From Hell to Jesus
Summer Neal
By: Amy Eskew
Edited by: Summer Neal
The lump in my throat, the tears stinging my eyes, and God’s overwhelming love wrapped in grace and mercy is what makes this so difficult.
Because I know where I've been. I know who I was and who I am today.
This is my journey from addiction, brokenness, loss, abuse, brushes with death, and fighting for my soul, to deliverance, chains and generational curses broken, healing, redemption, rehabilitation, recovery, and amelioration.
I am a prodigal daughter.
At 15 years old my parents divorced. My brother and I became the product of a broken home and the freedom to live a life that teenagers should never have the opportunity to live. Drinking, smoking cigarettes and marijuana, as well as using other illicit drugs. Singing karaoke in bars and getting into local dance clubs became my norm. Promiscuity was my way of searching for love.
July 31, 1999, one day before my 19th birthday, I married my first love the father of my daughters. He is the man who would be my first abuser.
My dad said he a dream that came to him from God that detailed the abuse I would receive from this man. I can remember standing in my kitchen with my dad, tears rolling down his cheeks begging me to wait a couple months to marry him. Dad told me step by step how and when the abuse would start. I will forever carry that day with me.
I was abused physically, mentally, verbally, and emotionally. In the years that followed, I would leave him and go back. Every time I went back, I lost a piece of myself. He broke me.
My husband was the first to introduce me to methamphetamines. I thought doing drugs with him it would make things better. Maybe he wouldn't feel like he had to hide using drugs from me and he wouldn't spend all our money.
In my naivety, I asked him to get us some crank. Crank was different than meth. He didn't tell me that crank was a thing of the 90's and meth was the now drug. I did meth for the first time. Now we were both addicts… that's how naïve I was.
I had my first daughter, Ariel, in June 2000, just before I turned 20. I had my second daughter, Gabrielle, in May 2002. I knew without a shadow of a doubt they were God's gift to me.
My beautiful girls are what kept me on this earth. I tried to be the best mother I could be in my brokenness and 22 year battle with addiction.
You see, I didn't just have a meth addiction. I was never sober. I would go through phases of not using meth, but I would drink heavily, smoke weed, pop pain pills, then cocaine and back to meth.
My girls never had stability. We moved a lot. It wasn't until their high school years that we lived in one place.
The abusive relationships I was in took their toll on me and I became a very mean, harsh, and vindictive person. Somehow, I ended up being a drug dealer to my friends and family.
I would say, “I'm not a drug dealer, I'm user supporting my habit.” And I really believed that. I had become a person l NEVER imaged I would be. I was involved with dangerous people who had no morals or values. They lived by drug world standards.
I know God had his hand on me; I was shielded by heavenly realms. There were situations when things could've turned bad for me.
In the drug world, there are good addicts and bad addicts. Good addicts can still feel emotions, but bad addicts feel nothing. They make sure they get what they want by any means necessary. Even as an addict who was now selling drugs and running the streets, I made sure to keep my girls away from the people that I knew were shady.
My second husband and I were so toxic for each other that it was like pouring gasoline on a fire.
I can remember one night, he said I needed to find something more important to do with my time besides sit around and make up crap in my head. I caught him lying so I stabbed a butcher knife into his pillow. Then I had a gun loaded and cocked because I wanted him to listen to me and understand that I’m crazy because of his lies.
After I shot the gun (not aimed at him), I had his full attention. The talk didn’t go as I wanted it, I took 25 Xanax along with some pieces and bunch of crushed ones. I downed them all with a beer.
That attempt to make the hurt stop didn’t work. I woke up two days later in a worse state of mind.
Things like this were very common at this point in my life. My daughters had grown accustomed to this kind of life. I knew it was all wrong, but I just didn’t how to make it stop.
How I know that Satan was trying take my soul from me is I had demonic spirits that lived in my house. They would open doors, open and shut drawers, mimic people’s voices.
One night in my bedroom I was sitting on my bed when I turned my head there was this man and little girl standing next to my bed. I can still remember exactly what they looked like.
I said to the little girl, “You scared the heck outta me! Where did you come from?!”
All I remember is it was like an out of body experience as she and I talked. I don’t know what I said but at the end of our conversation, she smiled and then they were both gone.
I spoke to my uncle Clell about it because he knows about spiritual stuff like that. He asked me how do I know she smiled? I said I assumed she was smiling because the space around what would have been her face kind of lit up. I asked him why they didn’t have faces and his answered chilled me to the bone.
He said, “Honey, you better be glad they didn’t have faces because that would’ve meant you invited them in. It’s like giving them an identity to you - like a name. Giving them a face means giving them permission to have possession.”
I know without a shadow of a doubt God was with me then. Because although I had become comfortable with spirits living in my house MY GOD stepped in that night and said, “My daughter knows who I AM!!! No identity for you spirits YOU CAN’T HAVE AMY ESKEW!”
When I think back on that night, I know God is real.
October 2017 was my rock bottom.
