When I first came to Grace Centers
of Hope, I was in complete despair. I had given up on life, and I
had given up on myself. My once resilient spirit was
nowhere to be found, and it was only when I surrendered to Jesus
Christ that my whole life changed. I grew up in a loving family.
My family back there tonight, thanks for coming. A Catholic
family. We didn't go to church every
Sunday but we never missed a Christmas or Easter service either. There
was a lot of love in my family growing up and my sisters and
I were thick as thieves. Mom and dad were the glue that
bonded us together and everyone was really supportive. Dad has
done a lot of things for me throughout my life. When I was a gymnast,
he built me a balance beam. When I was in theater, my mother
drove me to every rehearsal, and my family came to every show.
When I bought a motorcycle, my father taught me how to wrap
it. And when my heart would get broken, my sisters helped me
put the pieces back together. Throughout my entire life, I've
been a highly emotional person. My mother told me that I had
the gift of empathy, and that that would come to haunt me in
life if I didn't figure it out. I was born with a mind that swims
at depths most would drown in. And she also told me that if
I didn't figure out how to balance it, life would get very dark
for me. So it is both a blessing and
a curse to feel things so deeply. I was very ambitious growing
up. At 19, I moved to New York City.
I was a Shakespeare major at the American Academy of Dramatic
Arts. which is funny that I get nervous because I actually used
to perform in a lot of plays. When I tired of that, I enlisted
in the U.S. Navy, and that would become my
greatest accomplishment in life, and it would also lead to my
greatest downfall. Boot camp was extremely challenging,
by far the hardest thing I've ever been through. And I wanted
to quit many times, but I saw it through and I never gave up.
And the military provided me with another kind of family.
To go through something like that forms a very unique bond,
and it is an emotion born of initiation. So after 12 weeks
of no sleep, ice-cold showers, gas chambers, and plenty of physical
torture, I was off to California. I got stationed in San Diego
and couldn't have been happier about it. It worked really hard.
I excelled in my position, and I began to move up quickly in
rank. After two years in San Diego, we deployed. A nine-month
deployment that got underway from the islands of Hawaii to
the outback of Australia. From there, we sailed to Korea,
Japan, built a school in Cambodia, and went to the Philippines.
Next was Hong Kong, Thailand, and my favorite, Singapore. So
I was a world traveler with a spirit of tenacity. It was mentally
and physically exhausting, but exhilarating as well. Somewhere
between Hawaii and Hong Kong, I fell in love. He was an officer,
and I was enlisted. Fraternization and a one-way
ticket out of the military was what that got you. I should have
known better, and against my better judgment, I just couldn't
let him go, and he couldn't let me go either. By the time we
set foot on American soil, our consequences awaited us. The
investigation had already started, but the trial would take months,
long, excruciating months. I was put on restriction. I could
not leave the ship. I had to wear a bright red badge
with the letter R for restricted, pinned to my uniform at all times. This is my very own scarlet letter.
I still had to perform all my duties and report for work every
day. I remember standing watch as a port and starboard rover,
M16 in hand, and just wanting to blow my head right off. So
I was armed with seven different weapons and seven different ways
to kill myself. Not a good mix. I had to endure
five grueling hearings in which I would stand before 15 different
officers, lieutenants, and captains and have them annihilate my character.
Every one of them telling me how my egregious behavior was
a disgrace to the military as well as society, and each one
was like taking a bullet. Thinking back now, I don't even
know how I got through it. I just did. The trial went all
the way up to Captain's Mass, and after it was all said and
done, we could no longer call ourselves soldiers. I lost my
career and the love of my life that day, and that would become
the storm I could not weather. I had no idea how to put myself
back together. The devastation was insurmountable. I lost all of my military benefits.
I lost my GI bill for college, equaling about $100,000. I lost
my pride, my worth, and I lost all hope. My heart was broken
in a thousand pieces, and he left me. He said he could never
look at me the same, that I had ruined his career. Still, none
of that compared to the loss of respect for my own father.
Even to this day, when Veterans Day rolls around, he can't stand
the sight of me, and that never gets easier. And I wonder if
he knows how hard those days are on me as well, and that the
disappointment I feel in myself is still so close to the surface,
and how after all these years, it still brings tears to my eyes. To make matters worse, I was
injured in the Navy. I fell 15 feet during a fire
drill, and I broke my collarbone, my wrist, and my tailbone, resulting
in a severe spinal injury. I can't stand longer than 30
minutes without excruciating pain, and I developed an addiction
to Vicodin that would last for years. After the military, I
barely existed in life. I was tired of starting over.
