“I knew my body couldn’t take much more abuse,” Cynthia says, remembering the tail end of her 15-year drug addiction. That’s why, when the police caught her with cocaine, she didn’t panic. “I was relieved,” she said. “I knew I’d get help.” What she didn’t know, though, is that her arrest would also pave the way for her husband of 38 years, Leonard, and her niece, Ashe, to experience their own recovery journeys . . .
Cynthia’s addiction started when Leonard offered her cocaine. Even though she saw the drug destroying him, she’d said yes in a moment of weakness. Very quickly, her life fell apart too. She came to The Mission at Kern County after her arrest, when a judge agreed to substitute treatment for prison. “When I walked through these doors, I was filled with fear and shame,” she says. “But God changed my life here. As I learned how I could experience His love through Jesus, I was freed from addiction and guilt.”
She was also inspired to pray daily for her husband Leonard, still enslaved to cocaine. But this isn’t the end of the story…