After a life darkened by death and addiction, Lulu found Nashville Rescue Mission, and a way back to hope . . .

Lulu says she had “an average family: my mom, my dad, and my brother growing up, until the age of nine . . . Then my brother got killed on a three-wheeler, and a year or so later, my parents got divorced.

“My mom got real deep in addiction, mostly alcohol,” she remembers. “I’d just find myself as a nine-year-old staying with people. I would be the one to say, ‘Hey, can I spend the night with you?’ just to have somewhere to go, so I wouldn’t be alone.

“My mom stayed in her addiction for a long time,” Lulu says, then, “I got married . . . and I married an addict. We went on a long road together: I put him in and out of rehabs,” until, “he had a car wreck and passed away.” That was like losing her brother, “all over again,” she says.

And just like her mom, Lulu chose escape: “That was the beginning of my addiction,” she says.

I was alone again . . . didn’t know where my place was . . .
don’t even know how or what, just that I started using.

Addiction ended up costing her any stability and success she’d managed up to that point in her life.

“I’d always been smart,” she says, “had very good jobs, and anything I did I excelled in. I was working at a bank—head teller and personal banker,” while also, “working at a pharmacy, I was a pharmacy technician.”

But Lulu found it harder and harder to hold her life together as addiction grew stronger. “I quit working at the pharmacy: couldn’t work two jobs,” until finally, “ended up having to resign from the bank.” Looking back, she says, “I was thinking ‘Did nobody know? Could nobody tell?’”

Yet even after losing the jobs that had given her the trappings of a normal life, she continued finding, “jobs here and there.” Lulu says, “I would work for a few months, quit. Just . . . regular addiction lifestyle.”

Attempts to stay clean failed, until she lost two friends to overdose in two days.

“I’ll never forget it: I was lying in my bed, four o’clock in the morning, and I just felt something like God telling me, ‘It’s time for you to do something with your life. Get up.’

“I started calling around, and I used to babysit a girl when I was at the bank, and I’d got word she was working at a church, helping people. So, I called her . . .

She is actually the one that brought me to Nashville Rescue Mission.

“When I came through the doors, I left everything behind me,” she says, giving herself completely to our Life Recovery Program, “every part of me, because I knew I had to: I knew I was going to die.”

Not only was Lulu’s life saved, it was changed in the Lord, as she learned how to, “Give it to God and keep going!”

Before she knew it, she graduated from the program and her life is now dedicated to helping transform others through this ministry. “I was always like, ‘what can I help with? What can I do?’ Like God was telling me, ‘I want you at the Mission.’ I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else!”

Lulu has been working at the Mission for four years now. “I am the Lead on 2nd shift,” she says, “and my favorite part of working at the Mission is that I am able to [be there for] the ladies to talk to and tell them about how God changed my life.”

Lulu now has her own car and her own apartment, and is thankful to be able to live her life the way she was meant to. “The main thing that gives me joy in life is the relationship that I have with God and how He has restored my relationship with my daughter,” she says.

“I know what it’s like to be at rock bottom,” Lulu explains. “So if I could just be that one person to give a little hope in their worst days, I know that’s why God wanted me here.”

That’s the spirit of rescue and real life change you make possible in people’s lives—in Jesus’ name and by His grace—for people across Middle Tennessee, now, and all summer long!