How Can You Mend a Broken Soul?

CBN.com “I just remember going, ‘How did I get to this point? This is my life?’”

Tina Hoffman never intended to become a prostitute. But eventually, she lived up to her step-father’s words.

“I remember my step-dad telling me when I was little, ‘Oh, You’re just going to grow up to be a whore like your mother,’” Tina recalls. “My mom wasn’t of course. She was an extremely hardworking, you know, beautiful, wonderful mother.”

After years of verbal abuse, Tina’s self-image was crushed.

“I just started really kinda hating myself. I would excel at everything that I did. And just try, you know, I would try to overcompensate, I think. And try to do the right thing,” she says.

When Tina began college, she was ready for a fresh start in life. But things didn’t turn out as she planned. At a party one night, Tina was drunk and was raped by two fraternity guys. At first, she didn’t really blame the rapists.

“I guess I blamed myself. It was my own fault,” she says. “I kinda heard my mother’s words that she always used to say, ‘Now, you made your bed, you lie in it.’ You know, I mean, I shouldn’t have been … I blamed myself. I shouldn’t have been drinking. I shouldn’t have put myself in that situation and it wouldn’t have happened.”

Tina never reported the rape. But, she got this eerie feeling every time she saw her attackers. So, she quit school and joined the Navy. But she wasn’t in the military for very long.

“I had gotten kicked out of the Navy,” Tina explains. “I had gotten caught smoking pot in a fan room out to sea with seven guys. I didn’t care. I had no business being in the military. I was not a fan of authority anyway. I did not want to … didn’t like people telling me what to do.”

She did make one close friend, though.

“He wanted to get married and I really thought, you know, I am a used piece of nothing,” she says crying. “And who really wants to have a wife like that? This is really as good as it gets for me. I might as well just do it. He looks so happy. He’s a decent guy. I just thought, ‘this is as good as it gets for a girl like me.’”

Tina’s loveless marriage failed. She found herself broke and raising two young children by herself. And she needed money, fast.

“I was a single mom by myself,” she says. “I couldn’t afford to pay for daycare. I was at risk of losing my home, of losing my car. I had a good position working for the newspaper. I didn’t care.  I didn’t really see myself as a valuable person.”

So, she looked up escort services in the phone book and was hired. Each afternoon, she’d go to a motel and sell her body for $100 per client. She never told her family what she was doing.

“They didn’t know about it. The girls were really, really little. They were one and three at the time.  And they didn’t have a clue that I was doing that,” Tina says. “It was just so far from where my life started out to be. You know? I was a girl scout. I remember, you know, that went through my head all the time. ‘On my honor, I will try to serve God’… and I knew that I wasn’t.”

One night, Tina thought she’d smoke a joint while waiting for her next client. But she couldn’t find it. She looked everywhere, including the motel Bible.

“I needed to find a joint so I just started flipping through. Maybe I put it in here. And couldn’t-couldn’t, you know, couldn’t find it,” she says. “But something stopped me and I looked down at the Word and just like when, you know, when your parents read to you when you’re little and you see that magnified, you know, ‘Once upon a time….’ That’s how it was. It just came to life out of the pages.”

And it said, ‘While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.’ And something happened to me.  Something in my heart felt that word. It felt like God was saying to me, ‘I love you. I don’t think you’re despicable. I do not hate you. I do not – I’m not repulsed by you.’” 

I just felt that love and that forgiveness and it’s not really something that I had ever known from God before. I just always thought He was, you know, a mean God who, you know, who was there to punish me when I did wrong,” she says.

“And for so many years there lately I had – I had just done so wrong. I thought He could not stand me. All of a sudden just the love of the Father came over me. I just got down on my knees on the side of the bed and I just cried. Years and years and years of just all of this stuff and it’s just that, ‘I’m sorry,’ and that kept coming back to me.”

When she received this revelation of God’s love she decided to quit selling her body.

“I walk out and he’s walking in. And I’m like, ‘See ya!’  Yea,” she says.

Months later, she had another encounter with God.

“I was just flipping through channels one night and there was John Schneider…Bo Duke,” Tina says. “And he was talking about Jesus. I thought, ‘He’s a cool guy. Why is he talking about Jesus?’”

After the interview, Pat Robertson gave an invitation to receive Jesus. Since Tina had never actually taken that step, she prayed along with him.

“And again, just like that night in my motel night, it came down, and I just … something happened to me,” she says. “Something changed. I felt cleansed. I woke up the next morning and walked outside and it was … I understand now what a born-again experience is.”

It’s been over 15 years and Tina has not looked back. Today, she’s a successful real estate agent and sells multi-million dollar properties.

“All of the things that used to happen to me, the inappropriateness and all, that doesn’t happen anymore. It’s gone,” Tina says. “The Lord has removed those things and just knowing who you are in Christ. It doesn’t matter what you’re involved in, where you’ve been. He loves you. He wants to be that Dad that you have needed your whole entire life, you know, that maybe wasn’t there for you. God’s real.  And-and he loves you unconditionally."