Gary’s Story
“THIS PLACE TRULY IS A BLESSING!”
Gary grew up around drugs. “My mom smoked pot and drank. My Dad took pills, drank, smoked pot, and never hid it from me. So when I got older I didn’t have to go out and learn about it because I already knew.”
“My first experience with it was on a school night in the first grade, my uncle came over to babysit me, and he got drunk. I pretty much quit drinking when I was 19,” he says. “I knew I was becoming an alcoholic.”
So it wasn’t alcohol that got Gary sent to prison. It was drugs. “I never could pull myself out of the lifestyle,” he remembers today. When both of his parents passed away and Gary “sunk all the way down,” that pushed him over the edge, and he ended up in prison.
Gary was released into a half- way house in Richmond, and it was there that he learned about the Lexington Rescue Mission.
“One of the boys there had been here, and he told me about the Mission. He talked about everything: How they treat you; how it’s faith based. He had nothing bad to say. It just weighed on me that this is where I wanted to come.”
Gary came into the Mission with only the clothes on his back. Just a week after he arrived, he was able to begin working. “When I got here, they treated me like I was at home. Great people. They help out any way they can. Being here has just been blessing after blessing.”
One of those blessings is the rekindling of Gary’s faith. His grandmother was a regular church goer. He would see her when he went home on weekends and says her face would “light up” whenever he went to an old family church. “That’s one of the things I love about being here.”
