Running Toward Hope
"I JUST REMEMBER deciding to run,” Jessie recalls, tears in her eyes. “I didn’t have a suitcase, clothes, or even a backpack. I knew I needed to get out and go home.” For many people, home is a specific town or city filled with childhood memories. For Jessie, home was wherever her family was, not in Alabama with her abusive husband. Spending the only money she had on the first train out of Tuscaloosa, she started her
journey toward Indianapolis, her family, and home.
Jessie had grown up in the Christian church. A daughter of two pastors, she was well-versed in the Bible, sang along to Sunday school songs, and dug spare pennies out of her pockets to add to the weekly offering plate. As Jessie she grew older, though, her life began to head down harmful paths. Her confidence in God had faltered, and one bad choice was followed by another. Jessie dropped out of high school and moved down south with a man she thought of as the “love of her life.”
“I was running from God,” Jessie explains. “I thought I had everything figured out. Truth is, I was the emptiest person on God’s green Earth.”
Growing up, Jessie had heard from her parents the name of one place she could always go for help. A “Hail-Mary,” she thought, but she was out of options. Into The Salvation Army’s Fountain Square Corps Community Center she dragged her exhausted legs, hoping beyond hope that some kind of help waited there for her. What she found was so much more.
Fifteen years later, Jessie dances through those same front doors of The Salvation Army, excited to teach her Adventure Corps class during weekly youth programs and to meet with bell ringing volunteers during the Christmas season. She is part of a bigger family, a church family that provides her with unconditional love every day. For all that Jessie has received, she has given back so much more, bringing her light to the youth groups, volunteers, and staff at The Salvation Army.
“I thought I left God behind,” Jessie says, “but what I realized was that God was following me through all of those lonely nights. When I was at my lowest point in life, when I walked into the lobby of Th e Salvation Army, I realized I couldn’t outrun God. He was waiting for me there all along.”