Finding Freedom and Finishing Strong
Women’s Life Change participant Danielle Nyholm has a lot to celebrate.
She will be leading a chapel service on Friday and sharing a testimony that speaks of how far she’s come, and of God’s faithfulness through the darkest moments.
She remembers what brought her to the Eugene Mission and how hopeless she felt and compares that to how she feels today, and says there is no measuring God’s goodness, his truth, or his love.
“God is so good,” she said. “I just want to share with people that there’s always an option; you don’t have to sit out there and suffer on the side of the road and go deeper and deeper into your addiction. You can surrender, get up and go to work. You don’t have to lie there and die. I want to be proof that you can do it.”
Danielle has been in the program for nine months and is finishing the third phase, or “transformation” phase. Today, she says she is full of hope and gratitude, but that’s not how she began her time in Life Change.
“I was at my lowest point,” she says. She was living in a situation where she had lost all hope when her son called, and informed her his father had passed away. He needed a mother. She prayed hard, and then hitchhiked to a detox center in Salem where she met a counselor who told her about the Life Change program.
After nine months of re-connecting to herself, her faith, and the promises in the Bible, she says she has put on the armor of God and is equipped to embrace challenges and fight lies.
“God honors completion,” Danielle said. “I’m telling you, the armor of God is with me daily. I learned that in the Bible. It’s in his word. It’s the truth.”
It’s in the completion, she said, that you get the freedom.
Today, that freedom looks like making up for all the time she lost, being a mother again, having a career.
“Freedom to me looks happy and clean,” she said, and her heart and mind look “pure, like a child.”
She has a new confidence, and feels better and healthier than she has in years. And she knows she can finish strong.
“I stopped listening to that voice that said ‘you can’t,’” Danielle said. “I’m dead to that voice. I tell myself that daily.”
She has a prayer journal she began keeping, and loves to look back on all the prayers God has answered.
“God is so good,” she said.
Congratulations Danielle! We are so proud of you.