Tamlyn Ommert doesn’t go into detail about her childhood in Portland, Oregon. It was so long ago, and so much has changed in the four decades since. Her father then, she describes, was “very powerful, intimidating, controlling, and abusive.” He was also an alcoholic, with seemingly no qualms about supplying his underage daughter with samples from his supply.
“But still, I loved him.”
Tamlyn Ommert doesn’t go into detail about her childhood in Portland, Oregon. It was so long ago, and so much has changed in the four decades since. Her father then, she describes, was “very powerful, intimidating, controlling, and abusive.” He was also an alcoholic, with seemingly no qualms about supplying his underage daughter with samples from his supply.
The liquor he offered, as well as the marijuana Tamlyn chose for herself, helped numb the throbbing feelings that for years she couldn’t even label. “There was no communication in our home,” she says. “I literally did not know what my feelings were. So I had all this stuff that was there, and it wasn’t comfortable.”
By the time she was 14, Tamlyn found the courage to communicate an ultimatum to her mother. “If you don’t leave, I’m leaving without you.” That pushed Tamlyn’s mom to walk away from her oppressive husband.
Still, the newfound freedom from an abusive father didn’t quash the abuse Tamlyn inflicted on herself. The young teen ventured from marijuana to LSD. Her boyfriend regularly shot heroin—even after his brother died from an overdose. “And I said, ‘I’m not going there! I’m not gonna be like that,’” Tamlyn recalls.
But her resolve soon faltered. At age 16, “I decided to try it ‘just one time.’ I was thinking, Well, what is this stuff that people love so much they’re willing to die for it?”
She soon found out, as her naïve “one time” decision sped into an enslaving addiction. The drug no longer just numbed her feelings; “It made me feel nothing.”
Reeling Others In
That “nothing” included no sense of guilt as she’d troll the park for other drug seekers, lure them to a house where she supposedly kept a drug stash, then run out the back door with their money, leaving them empty-handed. “I changed into a person of dishonesty and hatred,” she says. After a while, the only people who wanted to hang out with her were those who were like her. She felt a sense of pride—fleeting though it was—when she heard someone praise, “That girl’s got game!”
Drugs pulled Tamlyn into degrading behaviors that ravaged her body and soul. Even her love for her newborn son wasn’t strong enough to change her ways.
In the tenth grade she dropped out of school after telling her mother “how horrible high school was because people were selling all these drugs.” She conveniently withheld the detail that “I was the one doing it.”
“Drowning myself in the lifestyle of an addict was a way to avoid facing anything that I had responsibility in,” she says from the astute vantage point of hindsight. “It allowed me to blame my father for the abuse and all the other things that were happening—It’s all his fault I’m out here! Which I learned later, of course, wasn’t true.”
By 19 Tamlyn had two convictions on her record and her first stint in the Oregon Women’s Correctional Center. After her release, she immediately went back to the drugs, back to the old—and increasingly degrading—lifestyle that left her disgusted with herself.
“But the more loaded I got, the easier it became,” she says of her behavior. And the sicker I got [from the drug use], the more necessary it became, because I needed the money.”
She lived “on and off at home, but mostly at dingy hotels,” she says. It pained her too much to see the sorrow in her mother’s face “when I had to lie again about where I’d been or what I’d been doing.” It was easier to stay away.
A parole violation sent Tamlyn back to prison, then prison coughed her back out to the streets. Even getting pregnant couldn’t get her to resist the drugs that ravaged her body and soul.
At 24, when she held newborn son Rod in her arms, “for the first time in my life, I knew what real love was—to the best of my ability,” she adds. “But it still wasn’t enough.” Her next arrest led to a federal conviction—which sent her to a penitentiary in California, and sent her three-year-old son to live with one of Tamlyn’s friends. More than 600 miles separated them.
But a few seeds of hope had burrowed into her heart—sprinkled by some Christians visiting the county jail that held her prior to her transfer. “These people were coming and talking about God,” Tamlyn describes. She was “too cool” to overtly join in their conversations with other inmates, but she stealthily listened in.
