you don't stop, you're going to die.
There was a night in winter nearly five years ago. She had lost everything and was moving from motel to motel.
She had no money. She was hungry. She weighed 90 pounds and had the gaunt, harsh look of the streets.
No dealer would come to her because they knew she couldn't pay.
So she began walking. It was cold and dark and her entire body shook and itched with withdrawal. The world was so huge and she felt so small.
She thought of all she'd lost, the choices she had made and the fights she had caused. She thought of her nephews growing up without her. She thought about her parents.
And she thought about the drug that owned her. The devil, she says, lurked on every corner and refused to let her go.
Hopelessness, she discovered, is when you realize death is no longer your greatest fear.
"On Jan. 16, 2006, God touched my life."
There was no sudden blinding light through the clouds or booming voice from above.
It was just a sense of peace.
She was sitting in a motel room in Grand Rapids one morning following a week straight of getting high and no sleep. Suddenly, she didn't want to do it anymore.
She called her mother, who drove her to detox once again. While there, Jennifer says she felt called to attend a strict, Christian-based rehab called the Western Michigan Teen Challenge in Muskegon.
It's a yearlong program with rigid rules. Judie, again, had doubts. Jennifer was a rule-breaker.
After three weeks, they were allowed to visit. Judie expected to find Jennifer waiting in the driveway, suitcases in hand.
"Jennifer took our hands and said, 'I'm not going anywhere,'" Judie says. "She was changed."
Jennifer has been sober ever since.
She was a different person when she got out of Teen Challenge. Jennifer knew she was being called to something, but she wasn't sure what.
She found it in Tanzania. She went there on a missionary trip to volunteer with an orphanage and was shocked to discover many of the children she worked with were not really orphans. They had mothers who couldn't care for them because they were trapped in a cycle of poverty, many of them powerless to their situations.
Jennifer understood hopelessness -- feeling trapped with no way out. She also finally understood what God wanted her to do. He wanted her, she says, to draw on her own experiences to help other women find a way out of the darkness.
She founded Shining a Light, designed to train women in a skill that will help them raise money, attend classes on how to manage their money and take care of their children and, hopefully, end the cycle of poverty.
Back in Michigan for now, she's selling a line of hand-beaded sandals made by a local Tanzanian. She will head back in February, hopefully, she says, with enough money to rent an $1,800 building where the women can train to make and sell the sandals themselves and where the children can attend preschool.
"I understand the strongholds on these women's lives because of what I went through," she says. "God took the bad and is using it for good. He could have used anyone to go to Tanzania. But he took an ex-crack addict."
Tanzania, she says, is lush and beautiful. She lives in a rented home that also houses a preschool.
She keeps wet wipes with her at all times to scrub dirty faces and wipe snotty noses.
At the end of the day, the kids run to her gate. Sometimes they arrive when she's tired and wants just a moment to herself. And sometimes she is tempted to pretend she's not home.
That's the old Jennifer, she says. The impatient one, the selfish one.
"Auntie Jenni-fah," they call to her. "Auntie Jenni-fah."
She puts her book away and lets them inside.
God, she says, works in mysterious ways.
Published: Wed, Jan 5, 2011
