9 minute read
The Last Hopeless Day
RECOVERY
For the first 17 years of Gloria Carney’s life, her father’s sobriety remained a distant dream. She literally described him as a “raging alcoholic.”
“He was sometimes a very functioning drunk, but toward the end, he was a very broken down drunk, and he couldn’t get sober to save his life,” Gloria says.
The family lived up the street from The Salvation Army in Kittanning, Pa. One day in 1986, her father said God spoke to him and told him he needed to go there. He was never a churchgoer and often cursed God, but during a Sunday night service, he stumbled into the church in a drunken stupor. Two elders helped him up to the altar.
“That was the last day that my dad ever drank,” Gloria recalls. “My dad became very involved with The Salvation Army because that’s where he found God.”
Unfortunately for Gloria, she had a hard time wrapping her mind around the sudden and dramatic change in her father.
“When he got sober, I never wanted anything to do with The Salvation Army because I didn’t understand my dad’s addiction,” Gloria says. “It was just overwhelming. I’m like, ‘How can this mean man—this total waste of a life—suddenly be for real? He finds this Jesus and now everything is wonderful?’ I didn’t understand it, so I was repelled by whatever my dad found.”
Nonetheless, Gloria’s parents, Ron and Barb Carney, became senior soldiers. In 2004, Ron died of a glioblastoma tumor at age 59. “He died young, but he died sober and a man of God,” Gloria said.
Her first drink Gloria didn’t realize it at the time, but now believes her repulsion came from her own demons who recoiled in horror when a sinner like her father found grace.
“It took me years to understand that,” Gloria says. “I didn’t understand what God did to his life. Before my dad died, we had a nice relationship. In his sobriety, he became my father. He made amends to his children and his wife. When he breathed his last breath, there was not one thing unsaid.
“I eventually forgave him. But then, I found myself in my own addiction; I became like my father had been.”
While in high school, Gloria had experimented with alcohol. She had run off to attend keg parties. But during her senior year of college at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1994, she walked into a bar. She doesn’t even know why she went inside.
“I took that drink, and it was instant insanity,” she says. “Some people can take a drink and put it down. I was able to put it down, but I couldn’t escape how it made me feel.
2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health
“I didn’t know how all of those years of being raised in an alcoholic home and all the stuff that goes with alcoholism, made me as angry as I was. I didn’t know I felt hopeless. I didn’t know all this stuff. I thought life was OK, until I took that first drink. It made everything go away. Then I just started drinking—every day.”
Within six months, and only a few more months to go in college, Gloria quit school. Her life quickly spiraled out of control. She was only 24 years old.
“I truly wanted to die. But God would not let me die,” Gloria said. “I tried suicide. I tried drinking myself to death. My life had crumbled so much. I was a functioning alcoholic for quite a few years.”
A new creation
From 1999 to 2004, Gloria was sober, but God had no place in her life.
“I was what they call a ‘dry drunk,’ but when my father passed away in 2004, I drank,” she said. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this thing called life. I tried it and it doesn’t work.’ So, I went back to drinking. With that came the chaos and the craziness.
“I was a hopeless, hopeless person. I was on the verge of being evicted. I had lost my job and I couldn’t get another one because I couldn’t stay sober.”
In March 2008, Gloria was lying in a hospital bed dying of alcoholism. With nowhere else to turn, she reached out to God.
“I spoke to God because I always knew God,” she said. “I said, ‘God, I don’t want to live. But I don’t want to die.’ I said, ‘God, just help me.’ And instantly—instantly—I was renewed, laying in that hospital.”
Her transformation astounded even the hospital staff that cared for her.
“The nurses were amazed,” she said. “They’re like, ‘This morning you were this angry person that didn’t want help.’ I was a mess and instantly there was clarity in my life, and I surrendered. I said, ‘God, I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but if you want me to live, you’ve got to help me, and I give my life to you.’ That’s how it all started, and that was the last day I drank.
“That’s why I always say March 11, 2008 was my last hopeless day, because on March 12 th , God woke me up as a child of God and I truly believed.”
Finding a place to grow
However, Gloria knew “there was something just not right” in the days immediately after she found Christ and sobriety. She didn’t have a home church and her desire for the things of God was growing.