I was tired of trying to rebuild myself. I was just tired of everything,
and the desire to live was just not there. I was alone for a
long time. It took years to get over the
officer in the Navy, and I wasn't eager to get hurt again. It seemed
that loving someone became my most elaborate method of self-harm. And I drank a lot, smoked a lot
of pot, took a lot of pain pills, and I just became a shell of
a person. And then I met him. I'm not even
going to name him because I don't like to speak his name. We became inseparable instantly.
We met at a bar, and we couldn't be without each other. I had
been living with my parents at the time. I came home a week
later. I decided to make breakfast for
my mom and dad to distract them from my week-long love bender. And she would never have a chance
to tell me how amazing that omelet was. She died that morning, and
I found her. Her death was so sudden it shocked
our entire family. She was prone to blood clots
and one went straight to her heart. And the days and weeks
that followed her funeral were a blur. Someone else's life. The pain of losing your mother
is something that one never truly gets over. And still he never
left my side. The first year was great. It
was like a fairy tale. But too much drinking and too
much cocaine. I never had enough money to form
a coke habit. It was the rich man's drug, but
he had a lot of money and that was his drug and soon it became
mine. So that fueled a lot of fights.
He became extremely angry all the time, and I became extremely
fragile, and not like a flower, fragile like a bomb. And the
second year, he began to hit me, and then I started hitting
back. His strength was unparalleled
to mine, and I've had more black eyes than I can count, and ribs
broken on so many different occasions. Fists were as hard as steel,
and my bones would just break like porcelain under them. And
the last time he hit me, he broke three of my ribs, and it had
collapsed my lung, and I spent five days in the hospital. And
the doctors had to come in and shove a metal rod into my lung
to blow it back up. The pain was unspeakable. I would
have gladly had another go in the gas chamber, then lived through
something like that again. So as I lay in that hospital
bed for five days, I had a lot of time to think. I think about
my life. I think about the mess that I
had made of it. And I looked at my busted face in the mirror.
And my bruised body was now a roadmap of destruction. And I saw how
ungodly this relationship had become. And someone that I loved
more than anything could do this to me. So I finally found the
strength to leave him for good. You know, sometimes the devil
comes to you disguised as everything that you want, and until he's
not. And when I asked myself how could
I possibly stay with him that long, I realized that sometimes
you choose the hell that you know instead of the hell that
you don't. So I filed domestic violence and I never looked back.
And he will realize I'm gone when he's unable to find me and
other women. So I checked into rehab, and
that is when I first heard of Grace Centers of Hope. And when
I got to Grace, I was defeated in every way. I was scared, I
was nervous, and unsure of the future and what that meant to
me. And honestly, there were a lot of days I wanted to just
walk right out the door, but I didn't. At first, I just went
through the motions, and then things slowly started to sink
in. I took notes in all my classes,
not because I had to, because I actually wanted to. I began
reading the Bible for the first time in my life, and everyone
here believed in God, and I liked that, and I felt comfort in that. I had felt the absence of God
for a really long time, and that started to change as well. The
more I talked to him, the more I started to hear his voice,
and I started to feel a peace I have never felt before. And
I also started to feel hope. I started to do something else
differently. I started to forgive myself,
because the monologue in my head was filled with so much self-hate
for so long that it felt foreign to think of anything else. So
like a soldier trained to follow orders, I had trained my mind
to follow every destructive thought. So I started to change that too.
I started to forgive others as well, starting with him. I knew
I was never going to get an apology, and I knew he was never sorry
about anything. And then I accepted an apology
that I never received. So I realized my whole life I
was searching for the fruits of the world. Money, power, success,
happiness. I was driven by that and I was
not driven by God. So now I can say that I'm gaining
the fruits of the spirit. I have joy in the midst of any
circumstance now. I have peace and I'm able to
sleep at night. I'm not consumed with fear and
regret every day. I fill my heart with kindness,
and I have self-control now that I work hard at every day. I am
patient with myself, and I am patient with others, and I have
grown from things that were meant to break me. Without Jesus Christ
and without Grace Centers of Hope, none of this would have
been possible. So this is my Grace Boot Camp,
and these are my Grace Soldiers. Thank you.