With a Subtitle: A testimony of faith, sobriety, and discovering a personal relationship with Christ

A brief Excerpt: A former Catholic shares her journey through rebellion, addiction, and searching for God before discovering lasting faith in Jesus Christ and the truth of the Bible.

The Author is: Debra Hodges

Introduction

I know and love many Catholics. I have the utmost respect for and admiration of my Catholic friends and family. This article is not about bashing Catholics in the least. It’s a reflection and commentary on my experiences with faith in God and the reasons for the choices I made.

Background

I was born into a Roman Catholic family and brought up in that faith. My parents sometimes took us to Mass, and all four of us kids were baptized, received First Communion, and then received Confirmation. We went to Catechism classes on Mondays, but we never read the Bible together.

My sister and I went to public school until 1966, when my parents moved to Arlington Heights, Illinois. We lived there for one year while the Jim Walter Research Plant was being built in Tampa, Florida, because my father (a chemical engineer) would have a job there after it was built. That was the year my mother left my father. Right after she left, my father enrolled my little sister and me in Our Lady of the Wayside Catholic School. He thought the discipline would do us both good. I absolutely hated it there!

One day, I threw my bologna sandwich in the trash can because it had ants on it. Somebody ratted me out to one of the nuns for trashing the sandwich, and she ordered me to stay in the classroom for lunch instead of going to recess with the other kids. The nun lectured me for 30 minutes about how the starving kids in China would have loved to have that sandwich, ants and all.

Another time, several girls in my sixth-grade class told me that the boy I had a crush on wanted to meet on the playground after school. When I got there, the girls and the boy all laughed at me, saying he never liked me at all, and had no intention of getting to know me. I started smoking cigarettes after that incident.

None of these unfortunate incidents caused me to reject Catholicism. At that time, and for many years after, I simply didn’t care about God, much less believe that a supreme being cared about me. I was rebellious to the core.

Life with an unknown God

My Mother and Father got back together after six months. Six months after that, we all moved to Belleair, Florida, in 1967. I went to Kennedy Jr. High and graduated from Clearwater High School in 1973. Summers were spent sunbathing on Clearwater Beach, playing pinball in a small restaurant in the afternoon, and listening to rock music on the radio. My parents both worked all day and drank Scotch cocktails after work on weekdays, so my sister and I had a lot of freedom. I can’t remember a time we went to church while living in Florida.

I did a lot of drinking and drugging in those years and ran away from home seven times. I hitchhiked a lot, and it’s a miracle that I wasn’t killed. The God I didn’t know watched over me during those times and saw to it that I was rescued from several extremely dangerous situations.

I thought there might be a God who cared about me one cold evening at Clearwater Beach. A kind young man invited me into an RV in the parking lot to get a cup of hot chocolate. In it were a bunch of people wearing “Jesus” t-shirts. That was the first time I heard the Gospel, but I wasn’t convinced yet. It would be many more years before His love for me would sink in and become real.

The haze starts to lift

Fast forward to my failed second marriage, and I hit bottom in Orlando, Florida. I had just gotten out of jail and was drinking heavily. After the divorce, I was living alone in a small apartment near the downtown bars. One morning, while looking through the local newspaper with a terrible hangover, I found an ad that mentioned an Indian ceremony that could help you get relief from your emotional pain. I attended that ceremony and met some young girls there who told me about Alcoholics Anonymous (something I needed desperately at the time).

They showed me where one of the groups met, and I started going there regularly. That’s where the subject of God came up again. They said you could never, ever get sober without a higher power, and you had to find one, no matter what it was, as long as it was a power greater than yourself. So, I joined the Church of Religious Science and read a huge, thick book by Ernest Holmes called “The Science of Mind.” That god must not have had much power to help anyone stop drinking, because I remember having to leave one of the services one morning because I was so hungover I couldn’t stand up and sing the songs.

Fast forward three years, and I’m still sober and tired of working the night shift. I managed to get a job as a Help Desk contractor at FedEx and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, with my two cats, Bear and Angelina.

God starts to make sense

I didn’t know anyone in Memphis, but I knew that I had to go to meetings to stay sober. I was able to buy a 999-square-foot house in East Memphis and attended the “Tower Group” regularly. That’s where I heard about Hope Presbyterian Church in Cordova, a suburb of Memphis. Soon after, I met my husband at work, and we got married in 2003. We attended Hope Church for 19 years. That’s where I finally learned about Jesus, the God who loved me and had been there for me with everything I went through. I’m eternally grateful to the two pastors at Hope, Craig Strickland and Eli Morris, for explaining His love for me during their sermons. They told me to “come home,” and I felt like I really had. God had become real to me!

Commitment and devotion

My husband (also a former Catholic) and I moved to Lexington, Tennessee, in 2021 because we wanted to get away from the crime in Memphis, and because there were three lakes in the area with swim beaches, and I love swimming! We now attend First Baptist Church and absolutely love it! Here we study the Bible and learn more and more about Jesus and His plans for our lives. I’m still sober but no longer attend AA meetings. The “God of my understanding” is the God of the Bible and always will be.

Conclusion

So that’s my journey to faith in God. I don’t feel like I’m a religious person. I simply feel like I have a growing relationship with Jesus. My husband and I believe the Baptist denomination aligns better with our core beliefs about God. We know that when the curtain of the inner Sanctuary was torn in two after Jesus died on the cross for our sins, it signaled that, through His sacrifice, we and all who believe in Him can pray directly to God the Father.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need. Hebrews 4:16