Meet the 2025 Life Change Program Graduates: Angel Henderson

With an abusive, drug addict father and a mother who tried the best she could, but suffered from bipolar disorder, Angel came into the world already facing challenges.

She was placed into 13 different foster homes, only two of which were loving. The rest, she says, were indescribably painful. By the time she was 26, Angel had lost her mother and her oldest son and she turned to alcohol to help her cope with the chaos and pain.

By the time she was 40, her life had stabilized a bit and she was sober, but a tragic car accident in which she was run over changed her life again.

“I was in the hospital so long my children were placed in foster care and I became addicted to pain pills,” she recalls. “I was on a suicide mission and I just wanted to die, but I was eventually arrested, and that’s what I call my intervention from God.”

While in jail, she joined a group called the God Pod, where she was ministered to by chaplains and teachers who she says loved her and fought for her. The leaders of the God Pod helped arrange her transfer to the women’s Life Change Program, where Angel believed she might be given a real chance to find recovery and hope.

“Through Life Change, I’ve learned a new way to live,” Angel says. “I go to church every Sunday, I volunteer and I have built up my relationship with God so much that I got baptized.”

Angel now possesses a deep determination to grow and become the woman God created — a woman who is worthy of love and dignified in all her ways. She is now in her second semester of school at Lane Community College to become a drug and alcohol counselor and has a 4.0 grade point average!

“If someone would have told me two years ago this is where I would be, I wouldn’t have believed them,” she says. “I’m so grateful that people had faith in me that I could change.”

Help us celebrate Angel and the other graduates of the Life Change Program! Come and show your support for a group of men and women who have worked through incredible adversity to come to a place of healing, authentic change and new life.

 You are invited to her graduation ceremony!

Click the button below to join our Facebook event page, and get important updates, graduate news and more:

March 7

6 p.m.

City First Church

830 Madison Street, Eugene