AMAZING STORY
Mother’s Death Leads to Wake-up Call
By Shannon Woodland
The 700 Club
CBN.com -“I write songs about things that I struggle with - heart ache of heart break of any kind.” Some say blues music goes deep uncovering things that are often hidden - injustice, want and pain. “Everybody goes through these things and some people are better than covering it up than others.”
Blues artist Angela Wolf knows about hidden things. She had a lot of people fooled. She looked like the sweet, innocent, church girl. But the reality was she carried a lot of pain.
“It’s hard to sometimes look back at the photographs. I was smiling in them. I was putting on an act, but underneath it all I know that look. I know how hurt I was inside and I was just really good at covering it up.”
Angela was one of those kids picked on by bullies. She believed she’d never fit in and school became a nightmare. “I was looking for anything that made me forget who I was and forget the troubles I dealt with at school. I didn’t feel like I could discuss those things with my parents and I just kept wanting to fit in.”
Angela started smoking cigarettes then pot. That led to drinking and eventually inhaling hair spray or huffing. In time, Angela had boys over after school. Both her parents worked and often things got out of hand. “If I wanted to get a boy’s affection and for a boy to like me that’s what I needed to do, and so I began to have sexual intercourse at the age of 14.”
No matter how many boys Angela was involved with, she never felt accepted. Then her high school music teacher encouraged her to try out for the school musical. He knew Angela had talent. “He kept encouraging me. He’d say, ‘You can do this. You just need to really apply yourself and not be afraid what people think.’”
Her voice gave her the attention she needed. She found her wings after that and in college took on a new persona. Gone was the little church girl, instead she sang in bars and nightclubs where new drugs and men again became a part of her life. Her mom sensed something was not right and encouraged Angela to go back to church. Still Angela did what Angela wanted to do. “I had boyfriend after boyfriend after boyfriend and one night stand after one night stand. I ended up with an STD. I had become a bulimic, and the bulimia had eaten away at the gums of my teeth.”
The reality of what she’d become was beginning to hit home. “There’s nobody who’s going to want somebody like me. I was a piece of trash.”
Life came crashing down when the man she was engaged to decided he didn’t want to marry her. Then came another blow – her mother got cancer. “When I realized she was dying I thought, ‘I can’t do this to her. She has been so good to me. She has been my supporter all these years, and she’s dying.’ So I went to church and I listened.”
“I remember the minister talking about how God loves you, and it was as if he was talking directly to me. He kept saying, ‘God loves you no matter what you’ve done, no matter who you are, no matter who you’ve hurt, no matter what’s happened to you, He loves you.’ And it broke my heart. I remember sitting in the back row crying and I realized that God loved me, and although I had been in church my whole life as a child I did not realize that He loved me so much that He died to forgive people just like me, and that was the turning point for me.”
It took time and prayer for Angela to get on her feet. She went into counseling for the bulimia and got involved in a church. She found that where she had no strength, God did. “I was still the same person on the outside. I felt different inside, but I still had all that nasty stuff hanging on me. He began to change my desires. He took away my desire for drugs. He took away my desire for other men, and you know He took that away. He took away one of the very things that was the most destructive things in my life.”
Then Angela met Michael and they married. As far as her music, she’s heard around the country in biker bars and prisons with a message to free people from the blues. “When you try to plug somebody or something into the emptiness of your life, it’s never going to fill that hole.”
CBN IS HERE FOR YOU!
Are you seeking answers in life? Are you hurting?
Are you facing a difficult situation?
A caring friend will be there to pray with you in your time of need.
