The Solution That Drugs Could’ve Never Supplied

“I felt so much guilt. Um, shame. I was a terrible person and that's what I felt like inside. Like, you, you can't get any lower than this.”

It was a scene played out too often in Maegan Burks childhood in Tennessee; Her parents strung out on drugs and alcohol. ““I felt unwanted, not good enough. Um, like, what's wrong with me? Why do they not love me? But they loved drugs more than me”, says Maegan. She lived with her grandparents and though they took her to church regularly, she struggled to see the point of it all. Maegan looked elsewhere to fill the needs of her heart.

According to Maegan, “the first time I got high with my mom, I was probably 17 and pregnant. I was pregnant with my daughter. We were smoking marijuana together; it just kind of numbed me.” By the time Maegan was 18, she had a daughter, Elena, and one step away from a full-blown drug addiction. It came One day when she went to visit her mother, where she did something, she swore she’d never do --- she began to shoot up morphine through a needle. Maegan says, “And I remember taking that first shot, like, in my head it almost made sense of why my mom and everybody was doing drugs that way.”

Over the next couple of years Maegan would have another child, all while continuing to use. Then, her older sister suddenly passed away, driving her into a pit of addiction that would take her six years to come out of. She says there were times she slept with men just to get her next fix. Then in February of 2011 at 22 years old, Maegan was arrested and charged with three felonies for robbing a pharmacy with some friends. By then, she was still living with her grandparents who were raising her daughter, Elena, and her second child, Sebastian. After she called her grandfather to post bail, he came and took her home, but even a lecture from him wasn’t enough. According to Maegan, “I went and stole his checkbook and did like a three-week binger. When he found out that I had stole his checkbook and wrote some checks, he kicked me out.

With no other options and nowhere to go, Maegan decided to enter a faith-based drug

rehab program at the Russellville Dream Center in Russellville, Alabama, for from the temptations of her life in Tennessee. Now alone and denied contact with her grandfather, family or children, she had to have a hard conversation with herself. Then, three months into the program, she received a message from a guest pastor at the rehab:

“He looked at me dead in my eyes and said, I want you to know that the Lord has seen your hurt. He has seen your pain of many nights, he has seen your shame and your guilt and he wants you to know that you've been made pure. And I remember when he said pure. Like, I knew that was a word from the Lord.”

Within months, through prayer, Bible reading and counseling, Maegan was freed from her 8-year dependence on drugs, and men. In that time she also began living a life fully committed to Jesus Christ. Although drug addiction would claim the lives of both her parents, Maegan began rebuilding the relationships with her two children, and grandfather. As or her crimes Maegan was fined and given three years’ probation. After her probation ended, in 2015, she started working as an office administrator and mentor at the Russellville Dream Center where she continues to work today. Maegan says, “I look at myself now as redeemed. I feel like I went through everything I went through  -- the bad, the ugly, the dirty to come out who I am today --- and that's redeemed and forgiven.”

If you or anyone you know is battling substance addiction in te Russellville, Alabama area, The Russellville Dream Center is the program that changed Maegan Burks’ life trajectory. Find out more information at http://www.russellvilledreamcenter.net .