Hooked on Heroin, Healed by Love

Linda Bowman's Long Journey

Alice Lawson Cox

 

 

Seventeen-year-old Linda smoothed the wrinkles on her jeans and walked onto the dance floor. It was her first year in Tidewater Virginia’s public schools, and she desperately wanted to be part of the “in” crowd. She danced and drank with her friends until the night’s revelry was suddenly interrupted: Someone turned up the lights.

 

Linda gasped as her father strode into the room and dragged her away. Once home he raged, “If God were to return right now, what would He think?’

Eighteen years later, Linda Bowman still remembers the shame. “I never felt good enough or right enough for my father,” recalls the petite brunette, tears in her brown eyes. “I wanted to feel that I was special to him, but I never felt accepted.”

 

Feelings of inadequacy and unloveliness drove Linda farther from her parents and their God. “The drug culture accepted me where I was,” she says. “Taking drugs was an entrée into ‘the crowd.’”

It was also a means of overcoming her inferiority. Her heroin highs gave her an illusion of omnipotence. By age 24 Linda was living with a pusher and addicted to the hero-making drug he pushed. “It was the only secure life I knew,” says Linda. She was soon arrested for selling and distributing heroin.

 

Sitting in the isolation unit at the Virginia Correctional Institution for Women, the frail young woman felt even more unlovable. She had failed everyone. For the first time, Linda realized her helplessness, her inability to escape the mess she had made of her life.

Uncertain whether she would even be heard, Linda asked God for forgiveness. Then she begged Him for even more: I’ve got to know Your love!”

 

Wanting to find out for herself who God was, Linda asked a friend to send a Bible she could comprehend. Having never understood the King James Version, she delved into The Living Bible with enthusiasm. “I knew all the judgment and laws,” she says, “but I didn’t know about His grace and love.”

Each time she read one of God’s promises, Linda told Him, “Okay, You said this; I’m going to act on it.”

In a giant step of faith, she trusted God to help her break free from drugs. Her new life in Christ was so filled with peace that she refused the prison hospital’s medicinal drugs, choosing instead to go cold turkey. God honored her trust and set her free from her drug addiction.