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| An Artist's Eye...and a Heart for God. |
| Changed Lives - March 2010 |
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| Rehab was ending and Rafael had no place to go... but was led to the Rescue Mission. Today, Rafael's life is headed in the right direction. |
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One hot summer day Rafael Lope and his cousin were wrestling in the dirt outside his home when a big yellow bus pulled up near them. Two girls he recognized from school stepped off the bus and asked if they wanted to go to church with them. Rafael thought for a moment, looked at his dusty, grubby play clothes, shrugged and said, “Sure,” and for the next four years regularly attended Sunday school. Rafael liked the stories and the activities but never did understand the Salvation message. Eventually he no longer wanted to attend church since his friends were having a bad influence on him. By the time he was fourteen years old, he was smoking marijuana and drinking. Curiosity about methamphetamine led him to try it just once, and he was hooked. Rafael remembers, “I knew it was stupid. I broke my mother’s heart. I could see it in her eyes. She never stopped loving me, but meth makes you not care about anything.” Rafael was an only child and “well-loved” by his mother, grandmother and a large circle of relatives in the small town he grew up in in New Mexico. His mother worked hard to support her family, and his grandmother cared for Rafael while his mother worked. His grandmother’s death when he was 15 devastated him, and he became even more rebellious.
Meth and alcohol were a potent mixture for Rafael and transformed a normal, happy kid into an angry, violent man by the age of 26. “If someone annoyed me, I would just pull out my gun and tell them to shut up,” Rafael relates, shaking his head in dismay. After his mother passed away in 2003, Rafael was distraught and angry by the loss of the last person he could count on. “She was all I had. Everything went numb inside me when I lost her.” Not long after her death, Rafael developed a severe tooth infection. He ignored the symptoms, and the infection moved into his blood system, damaged his heart and required open-heart surgery to repair a valve. He then fell into a coma which lasted four months. Waking up to tubes sticking out of him and unable to speak, walk or perform any basic function without help was a shock. Eventually he was sent to rehabilitation where he slowly regained his motor reflexes and other abilities. However, after two months into rehabilitation, he felt the cravings for alcohol and meth again, and he snuck out to get them. When he was able to function better on his own, Rafael escaped from rehab and headed for home.
Back in familiar territory, he made a beeline for a drug dealer. He sold everything he owned; even the house and land he had inherited went to support his drug habit. Soon Rafael was homeless and looking for ways to support his craving, but he had nothing and no one to help him. One night he ended up sitting under a bridge thinking about what a mess he was in, and as he watched the sun come up he said, “This is it!” Rafael started walking and talking to God. He did not know if he was doing it right, but he kept asking God to help him, and by putting one foot in front of the other he managed to walk for about 160 miles. Finally, he accepted a ride which brought him to Albuquerque and life on the streets of the big city.
Six years went by for Rafael where his only concern each day was how to beg, borrow or steal enough to get the bottle of booze and the drugs he wanted. Rafael’s heart weakened even more with the constant substance abuse, and he spent much of his time either in jail or in the hospitals. One of his doctors, Dr. Anthony Fleg, inspired Rafael with his positive attitude. He encouraged Rafael to fight his addictions by entering a 30-day rehabilitation program.
The rehab program was ending and he had no place to go. Rafael did not want to go back out on the streets. He kept searching for a residential program that would take him with his special needs. One day he looked across the street to the Albuquerque Rescue Mission and thought, “I am not much of a Christian; that will be too weird for me.” Suddenly, he felt a surge of strength and knew that this was his last chance. He HAD to make the effort. Rafael stood up and walked across the street to the Albuquerque Rescue Mission.
This was the beginning of a transforming year for Rafael. He says, “My year in the program at the Mission was a wonderful experience. The great teachers at the Mission opened the Bible to me. You can see that it comes from their hearts. With all the support I found at the Mission, putting my addiction to alcohol behind me was surprisingly easy. I was safe here, and I met others going through the same experience. Church and support groups filled my life with the knowledge that I had choices beyond using drugs or alcohol.”
With regular medical treatment and ceasing the self-abuse with his addictions, Rafael is able to look forward to a longer life in Christ. After graduating from ARM’s New Life Program, Rafael is now in a self-sufficiency program and is an active volunteer in the Native Health Initiative (NHI). NHI works with medical students to develop health programs in the community and on the reservations. |
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