Episode Summary: If you think your life is too far gone, or if you’ve made too many mistakes for God to redeem, you’re going to want to listen to today’s conversation: a Sacred Scar Story. Julie knew she could spend the rest of her life in prison if she were caught crossing the border with four pounds of methamphetamine duct-taped to her waist. But life had become so overwhelming, so painful, that she no longer cared if she lived or died. So, she crossed over the border. And with her arrest as a drug smuggler that day, her years of running from responsibility -and from God - came to an end. Through one miraculous event after another, God transformed Julie from drug dealer to Hope Dealer. In her book, All My Hope, Julie wrote “It takes courage to live beyond regrets, but the good news is that God wanted to take my mess and turn it into a miracle.” Join us on the podcast as we talk about Finding Hope After Addiction, Loss, and Imprisonment.   Quotables from the episode: I want you to know that nothing you face is impossible with God. NOTHING. The blood of Jesus has never lost its power. God takes our mess and turns it into a message for the world. You see, what looked like a loss was really a game, because when my leg was amputated, it was one thing that did actually send me spiraling further into addiction. In that spiraling, I ended up at the foot of the cross in the arms of Jesus. And it was in that place where I was so done with the pain and the suffering and the dumb decisions and the addiction that I was so desperate, I cried out to God to become the center of my life, or I was going to lose everything. I had lost a leg; you would think that was a lot. But I was on the way to losing my very soul and my very self. You don't realize that you're stepping into a trap of the enemy that is going to consume you and steal your identity and your very soul. Sin is enticing because sin feels good for a moment. My first use of drugs took me on a journey straight to hell on earth. Addiction runs rampant in my family on both sides. And so that first line of meth, it just had me hooked. Addiction took me further than I ever wanted to go and made me someone I never wanted to be because I ended up liking the feeling that I got when I snorted that meth so much that I would do anything. I would tell any lie, I would deceive my parents, I would tiptoe into their bedroom at night and steal $50 bills out of my dad's wallet while he slept, I would do anything for that feeling. And then that feeling doesn't last forever. I would mix it with alcohol and try to get this euphoric feeling and it was like chasing my tail. And meanwhile, I'm slowly like becoming more and more depraved. Addiction made me lose all of any sense of morals that I may have had, even as a non -Christian, even as somebody who wasn't living for Jesus. I felt the presence of God there, and in that moment and I believed in God I knew he was real and I even understood that he could see me and I think it's that little seed of faith right the Bible says that we are all born with a measure of faith and so with that measure of faith I believed in God and he was chasing me and in that moment, I felt like God told me you can't have one foot with me and one foot in the world. Well, I didn't even have one foot with him yet. That voice made me stop and really think, “Okay, I'm living this way, But God is calling me to a life with him.” Nobody ever starts off using a substance thinking, “Oh I want to become an addict.” That's the grip that addiction has. It's like an invisible hand around your throat. There's only one thing that can break the grip of addiction, and that is the love and the power and the blood of Jesus. After I lost my leg to amputation, and I just was getting more and more into a wor

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