July 2022

FROM DISCONNECTED TO VITALLY CONNECTED

“When my parents divorced, my mother sent me to an Adventist school, and our church family took very good care of us.” Amber Andrews remembers how the good times outweighed the bad during her early childhood years. “I was a tom boy, had a horse, a 4-H cow, and I had all the dogs and cats a girl could want. I loved living on a farm in Saskatchewan with my mother and her new husband.”

Six years later, at age 13, Amber decided to move to Kelowna to live with her dad and stepmom. “Dad would have parties at his house while I was trying to focus on school. My dad protested about me attending an Adventist school, so I was sent to public school and was bullied for being tall and geeky. Being a teenager, I found a group of friends and started rebelling: smoking cigarettes, then marijuana, and eventually tried cocaine. Looking back, I think I felt left behind when my parents broke the bonds of our family and remarried. At 16, my dad kicked me out of his home, and I dropped out of school.”

Amber met her husband when she was twenty and married him at age twenty-five, but this was a bad combination. “He was an alcoholic, and I was a druggie. I became very depressed and attempted suicide twice. I now see how God wanted me alive, kept me alive, and had another purpose for me.”

Hitting rock bottom, Amber went home to Saskatchewan to stay with her mom and stepdad. “I quit smoking cigarettes at that time, got cleaned up off the pills, started going to church with my folks, and I actually ended up getting baptized. I had thirteen piercings at that time, and I knew I didn’t want to go under water with those, so as the day drew closer and closer, I took out more and more piercings until the night before; then, I took out the last piercings and never did put them back in.”

Although she fought to stay clean, Amber fell under the temptation to use pills again. “I wish I had stayed with my mom on the farm, but I didn’t. The temptation is real; it’s powerful; it’s all-consuming. Once you feel the relief that it gives you, it’s very hard to forget that, and it turns into your coping mechanism, your security blanket. Later, I had started using needles, letting whoever I could find put the needle into my neck. I was up to a forty-dollar dose of meth, looking forward to a fifty-dollar dose of meth.”

That’s when God threw Amber another lifeline. “It was my dogs, my love for my dogs turned it all around.” When she realized she had to get clean to keep them, she cried out to God for help. “Little did I know that I had a whole church behind me praying. My mother never gave up praying, and she asked her church family to join her, and they did.”

Thanks to your generous contributions, It Is Written Canada’s film crew was able to visit Amber’s workplace in Alberta and capture her story.

If you wish to watch Amber’s entire captivating story of how she has become a vibrant leader within her community and beyond, you can see it on It Is Written Canada this month on CTV, 3ABN, Hope Channel, Yes-TV, Miracle Channel, or many of the other networks across Canada and around the world where It Is Written Canada is featured. Or simply go to itiswrittencanada.ca or It Is Written Canada’s YouTube and Facebook videos and click on the programs entitled: “From Disconnected to Vitally Connected – Part 1 & 2.”

~ Mike Lemon