By Sophia Gliwa –
A random guy got on the bus and, looking for Jamie Tolson without knowing her, told her: “Don’t give up. God has a calling over your life. You’re getting a blank check and you need to use it wisely.”
Tears emerged in her eyes. “Lord, you want me,” she realized. “My whole life, I felt like nobody wanted me.”
The prophecy was part of the beginning of the end of drug addiction and abusive relationships.
Jamie Tolson cried with her sisters when their parents sat them down and told them were separated, ending years of fighting. Mom tried to bring the girls to church. Dad, a nominal Catholic, was always angry and cheated on Mom, she said.
Two years later they were divorced. At the time, Jamie thought: “God, even if you are real you can’t make my parents stay together you can’t do anything to help me.”
She set her life off in a different direction.
To fight against the mom, Dad allowed the girls to do whatever would annoy the mom.
“He let us get our ears pierced and drink and do stuff to kind of upset my mom and also be the cool fun parent,” Jamie says. Meanwhile, Mom was strict. She didn’t let the kids participate in Halloween or watch Harry Potter movies.
“I built up bitterness and resentment towards my mom, towards Christianity, towards the Lord,” she says.
In the 5th grade, Mom put her in a Christian school. It backfired. The kids called her fat.
Dad drank on weekends when Jamie was with him. He still had anger issues. For holidays, the parents let the kids choose with whom to celebrate; it was a painful decision she never relished.
Jamie was enrolled back in public school and saw the worldly kids “having fun.” It was an attractive alternative to the hell of her life. Lacking love from her dad, she craved attention from the guys and got an STD.
“I was scared to tell my mom,” she says. “It created a lot of isolation, a lot more of just low self-worth.”
She reached out to her friends, who gossipped and bullied her. “In the 11th grade, I got bullied really bad. I would hide in the bathroom and just cry. I told my mom, I want to drop out of school.”
She enrolled in online classes and “alternative education,” where she met troubled kids.
“I got myself into trouble and ended up moving out of my mom’s house right when I turned 18,” she tells.
She took up abusive relationships. She had started smoking marijuana at 14 and progressed into harder drugs.
“If you brought something, I would try it,” she said. “There was emptiness inside of me that I was trying to fill. I remember always thinking: What is my purpose in life? Why am I here?”
Eventually, she fell into meth. She was working in a group home with mentally disabled people.
Aware of her situation, her mother and sisters prayed in earnest.
One day she took suboxone (a downer) because she couldn’t get her hands on meth and needed something.
“I was driving the van and I was falling asleep. I was on the highway slapping myself in the face. I would go out and come to,” she recalls.
She hit another car. She drove away. She made it to the workplace to pick up the girls.
“The next I knew I was with all my higher-up managers,” she says. They asked if she was on drugs. She replied that she was sick.
She left the meeting and the work. Living in her car, she was homeless. She wrecked her car driving. She had no friends. She was lugging her suitcase around Downtown.
“I can’t live this way anymore,” she thought. “The Lord was taking away everything I had to get me to come to him.”
Jamie reached out to her younger sister, who reached out to her mom, who had already found out about a rehab program in Kansas City, Missouri.
After being sober for two weeks, she felt like she was ready to go home. Her leader suggested they pray about it and rush.
That’s when she met the guy on the bus who told her, prophetically, that God was giving her a clean slate, to not miss the opportunity.
Jamie felt loved.
“Rejection is a huge things that I have since been delivered from,” she says.
She stayed in the rehab program and began rebuilding her life with the church. Today she is married and in ministry.
Source: Lyfted Testimonies
