From the pages of the Whiskey Woven Dreams Journal.

Jennifer never thought she’d make it to thirty.

Her twenties had been a symphony of destruction—drugs, men, screaming guitars, and the kind of nights that blurred into each other like smeared eyeliner. She had once been the girl with the whiskey laugh and the leather-clad swagger, the one everyone wanted to be near. But that version of her had died somewhere between the overdose in an alleyway and waking up to a stranger’s hands on her, body too numb to resist.

Now, at thirty-two, she was a ghost of that girl—sick, hollowed out, bones pressing against pale skin like her own body was rejecting her existence. She had burned through every dollar, every friend, every promise of a second chance. Her voice, once her weapon, was shot from too many cigarettes, too many nights screaming into a microphone trying to drown out the emptiness inside her.

And now, here she was, shivering in a roach-infested motel, watching the blood drip from her wrist onto the yellowed carpet. The razor blade lay beside her, shaking in her weak grip. She had tried to go slow, had let the pain remind her she was still here. But the truth? She didn’t want to be.

A Gideon Bible sat in the nightstand, a relic of some forgotten mission. She had mocked it before. Tonight, she grabbed it with trembling hands. It fell open to a verse highlighted in fading ink:

"The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." — Galatians 2:20

Gave Himself.

For her.

Jennifer’s breath hitched. A sob clawed its way up her throat, raw and ugly. She pressed her forehead to the brittle pages, whispering, "Why? Why would You do that? Why would You die for me?"

The answer wasn’t in words. It was in the stillness. The weight of something unseen pressing against her, a presence so overwhelming she felt it. Love. Real, unshakable love. The kind that wasn’t asking her to be better before coming home.

Her blood still dripped. But she knew now—this wasn’t how her story ended.

She crawled from the floor and stumbled into the night, into a city that had devoured her once but couldn’t have her now. She found a church with its doors still unlocked, and she collapsed at the altar like a dying thing gasping for its last breath.

"Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." — Luke 9:23

That night, Jennifer died. The girl who lived for destruction, for pleasure, for escape—she was gone. And in her place was something new, something covered in Christ’s blood, something alive for the first time.

She never touched another needle. She never touched another man who didn’t know the weight of her soul. The withdrawals nearly killed her, but she bled them out like poison, screaming into her pillow, gripping a Bible like it was the only thing keeping her tethered to this world.

And it was.

Years later, her voice returned, but this time, it carried something no drug, no stage, no man had ever given her—truth. When she sang, she didn’t just perform. She testified. She told the addicts in the back row that she knew their pain. She told the lost girls with dead eyes that she had been them. And she told them about the blood.

The blood that washed her clean.

The blood that saved her life.