When I was growing up we didn’t go to church much. My mom and dad got a divorce when I was eight years old. That left me and my sister living in separate houses and having to live with our broken parents. When I was this young I didn’t realize a lot about my family. I only seen what as on the outside. I seen my mother working at the bank, my father a farmer. I also seen my mother sleeping most of the time, and when she was awake I would hear her and my father bickering. I thought that all parents fought every night. My mom was good at making me and my sister think that our family was perfect. She would take us out shopping, take us on lots of vacations, and even check us out from school for mommy daughter days. She was doing all of this while struggling with her own mental health. She had an addiction. This addiction had come from years of mental and physical abuse from multiple people around her. I learned of this when I was 10 years old. We were staying at her boyfriends house at the time. She was in the bathroom a lot and would take forever to come out. I never though anything of this until one day I was snooping for some of her makeup under the counter and that’s when my whole world was flipped upside down. I questioned why she would have to have drugs to make herself feel better. I asked myself why I wasn’t enough to make her happy. I stayed up all night thinking about this. That is when I remembered what I had learned at a church sermon I had attended on Easter a couple years before. They said that no matter how long it had been since you had spoke to Jesus, He would always listen and accept you for who you were. I was to embarrassed to talk to any of my friends or family about this, so I resorted to prayer. I prayed and prayed until I fell asleep. That next morning I found my mom crying. She was sitting in the dark room wrapped in a blanket balling her eyes out. I asked her what was wrong. She explained that she could hear my prayers the night before through the thin walls of our outdated house. She cried into my arms and pleaded for my forgiveness. I had no idea what to say. I took a step back and told her it was not me she should be asking for help, but God. He would forgive her and set her on the correct path to sobriety. That next Sunday after church, I asked my youth leader to come to my house and talk to my mom about God and getting saved. That afternoon, my mother and I were saved and forgiven by God. Now six years later she has been sober for 6 months. Through all of the hiccups and all of the mistakes she has made, I know, and she knows, that God will always be there to pick her back up and help her through the darkest times in her life. I truly believe that Jesus saves, not just our souls, but also our lives.