Jill's Story

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Jill Colon gave her life to Christ the first time she was in prison, but back on the outside she followed her husband into a drug-destructive lifestyle. Otherwise, “I was afraid he would leave me,” as he had done once before, she recalls.

She knew it was the wrong choice. “God kept talking to me in the back of my head, constantly convicting me of stuff I was doing.” Then one day, while waiting for her husband to return from a heroin buy, “I found myself praying to God that he would have the drugs in hand. And I thought, You can’t pray that!” So Jill decided to “leave God alone” and broke off all communication with Him.

But things only “got worse and worse and worse,” she discovered. She and her husband fought. With so much money going for drugs, “we couldn’t pay the rent and had to move again and again.” A college graduate, but with a prison record, “I could only get crummy jobs” that required two-hour bus rides back and forth because neither she nor her husband had a driver’s license. “It’s easy not to want to go to work,” Jill explains. “And then you have to resort to doing the wrong things in order to survive.”

She violated her post-prison probation, prompting a warrant for her arrest—though their frequent moves helped her avoid being caught. But one day, after another screaming match with her husband, “I just couldn’t take it anymore,” Jill recalls. So she walked to the county jail near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, to turn herself in.