Good morning. It is a privilege to be here this morning and have the opportunity to share my story with you all.

I am from Canada, where I grew up in a wonderful Christian home. As a young girl, I felt God call me to work with Deaf people and I started taking sign language lessons at nine years of age. This calling lead me to Puerto Rico as a teenager, where I spent two summers working with Deaf children.

I decided to attend a Christian University in Minnesota that offered a degree in Deaf Culture Ministries which would allow me to be a missionary to the Deaf. It was in University that my life began to fall apart. At the end of my sophomore year, I met a man who quickly swept me off my feet and left me with stars in my eyes. I knew deep down he wasn’t everything I was looking for in a mate, but I figured, like so many others, that those small things that weren’t perfect could be corrected.

After we got married, life became almost unbearable. Being from Canada, I needed my husband to apply for a work permit which he refused to do as a means of controlling me. I had dropped out of University and now found myself sitting at home growing increasingly depressed. Then the abuse began and I decided that life wasn’t really worth living. Suicide seemed like my only way out. Thankfully, God protected me from myself.

Approx nine months after we were married, I realized I was expecting. I began to feel more hopeful that maybe life would be OK. Things were still really hard. Because I wasn’t able to work, I didn’t have a say in how the money was spent. My husband rarely allotted me enough for groceries and I finally had to go to the local food bank where I was given moldy bread and some canned veggies. I became very sick during my first trimester and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back as it were. My husband told me that he wanted out of our marriage. Once again, the hopelessness came flooding in.

I was 4 months into my pregnancy, when I arrived in Florida to live with my parents. I could see the look of shock on their faces when they picked me up at the airport. I looked gray from lack of proper nutrition and later found out that I was 20 pounds under what would have been a “safe” weight for that stage of my pregnancy. God was still watching over me and kept the baby healthy in spite of my poor health.

My initial contact with Resurrection House left me disappointed. I was not able to qualify for the program without a work permit, which I still didn’t have. It took awhile, but I was finally able to secure a work permit and then I tried again. This time I was accepted into the program!

My son and I moved into RH when he was just 18 months old. We were given a beautiful home and the opportunity to begin the process of rebuilding our lives. Feeling very strongly about being at home to raise my son, I came up with a plan to start my own daycare. RH agreed to the plan and even built a playground for the daycare in my backyard. Slowly my life that had looked so bleak began to be filled with hope.

Today life looks much different. With the support of RH, I have been able to establish a thriving business, Purchase a new car, save a nest egg for our future, and will soon finish the last class to complete the BA in Deaf Culture that I started so long ago. I have also been accepted into the Habitat for Humanity program and am in the process of building our new home.

It would take all day to tell you all the blessings that have occurred in the past four and half years at RH. I would, however, like to mention just a few. Throughout our stay at RH, AJ has been a part of the reading program which helped encourage his love of books and has contributed to his success this year in kindergarten. Thank you to Richard, and reene, and others who have worked with AJ over the years!

I have also been blessed to be able to participate in Life skills classes where I have gained just that! Some of the most memorable classes include investing, organic cooking, home ownership, and hurricane preparation. These classes also created a sense of community that helped me to feel like I was not alone on my journey!

Having a beautiful apartment to live in and a program designed to help me suceed, has been a huge blessing in and of itself, but people like you were generous enough to care about even the smallest details of our life: Gifts for Christmas, special Mother’s day surprises, even tickets to be able to take my son to see the Rays. These are things that I would never have been able to do on my own! “Thank you” hardly seems like enough. I am soo grateful. These may seem like small things, but to AJ and I, they were huge - they were the building blocks of hope!

In just a few months, our new home will be finished and I will say goodbye to my life at RH. I will walk away with a life bursting with hope. Much like a butterfly emerging from their cocoon, RH has provided a place of safety for me to rebuild my life. Not a hand out, but a hand up when I really needed it! I would like to say thank you to each one of you that has helped RH make this possible. I pray God will bless you greatly for the love you have shown to me, my son, and all the families at RH. Thank you once again, for this opportunity to share a small part of my RH story – My journey back to hope!

Thank you!