Beth awakened in a sterile hospital room with a few familiar faces crowding over her.
“You’ve been in a coma for two weeks,” her parents told her. “You were in an accident on New Year’s.”
She panicked.
“Was anyone hurt?” she asked. Her dad, a pastor, hesitated to answer.
“Yes,” he replied, his voice shaking.
She tried to put the pieces back together as she lay in her hospital bed, but her foggy memory failed to recall what happened that fateful night . . .
Just a couple weeks before, Beth arrived at a neighborhood bar to ring in 2008 with her friends and boyfriend.
One too many drinks later, Beth called a cab to take her home. The last thing she recalled was how hard she hit the ice outside her front door when she slipped after stumbling out of the taxi.
But she didn’t go to bed. Instead, Beth grabbed her keys in a blacked-out haze, started her car, and headed out of her house and down the wrong direction of Highway 10.
An oncoming car couldn’t swerve out of Beth’s way fast enough, and the two collided head-on, killing a passenger on impact.
Beth survived, but with deep scars of regret that remain even today.
“I don’t know what possessed me to drive or leave the house. Those are questions I’ve had to give to God because there’s no way I could answer them.”
Reviving Lost Lives
Beth desperately wanted to pay her dues for the heartache and anguish she caused, but she had to wait a year before starting her four-year sentence for manslaughter.
Struggling with the burden of regret, Beth received another crushing blow when she took a pregnancy test that turned up positive.
“All I ever wanted to be was a mom, so I thought it was a cruel joke, some sort of punishment,” Beth says. “I thought God turned his back on me.”
But her dad reassured her that she’d one day see God’s purpose shine through such a dark time in her life.
So Beth married her boyfriend that May and gave birth to their daughter, Rylee, three months before she entered the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Shakopee.
“God’s hand was over me the whole time I was in prison,” Beth says.
She immediately joined a parenting group that allowed her to see Rylee several times a month. And that’s where a fellow inmate told her about Prison Fellowship’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) program.
“That sounded right up my alley,” Beth recalls. “I had lost myself, and I was needing that relationship with God again.”
There she found Jesus and a change of heart. She studied, learned, and grew with the help of Prison Fellowship mentors and her IFI sisters.
“Without IFI, I might have slipped downward under the weight of the circumstances,” she says. But with IFI, Beth found herself transformed by the forgiveness that only Jesus’ death and resurrection could bestow!
A Family on the Inside
Today Beth is home as a mom, a wife, a reconciled daughter, and a guide for those who have traveled a path similar to hers.
But she hasn’t forgotten the family she found on the inside.
“They were always there for me, giving me godly advice and praying for me. Prison Fellowship was and still is very dear to my heart,” Beth smiles.
And Beth’s dad agrees. “Without Prison Fellowship, my daughter would not be where she is today. Thank you,” he says, with tears in his eyes.