AMAZING STORY
Living a Lie No More
By Randy Rudder
The 700 Club
CBN.com -To the outside world, Bobbett Bettencourt seemed like the All-American wife and mother. She kept the books for her husband’s business, and cared for their two young boys. She attended ball games, and even served as a room mother at their school. But Bobbett had a secret.
“I was a master of disguise,” she says. “I had been doing cocaine for about four years, and someone introduced me to meth. That’s what really took me down a path of destruction.”
Bobbett was born and raised on a family farm in northern California. Despite the idyllic surroundings, her childhood was farm from picture-perfect. “My dad was an angry man, and he took it out on us—not so much in physical abuse, which he did, but basically it was more verbal abuse. And so I grew up scared of my father. I grew up thinking that I didn’t have a whole lot of value.”
Bobbett turned to drugs when she was just a young girl. “I was pretty much a pothead. I smoked every day,’ she says, and I really liked it. Basically, what I wanted was to relieve the pain of not feeling good enough, of not feeling loved. I thought, This is cool. I don’t have to feel anymore.”
In high school, Bobbett became intimate with her boyfriend Marlin, who was older and had already started an agriculture business. When she was just 15, she found out she was pregnant.
“We were both really scared, because we didn’t know what we were going to do. He was 20 and it was just before my sixteenth birthday, and he knew that if my dad found out, he would go to jail,” Bobbett remembers.
A family friend took Bobbett and Marlin to San Francisco to terminate her pregnancy. “I didn’t know what I was doing back then,” she says. “If I could take it back, I would because abortion is a big deal. And anybody that says it’s not has never had to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.”
Bobbett and Marlin eventually married and later had two sons. She continued to hide her drug addiction from her family, though, and later became addicted to meth. “That messed me up to a point where I could no longer function,” she remembers. Eventually, Marlin found out and talked her into going into rehab. When Bobbett was released, she had a visitor show up one day at her home.
“She said that the Holy Spirit had sent her to my home, that there was someone here who was hurting,” Bobbett remembers. “And I told her that it must be me, because I just got out of rehab, and I don’t know how to do this thing without drugs. And she said, ‘Do you have a relationship with Christ? And I said, ‘What’s that?’ I didn’t even know what it was. And she led me to Christ right then and there.”
Marlin’s business continued to prosper, but Bobbett’s faith did not. In 2006, the couple moved into their 5500 square-foot dream home on 40 acres, but Bobbett was still struggling with anxiety and depression. One day, around Christmastime, her friend Lupe came to see her. Lupe asked her if she was fellowshipping with other believers and reading her Bible, to which Bobbett replied ‘no.’ “Lupe said, ‘The Word is alive. When you read it, it gets into your heart and your soul, and then the Lord starts making transformations in your life and he can heal your pain.”
Bobbett took her friend’s advice. For the next year, she immersed herself in god’s word every morning. Bobbett later found fellowship at a local church where one Sunday morning, god truly revealed himself to her when the pastor asked her to come forward.
“My whole life flashed before my eyes: everything that I had done wrong, all the people that I had hurt, the baby that I had aborted,” Bobbett says. “How could God forgive me? How could he ask me to serve Him? And all of a sudden, what I believe was the Holy Spirit came on me, and I just wept, and laughed, and I was trembling. And I felt more peace and comfort than I had ever felt in my whole life. And I was like This is real.
Bobbett discovered the joy of serving, and began sharing her faith with the employees at their seeding business. She got involved in several local ministries, and chronicled her experiences in a book that she hopes will lead other women to Jesus.
“You can know that you are valuable in the Lord’s eyes, hat you are precious before Him, and that all you have to do is surrender to His Grace, to His mercy, and to His love, and to embrace who He is. That’s where you’ll find the peace and the comfort that we are all searching for.”
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