“I kept going to different churches, but there was nothing there,” she said. “I didn’t feel what I needed to feel inside because I was hungry. My sister said, ‘Why don’t you try The Salvation Army?’ I said, ‘That’s just not my way. I don’t want that.’”
When a 2009 snowstorm buried Kittanning in five feet of snow one Sunday morning, Gloria reluctantly agreed to go to The Salvation Army because it was close.
“I’ve been going there every Sunday since,” Gloria says. “I found what I needed to feel, and The Salvation Army did that for me. I think at the time I didn't know it, but now I do because of where God has grown me. For me, I needed a place where people meet people where they’re at in life. That’s what The Salvation Army did for me.”
Gloria says she still remembers the service and the sermon by Major Pam Rhodes.
“I looked at her behind the pulpit and I said, ‘I want what they have here.’ This is truly what’s going to fill me,” Gloria said. “I didn't know what I was saying at that time, but through the years I learned to love The Salvation Army because we do the ‘most good’ by meeting people where they’re at in life.”
For the past 10 years, Gloria has been meeting many of those people as the corps sergeant major (CSM), a lay leader position, at the Kittanning Salvation Army. She also worked as the ministries outreach coordinator at the corps for a decade, but recently left to oversee a series of Salvation Army service units in the Western Pennsylvania Division.
A test of faith
Gloria, who returned to college in 2000 after getting sober and earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Slippery Rock University, also started the Bridging the Gap (BTG) program at the Kittanning Corps, as well as an addiction support group called Harbor of Hope.
She was making $50,000 as a drug and alcohol counselor, a job she thought she might do until retirement, when she got a call from Rhodes, her corps officer, asking if she might be interested in starting a BTG program in Kittanning. The post was only part time and paid $9 an hour.
2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health
Gloria, who is 52 and single, worked out all the financial details with her family to make everything happen.
“I said, ‘This is my calling. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I have to answer this call.’ It was crazy and it was a struggle. I’m not going to say it wasn’t, but I felt a calling. I was only in it for maybe six months before it turned full time,” she said.
Again, a snowstorm intervened at a critical point in Gloria’s life. She traveled from Kittanning to Springfield, Mass., during a heavy snowfall to see the BTG program in action and get tips for her own effort.
“Bridging the Gap flourishes in Kittanning,” she said. “It’s taken its hits with community changes and stuff, but it’s up and running and it’s a very successful program.”
A place she belongs
Because of her success with BTG, Gloria was allowed to start Harbor of Hope, a group that consistently draws 10 to 20 people a week.
“We meet once a week and we do the 12 Steps, biblical style,” Gloria said. “It is for all people. You don’t have to have an addiction. It’s ultimately for people who want to understand addiction.”
Looking back, Gloria is amazed at how God has used her and the opportunities The Salvation Army has afforded her for the Kingdom of God.
“I am who I am, and God has given me so many talents that it’s easy for me to meet people where they’re at and that inspires me to know that my roots are grounded in Christ,” she said. “I’m not saying I’m bubbly because I’m not that person, but because of who I am in Christ, God has allowed me to become this beacon that I never thought I’d become.
“We meet people where they’re at and The Salvation Army met me where I was at in life. I was hungry and they fed me. They made me feel like I belonged, and I never had that ever in my life anywhere. I found it at The Salvation Army.”
Bridging the Gap
Bridging the Gap (BTG) is a 12–week youth diversion program for juvenile offenders that is active in many Salvation Army churches.
Young offenders must attend BTG sessions at the church several days a week, continue their education by staying in school or seeking a GED, and stay crime free. If they successfully complete the program, their record is expunged. The overwhelming majority of those who complete BTG do not reoffend.
The youth at the BTG program in Worcester, Mass., follow a curriculum that includes topics such as building self–esteem; peer pressure; anger management and decision making; communication skills; relationships with family members, friends, figures of authority; culture and diversity; violence and gangs; the effects of drugs and alcohol; job seeking and financial planning; legal issues; and ethics.
The Bridging the Gap (BTG) program is prominent in the Salvation Army’s Empire State Division. To learn more about the program, go to empire.salvationarmy.org/EmpireNY/news /bridging-the-gap-program.
