MAGDALENE’S
TRUE LOVE

Topics: Community; Deliverance; Experiencing God; Freedom; Help from God; New Life; Overcoming; Prostitution; Trials; Unconditional Love; Worth

References: Matthew 21:32; Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25

Her story of addiction is all too typical. Cynthia, of Nashville, Tennessee, was introduced to moonshine at age five and to marijuana at age six. She was raped by a cousin at age eight. Her father died when she was nine. Angry and afraid, Cynthia left home and began living on the streets.

She had a baby when she was thirteen, thinking a baby would give her the love she yearned for. “I didn’t have anybody to show me the way,” Cynthia says. Things continued to decline as she got into drugs. She had two more children while bouncing in and out of drug treatment programs. At one point she weighed only sixty-four pounds. When she finally hit rock bottom, she asked God to either take her life or send her to jail.

She went to jail. In prison she prayed fervently for a month before she finally found a sense of God. After prison, Cynthia went to Magdalene, a two-year residential community for women with a criminal history of prostitution and drug abuse, which was founded in 1997 by Rev. Becca Stevens. For the first time in her life, Cynthia knew the love of Christ in a caring community. “From that day forward, I was blessed,” she says. “These people didn’t know me, and yet the love was so unconditional.”

In April 2006, Cynthia celebrated her nineteenth month of being clean from drug addiction. She is the store manager for Thistle Farms, Magdalene’s cottage business that sells bath and beauty products.

According to Rev. Stevens, women like Cynthia often get into trouble because of a combination of family failures, community breakdowns, and poor choices. Drugs become a way to escape the pain, and prostitution the means to acquire the drugs. Even so, Stevens is quick to emphasize that nobody’s situation is hopeless. “There’s a myth that once you are a prostitute, you’re never going to get better,” she says. “It’s not true.”

—Jane Lampman, “Where Women Build New Lives,” Christian Science Monitor (April 13, 2006)