I got into a physical altercation with my oldest daughter, and she called the police on me. They filed a report and DFACS got involved.
I was so broken, mentally, and emotionally that I had to do what was best for my girls. I signed over custody to their dad. DFACS wouldn’t even allowed to see my girls before they left. It didn’t really hit me until after the paperwork had been signed and filed with the courts.
Day after day my girls weren’t there to hug or say I love you or to wake them up in the morning. I literally felt my heart break in my chest. The ache was so strong and so deep. I would wake up crying, cry all day long, then cry myself to sleep.
I tried to get so high just to make the pain stop but nothing would make it stop. Broken and desperate after weeks and weeks of my brother asking me to come to church, I said, “For crying out loud if you’ll shut up I’ll come to church.”
I came in early January 2018 and that’s when Jesus picked me up and carried me out of darkness and into his beautiful light.
Jesus spoke to me and said, “If you will give your life to me. Serve me and be faithful to me, I will restore all that you have lost.”
I said, “Lord, I will serve you; I give you all of me, my heart, my soul, all of me belongs to you. All I want is for you to please restore my relationship with my daughters.”
After two months of me not giving up and reassuring my girls through text messages that mama loves them and I’m turning my life around with Jesus…he broke the barrier of communication and my oldest daughter called me. She agreed to see me, and I drove to south Georgia to see my girls!
I have now been the house mom/intake coordinator for 4sarah for 3 ½ years now. I have been leading prayer meeting at Faith Tabernacle for 3 years.
I have been tested in my relationship with God and in my sobriety. Only a year into my walk with God and sobriety, one of the hardest challenges was being hurt very deeply. When you feel like you have been betrayed and lied on and talked about by someone you trust, it hurts to the core. I thought, why would I want to live for God and have to deal with being hurt and feeling this way. It would be so much easier to just leave and go get high.
I remember standing in my room at the 4Sarah house deciding to stay and work through the pain and trust God in the midst of all of it or leave walk away and go back to my old life. I stayed.
I was on what I call a spiritual respirator. I was so fragile in that moment of my life and God knew and He sent people to love on me and breathe life into me. Every week God made sure I knew He loved me, and He was there.
God will put people in your life for a season just a love on you. God will give you tools to help you grow and understand what you're going through. It’s up to you to utilize what He gives you.
I read a book called Crushing by T.D. Jakes. I would read that book and cry because I understood that to get the purest out of me, God had to press the hardest on me. Because if I could get through that, I could get through anything.
I remember Evangelist Tim Green visiting at our church and he prayed over me. I didn’t fully understand at the time, but he rebuked the victim mentality I had. I realized that is what I always thought I was, a victim. Every time someone hurt me or lied to me or did me wrong, I was a victim.
In abuse, you're always defensive. You feel like you have to be on the defense ready waiting for all hell to break loose. I didn't we want to be the victim anymore, so I asked God to help me change how I viewed myself. After that, I put in the work that it takes to not be a victim, and I changed my mindset.
I have learned that you can't carry around being hurt and offended because sometimes people can't control how they behave and sometimes it's just because we're people and we take things wrong.
In the midst of dealing with being hurt and offended, there are things that haunt you in your sobriety. Shame, guilt, and regret will try to drown you spiritually and mentally. You remember all the things you did and things you missed out on. You want the chance to go back and get it right. That's all a natural part of the recovery and healing process.
Without God being there for me, to love on me and send people to love me and pray for me, I don't think I could have made it.
In recovery, when you finally get to a good place with your children, they begin to open up again and talk to you. My oldest daughter shared with me that I would stay so sick and make so many ER trips, that they would prepare themselves that this would be the time their mama would die. More than anything I’m so sorry that my girls had to feel that way. I asked them to forgive me and of course they did. Children are resilient like that; they love their mom and dad. As a mother, there is nothing better in the world than to hear my daughters say they love who their mama is now and they’re thankful that they can see how God has changed me and given their mama back to them.
I also learned from my oldest daughter that not only did my father pray for me faithfully for 23 years, so did my youngest daughter. I told her that God may have not answered her prayer right then, but He heard her because I am no longer an addict and no longer mentally and emotionally messed up.
I can honestly say that God has always provided and made a way. I know what it's like to lose everything that you've ever owned but it's just material possessions it's not a soul. I can't take things with me to heaven, but I can win souls and make sure they go to heaven with me.
I've done a lot of praying and crying and screaming because of situations and the pain that I was feeling inside. And sometimes I’ve done that because I was overwhelmed by God's grace and mercy all wrapped in love, knowing that his body was beaten and spit on… because he loves me.
Recovery and healing is a one day at a time process. I've never been a patient person but I’m getting better at it. I wanted my healing to be done and over with. I mean I don't know anybody that wants to go through that process of healing because it hurts. There are things that you must face and go through and do in order to heal. But with God anything is possible. And He takes all the hurt and pain and uses it for His purpose.
THANK YOU JESUS FOR SAVING ME!!!