A BEAM OF LIGHT IN A JAIL CELL

ing to function well only fueled her rationalization during her alcohol and drug abuse.

For years prior to 2004, Ann had many close calls with the law and was arrested numerous times-each time behind bars for no more than a week. She admits, “There hardly was a time I wasn’t ‘under the influence’ behind the wheel” of her car.

Despite an excellent job after graduation, she just could not stop using. It all caught up to her one night with a knock on her door. Police were looking for her friend, but since she was on “intense probation,” the drugs they found in her house landed her in jail for possession of meth-this time for nearly three months.

Ann describes her childhood and young adult life as “a hot mess.” Both her parents were alcoholics, her father severely abusing her mother. He finally abandoned the family when Ann was seven, and her mom remarried several times. One of Ann’s stepdads committed suicide. Little wonder that by age thirteen, Ann was experimenting with alcohol, marijuana, psychedelic drugs; and later on, cocaine and meth.

“But God had His eye on me,” she says. Thanks to the Christian influence of her maternal grandmother, seeds were planted during Ann’s childhood that would one night literally save her life.

“I was bullied a lot in school. I lived in a small town where everybody knows everybody, and all their secrets,” Ann says.

Despite this, Ann remained in school graduating on the Dean’s List, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. Continu-

It turns out, “God’s will for my life came as a knock on the door by the police.”

That extended stay behind bars became “the first time I was ‘clean’ since the age of thirteen!” She thought more about God, and the gospel truths impressed on her through her grandmother. She remembered at age seven receiving a Confirmation Bible.

“It was like a beam of light in that dark cell-the image of that little Bible!”

She still has that Bible. Upon release from jail, she found it and took it with her to the halfway house she was assigned to for parole. Ann took Isaiah 51:11 as the key verse for her recovery: “Those the Lord has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

Ann landed a job at a Microtel motel around the corner from the Atlanta Temple Corps. There she discovered “Celebrate Recovery.” Involvement in Temple Corps activities followed, and she was mentored by (then) corps officers, Lt. Colonels Allan & Fiona Hofer. She became a soldier in 2006.

Captain Ann Hawk became an officer in 2012 serving in corps appointments in the Carolinas, Texas and Oklahoma. She now serves in Front Royal, Virginia.