A Lost Sheep Finds Her Shepherd

“It was a date, and things didn’t work out. And he pulled a gun on me. I just told him, ‘Shoot me and put me out of my misery.’ That's how bad I wanted to die," Sharon recalls. 

As a young woman, Sharon Dutra had an intense self-loathing born out of all the rejection she experienced. “What I remember of my mother was that she worked nights and so, she had a daughter from a previous marriage who babysat me, but she was drinking and partying while she was supposed to be babysitting me,” she says. “The next morning my mother sat us down and that’s when she said, ‘I’m going to have to put you in foster care.’ I never saw her again.”

When Sharon got older, she began using drugs. “I got in with the wrong crowd but it also helped me just to kind of not feel. There was so much betrayal, abandonment, and rejection.”
 
Her self-hatred manifested in other ways as well. “A few times I started hitting myself, just trying to be in pain in my body so that I didn’t have to be in pain in my mind and my heart, my spirit.”

Sharon’s father struggled with alcohol and remarried several times. As a result, Sharon was in and out of foster care. “I would go live with them. Then they would get a divorce, then I would go back to foster care,” she says. “So wherever I was it wasn’t settled. I didn’t feel safe, I didn’t feel secure, and I didn’t feel wanted.”

Her drug use increased. “I used intravenous drugs for six-and-a-half years and then I smoked crack for two years. It made me feel like I had some control over my life,” Sharon says. “It also took away from the pain that I was feeling. I felt I had developed by then a sort of exterior persona that I was tough and I could make it through and nobody’s going to hurt me again.”

By age 15, she was living on the streets, seeking acceptance wherever and from whomever she could. “I was raped a couple of times. That was pretty devastating. It almost felt I was such a bad person and I was so unworthy that someone hurting me wasn’t out of the question.”

Sharon married and had two children before she was 20, but the marriage failed. “I used to tell them, ‘I’m never going to leave you like my mother left me.' And I believed that at the time. But my ex-husband and I were in an abusive relationship so I ended up going back to the streets."

To support herself, Sharon got into prostitution. One evening, while on a date, Sharon had a gun pulled on her by a customer. “I seriously wanted him to pull the trigger, take me out of my misery," she remembers. “But he just ended up leaving.” 

She was arrested 13 times before she was 29 for charges ranging from prostitution to breaking and entering. While at the California Institution for Women, she started reading a book she thought was about Al Capone. “It was about a gangster, Al Capone’s gangster chauffeur. He had people killed, and killed people, and he went to prison and he accepted Christ there. Of course, he had done things a lot worse than I had, but there was such a parallel there of brokenness. That realization that our sin is so great and God is so wonderful. That reached my heart,” she says. "And when I finished that book I got down on my knees and I just wept. I accepted Christ right there on the floor. And it completely, radically, changed my life. I realized how much God had loved me and I realized that he forgave me.”

Sharon spent the rest of her time in prison ministering to other inmates. “I wanted to help other women who were broken as well. And I became a song leader in the chapel. The chaplain bought me a Bible with his own money,” she says. “I read that American Standard Bible every day for hours. It was truth, life, light. It was power. They saw that I was a new person and I don’t think they understood it, but they saw it.”

When she was released, Sharon plugged into a local church. “They accepted me, nurtured me, discipled me, and then ten months later I met my beautiful husband, Michael.”    

Today she writes about her experiences. Sharon’s book helps minister to women in southern California. “We started the ministry, Be Transformed Ministries, and it has grown exponentially. We are in different countries, different languages. It is so amazing,” Sharon says. “God loves to take the broken, heal it, and use it and us for His purposes. We all have a story of the way God uses us. He reaches us in that special way and then He uses us so that we can reach others for Him. No matter how dark, no matter how broken, no matter how used and abused you are, God can definitely take your life, heal you, and bring you into relationship with Him.”