And one night, lying in her bed and contemplating her future, Tamlyn whispered a prayer to a God she wasn’t even sure she believed in. “If You are really real,” she prayed, “You’ve got to show me in a way that I really know it’s You.”
Discovering the Reality of God
Once at the penitentiary, “I forgot about saying that prayer.” But God started to reveal Himself in mysterious ways.
The mystery of it confounds her ability to find an adequate description. “I was getting this nudge, and the nudge got stronger and stronger. It was like an out-of-body experience. It was like what I had known and anything I was familiar with had completely left my being, and I was so uncomfortable in my skin that I literally thought I was going crazy. And all these people that were Christians kept coming up to me and saying all this God loves you stuff.”
And some mysterious voice inside her head kept prompting, “Read Proverbs, read Proverbs.” So she went to one of those Christians and asked, “What’s Proverbs?” Someone gave her a Bible and pointed out the section she was looking for.
“I went and read it, in secret, of course. And I read all about myself—the woman who tempts others to sin. And it was just so clear it was all for me.” She could no longer foist responsibility for her actions onto someone else.
Afraid of being seen as a “Jesus Freak,” Tamlyn still felt conflicted over exposing her growing interest in God and His Word. “One day I stood at the edge of the prison yard and said to God, ‘You can’t make me [carry] this Bible across the yard. I’m not going to!’ ”
At one point she got her hands on a book called Born Again—Chuck Colson’s autobiography. “I was just blown away by this guy who did all these things that were dishonest and was so transparent talking about it, and God transformed him and he was so passionate about God. That got my attention and made it easier for me to read the Bible.”
And finally—on May 23, 1983—she said another prayer to God: “If You think You can do better in my life than I have—because obviously I’m not doing great—then I surrender my life to You.”
“I knew if I didn’t do something different,” she explains, “I was going to die.” She asked for forgiveness and thanked God that Jesus had died on the cross for her sin.
When she awoke the next morning, “it was like I was floating, and all of a sudden I realized this gigantic hole in my soul was suddenly filled with love and peace and self-worth from knowing God created me.”
One of the corrections officers immediately noticed the new lightness in her step and demeanor. “What happened to you?” he asked. “Jesus!” announced Tamlyn. Soon, she says, “other people started to tell me I had this glow.”
As Tamlyn describes it, “God completely transformed the way I thought, the way I carried myself, the way I talked.” He immediately removed cursing from her language, “and from that day forward, swear words hurt my ears.”
She also lost all cravings for drugs.
And then she prayed a rather surprising prayer—in behalf of her father. “Lord, I want him to know what I know. I want him to feel this love!” Even now, the memory of that prayer, springing out of a God-given compassion for her dad, causes her to weep.
Finding New Connections
During the rest of her year and half in prison, Tamlyn got involved in Prison Fellowship programs and “everything else that was Christian based”—adding to her understanding of God, allowing Him to continually refine her. As she neared her release date, she asked for someone to connect with on the outside, back home in Portland, Oregon. “The only people I knew back there were dope fiends,” she describes.
Prison Fellowship connected her with volunteer Arnie and Merrie Gagnet, about 30 years older than Tamlyn. “Someone gave us her name and asked if we would ‘mother hen’ her,” says Arnie. And like good mother hens, they protectively swept her under their wing, giving her encouragement, love, and support. “We cared a lot for her,” he adds.
They invited her to their home, took her to church with them, and while she was still in the halfway house, they took her to visit her then five-year-old son, until she was able to reunite with him as a full-time mom. Tamlyn got little Roddy a children’s Bible (which the sales clerk gave her for free after hearing her story) so she could begin to teach him about the Savior who had changed her life.
Along with the GED Tamlyn earned in prison, her drive, outgoing personality, natural intelligence—and God’s grace—opened up job opportunities for her. Her first was at a walk-in crisis counseling center, where she had volunteered during her time at the halfway house. She served as a drug and alcohol counselor for several years—and married one of the other counselors, also a former drug addict.
