Finding True Love

Hand of Hope

Growing up, Pamela felt abandoned by her mother...she was always distant from her and her siblings. Her whole childhood, she never felt loved.

When she was just 23 years old, Pamela met a man she thought would give her the thing she was always missing. And when he shared his drugs with her, she just thought that that was love.

But she was mistaken. Besides introducing her to the drug scene, he forced her to start prostituting herself.

“I could not find any way out. My daughter had been born, and I just thought that she could end up an addict like me,” Pamela says. “And I just thought that I had been a bad mother.”

It got to the point where Pamela was spending all her money on drugs. She wanted to stop using but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t finish a day without getting high. She knew deep down something had to change, but she was frustrated and lost in her addiction.

She began to feel that the only way to escape was to end her life. She gathered what she needed to kill herself, and then something strange happened...she remembered someone telling her about God.

In that moment, she prayed and said, “If You’re so big, can You get me out of this?”

That afternoon, her nephew, who is a Christian, came to visit her and said, “You know who sent me?”

“And I said, Yes. Yes, get me out of here, just get me out of here,” Pamela says.

Within days, she agreed to enter a rehabilitation center for women called Siquem Lugar del Refugio, an outreach of Global Teen Challenge outside Santiago, Chile, that Hand of Hope is honored to come alongside.

It was hard work, but over time Pamela experienced Christ’s healing through the program and found freedom from her addiction. She came to understand that God has been with her every step of the way.

Today, Pamela lives a completely changed life. She’s studying to be a therapist so she can help others who also battle addiction. And she’s become the mother she always wanted to be through encountering the love she was longing for all along—in God.

“I found my only true, great love,” she says. “Having the love of God in my heart made me forget everything else...I finally really know what love is.”