"God, help me or let me die"
Red Door Newsletter - March 2011
Special Easter Issue
EDITOR’S NOTE: Easter is the season of miracles. But does God still perform miracles in this day and age? Joyce desperately needed to know. Drugs had taken over her life, and now her legs were about to be amputated. Feeling like she was losing all hope, Joyce cried out, “God, help me or let me die!” It’s what happened next that Joyce still can’t believe ...
"What am I doing here?” Joyce asked herself as she stood in a plaza in Puerto Rico, waiting to find out why the folks at The Bowery Mission had traveled from New York to see her.
Sure, Joyce’s friend from the streets, Cindy, had gone to the Mission and gotten help. But what could the Mission do for Joyce, especially since she was in such bad shape?
Joyce looked terrible and smelled even worse. She hadn’t showered in days and her legs were covered with open sores.
From far off, she spotted the folks from the Mission approaching her.
“Don’t get near me!” she warned. “I have wounds on my legs, and I smell bad. I’m infected. You’re clean.”
But that didn’t matter to the people from the Mission. They wrapped their arms around her and told her God loved her.
“I felt accepted for the very first time,” Joyce remembers.
As they stood there and talked, Joyce told the group about a friend, Marisa, who had died two days earlier from a drug overdose. The folks from the Mission cried.
“They were crying for a person they didn’t even know,” Joyce recalls. “I just had to go with these people.”
That’s how Joyce ended up in New York at The Bowery Mission’s women’s shelter on June 23, a day she describes as the day she was born again.
“I was dead, and the Mission accepted me the way I was,” she says.
Now under a doctor’s care, Joyce is healing from the ulcers that almost cost her both legs and the memories of when she used to get high on a combination of heroin and horse tranquilizer.
But the biggest change has happened in Joyce’s heart.
“The other day, I was asking God, ‘Why do I still have this pain?’ I opened my Bible and turned to Corinthians, where it says, ‘In my weakness, He is made strong.’”
Joyce and others are finding new life at the Mission this Easter, thanks to generous gifts from friends like you.
Thank you for offering them God’s love in the form of meals, shelter and other lifesaving care.