Elizabeth’s life is penned very simply in this inspiring memoir about her incredible battle, to find a way to live.Born the year her parents immigrated from Europe, in a large catholic family, she experienced poverty, neglect, rejection and abandonment before the age of eighteen. She had no sense of self and felt invisible most of the time. Her father passed away after battling cancer for eleven … eleven years, when she was nineteen years old. It was then that her world took a bad turn, when she fell in love with a drug addict/dealer.
Twenty four years later, after using heroin everyday while trying to raise her five children, circumstances forced her to leave him. Elizabeth and her three year old daughter had only one bag of clothes and a stroller. They were homeless for three months and she attempted suicide.
Without a car, phone, money or friends and in very poor health she was lost and broken and needed help but was too stubborn to reach out, believing her life to be worthless and of no value. She did not attend any detox, meetings, rehabs, counselors or doctors but with only sheer determination and persistence, overcame her dependency on drugs.
Elizabeth began her harrowing journey towards the light of truth and found freedom in Christ alone. She remains clean to this day and is a very private person. She wrote her story only to help people who suffer like she did and need help to find a way to live without drugs.
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Elizabeth shows so much courage and faith writing about her journey from heroin to Christ. This is a must read for anyone battling any form of addiction. Thank you for sharing your story with us Elizabeth.
Welcome back to another Sacred Sunday, my fellow Book Dragons. I hope your weekend was enjoyable. We are starting the month of December and this is the most festive time of the year. I thought it fitting to start out with a Gem of Hope, honoring He who brings us Hope.
This Gem is quite beautiful, quite seductive. Look at the way it glows in the light. White, soft, almost like silken on the surface, it looks as though it would bring comfort and take away all sorts of pain if One were to only hold it, caress it, ingest it in some way…but take heed! This Gem is quite dangerous, quite deadly. Will it kill you immediately? Or will it be a slow, lingering demise, taking with you all that you hold dear, leaving destruction for your parents, your siblings, your nestlings? This is “From Heroin to Christ” and the Gem Maker is E.A. Moldovan.
This is Moldovan’s story. It is not pretty, there is no magic lamp, three wishes, no castle. There is however poison powder, a Heroic Prince and in a sense a happily ever after, but it all comes with a price.
Moldovan explains her life in decades, which makes this easy to read and follow and explains how her addiction began and why. She makes us understand her parents lives after WWII in France, their journey with her siblings to Australia and the harsh life that awaited them. She explains her birth into a large Catholic family and how her father goes from being patient, funny and benevolent to angry, irritable and abusive due to lung cancer. How she and her mother and siblings begin to handle the abuse. Moldovan lets us see how she becomes so low in self-esteem that she feels complicit somehow in her own sexual assaults and never reports them. And how her cries for help in an attempted suicide are pretty much overlooked and her descent into drug abuse takes over her life.
This is not a pretty story. It’s actually pretty ugly for several decades, but Moldovan sees in hindsight how God kept His hand on her the entire time she was lost and alone in the world. She shows us how He was guiding her steps, even though she was doing her best to avoid Him and choose her own path. And then, when she was finally ready, she ends up, through a weird twist of fate, following that path straight to him.
I loved this book. Moldovan is not namby-pamby. She doesn’t sugar coat. This book is about substance abuse at it’s worst. She doesn’t “trigger warn”. This is graphic, but not glorifying; plain speaking, but not bragging; startling, but not the stuff of shock for shock’s sake. If you or a loved one are living with substance abuse or a substance abuser, if you or someone you love is trying to get clean, this is the book for you. Get one for you and for your loved one, get a copy for the office, your church, your business library, but get one. It is currently on KU for free or in paperback for only $6.08 and that is money quite well spent.
Until tomorrow, I remain, your humble Book Dragon, Drakon T. Longwitten
I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.