Stories of Changed Lives

A Dramatic Change

Lisa Bouw’s life was so out of control that, last fall, she walked into a hospital emergency room and admitted to doctors she was a danger to herself and others. 

Since leaving home at 16, Lisa’s life had been a chaotic tangle of partying, drugs and physical abuse.  At 22, she married then got pregnant with her daughter Sarah, now 7, and then Elaina, 4.  But the couple fought violently and her husband left, taking both children with him.  Lisa returned to using drugs, not even stopping when she became pregnant for a third time by another man.  After Elijah, now 2, was born, his father took him away and Lisa got into rehabilitation, but she says, “I used the same day I got out.”

Eventually Lisa got her older children back, but she continued to use drugs.  “It was horrible what I did to the girls,” she admits.  “I wasn’t even keeping the house clean.”  The family was evicted and Lisa and the girls moved from shelter to shelter.  Finally, Lisa left them with a friend for several months, intending to go back into rehab.  Instead she found a crack house until her drug use drove her to the ER.

“So I spent last Christmas in a psychiatric hospital,” she says.  “I was hopeless and helpless without my children.”

At Easter, Lisa got in touch with her father though she recalled him as abusive and an alcoholic.  “But I found out that three years earlier he became a Christian!” she says.  “He didn’t judge me, just listened and prayed for me.”  He also encouraged her to go to Buffalo City Mission’s Cornerstone Manor. 

Lisa and her children joined Cornerstone Manor’s two-year, residential recovery program last summer and, now Lisa says, “God has delivered me from my addiction and healed me!” 

Due to Lisa’s progress on the program, she has received permission to have her son, Elijah, for two months next summer.  She will enter a medical assistant program in the fall of 2007.  “I want to have a good job and support my children when I leave here,” she says.

This Christmas will be different for Lisa, Sarah and Elaina.  “It will be wonderful!” she enthuses.  “I’m clean and I have God with me.  It’s only through Cornerstone Manor that I can have my girls with me.  Anywhere else, I wouldn’t have been able to do that.  And it’s only through the birth of my Savior that I’m able to be forgiven … to have a new beginning.”