A Long Road Home

I have a young friend (20) whom I will call Jorleny who is courageously seeking healing and transformation for her own life. After being sexually abused by her own father at age seven, she made friends who introduced her to drugs, alcohol and prostitution. For the past thirteen years she has alternately been committed to staying alive in the street culture or attempting to escape it. She has been in several different programs and ministries in Tegucigalpa, always with optimistic intentions, but each time she has ended up back on the street.

This time around Jorleny has been clean from drugs and alcohol for eight weeks, her longest time ever! She is in a Christian rehab center. Several of her friends, all of them sex workers, had been murdered, so she decided that it was time (again) to “live like normal people.” She voluntarily entered the center, and she has faithfully obeyed the schedule and rules. She is now physically clean, and she has also become reconciled with the Lord Jesus.

What’s next? Her emotional state is shattered. She struggles with depression, fears of all sorts, and traumatic memories. I asked her if she has nightmares. “Yes,” she said, “All day long.”

She wants to go back to school. She quit in fourth grade. She wants to work so that she can be somewhat independent. And most of all she wants to be the kind of person and mother that her little boy, age four, can be proud of. He is in our children’s home, and if there is any one reason for Jorleny’s tenacious resolve, he is it. She finds strength in the God she cannot see, but her hopes are pinned on that little boy.

Would you pray for Jorleny? She is looking at a very long road home, and some days she doesn’t want to try anymore. She is being healed one day at a time by the One who loves her best, and she longs to feel that she truly belongs to the Body of Christ. Let us surround her heart and spirit with our intercessions on her behalf so that she can be truly free and fully healed.