That marriage lasted 10 years, until her husband relapsed, leaving her with significant debts and three children—her son, his daughter, and the son they had together.
Through the years she has worked for Radio Shack, Nutrisystem, the National Missing Children Locate Center—each time rising to a position of leadership. She won parts in TV commercials and worked as an extra or stand-in in theatrical movies. She also worked with a Portland casting company to train other extras “how to be on movie sets.”
And slowly she paid off the debts.
“I was leaning on God, living as a Christian, taking my family to church,” Tamlyn says.
Then in 1999, her past came crashing into her present when she learned she had hepatitis C—most likely a result of her drug abuse. The liver-assaulting disease can go undetected for years. The doctor, Tamlyn remembers, gave her about 10 years to live.
Dark Night of the Body and Soul
The discovery of the hepatitis C was followed by a stroke, then by cancer—which required the removal of her thyroid—then by near kidney failure. For 10 years the combination of severe health ravages required a succession of interferon injections, chemotherapy, surgeries, radiation, and other treatments that sapped her physical and spiritual strength. The deaths of her father and oldest brother added to her grief. The illnesses and related anxiety led to the loss of her job as an apartment complex manager, which led to financial struggles.
She decreased contact with the Gagnets—as well as nearly everyone else—during much of that time. “She was so sick,” says Merrie, and the high doses of some medications caused Tamlyn to gain excessive weight. “So I think Tammy didn’t want us to see her that way.”
But Tamlyn’s self-imposed isolation also stemmed from her belief—and the shame attached to it—that God was displeased with her.
Lost in what she describes as a “deep, dark pit,” Tamlyn cried out to God but felt no consolation. “What have I done?” she entreated. “I was really feeling like I was being punished for something. I figured I had let Him down so bad in some capacity that my name was literally taken out of the Book of Life.”
Broken and desperate, she pleaded with God: “Can You just let me know You’re there?”
The answer came after she lost her home and moved in with her mom. Her Bible was always near, though for a time problems with her eyesight allowed her to read only the larger subheadings in the various chapters.
Eventually she could see well enough to read 2 Peter, where words she had forgotten in her despair suddenly leaped out at her. “Therefore, be all the more diligent to make certain about His calling and choosing you . . . for in this way the entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be abundantly supplied to you.” And from James: “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.”
She can pinpoint the day of her “resurrection”—November 24, 2008. “Oh my gosh, He just filled me. I had instant clarity: ‘I am here and have never left you. I never gave you more than you could handle.’ And I instantly became grateful for everything I had been through.”
She reconnected with Arnie and Merrie—and has stayed in touch regularly ever since, through visits and almost daily e-mails. Now 86, compared with Tamlyn’s 56, Arnie vows that “I’m going to be here to help that kid until she’s 112!”
Father-Daughter Reconciliation
Now assured of her inclusion in the Book of Life, Tamlyn knows another name was also written there: her dad’s, before his death. After her release from prison in 1984, she contacted her father, boldly sharing the Gospel—and just as boldly confronting him about the past. He admitted his abuse and asked for his daughter’s forgiveness.
“I know now that [the confrontation] wasn’t about me,” says Tamlyn, as she had already forgiven him. “It was for him, so that he could say he was sorry and then go to God.” Because one day soon after, he phoned her and asked, “What is that prayer you said to say?” Then he, like his daughter, surrendered his life to the transforming love and power of Christ.
Today Tamlyn works part-time building a Univera business, providing products “that dramatically alter how we experience the aging process,” she describes. Tamlyn stands behind the products because similar ones, she says, helped her beat the odds of death by hepatitis C. In 1999 doctors gave her 10 years to live; within three years they declared her cured of the illness. She doesn’t discount the miracles of God, of course. She considers these products, using ingredients found in nature, as “God’s medicines.”
She looks back on her trials and testings with a far different verdict than she had in the midst of them. “It was all good,” she says sincerely. “It was all for His purpose and glory. I just can’t be more honored that He would think I had the strength to endure, because through endurance comes joy.”