My name is Tina. I want to tell you my story. I was an only child born to drug-addicted parents. My father was not present, and my mother dealt with depression and bipolar disorder, attempting suicide multiple times. We were very poor. I remember being homeless and living in a car. I would go to school in the wintertime wearing shorts because I had nothing else clean to wear. The kids and the teacher made fun of me.

For a time, my mom was working at Wendy’s, and every day she would bring me a Frosty when she picked me up from school. I would ask her, “Mommy, did you get me my Frosty today?” She would smile and say she forgot, but then she’d pull it out. Those small moments of love meant everything to me.

Things seemed likely to improve when my mom met a man who at first seemed stable and they got married. However, not long after that, I learned that my stepfather had been beating her. The abuse was sever,e and we ended up going to a battered women’s shelter. He was ordered to stay away.

In retaliation, he killed a close friend of ours who was trying to protect my mom and even did a drive by shooting where he shot at me and a friend while we were playing ball in the yard. My mother suffered a complete mental breakdown. I stayed with my grandmother while my mother was in treatment. I endured sexual abuse from a family member during this time. I was 10 years old.

Later that year, we moved way out into the country to hide from my stepfather who was out on bail. I did not go to school for that whole year, and I had no one to talk to except my mom who was not well; I felt very isolated. During that time, I started playing with frogs and they became my friends—they were my companions during a very lonely period and I still love frogs to this day.

After that year, we moved back to Knoxville where a sixteen-year-old boy took an interest in me. He took me into an empty house and raped me. I didn’t understand what was happening to me at the time. My mom did not know where I was that day and was worried sick. When I got home, she tried to spank me, and after being raped that day and holding that secret, something snapped in me and I hit her. She called the police. At eleven years old, I was sent to juvenile detention for three days.

When I got out, I started smoking pot with some teenage girls. I told my mom about it, and instead of punishing me, she said, “I feel safer if you just smoke with me.” We started smoking pot together every day. By twelve years old, it was really just me and my mom against the world. Due to the sexual abuse I had endured, I became very promiscuous.

My grandfather was a Baptist preacher, and I started going to church with my grandparents, and one day I went to the altar and gave my heart to the Lord. I felt like a weight of one hundred pounds had been lifted off me. That salvation experience changed something in me.

Again, it seemed that life would be better, but it took another turn. My aunt and her friends sang in a gospel group. Ralph, who was 40 years old, was the husband of one of these women. He and his wife would come to my aunt’s house to practice gospel music. He would come upstairs where I was watching TV and say inappropriate things to me. While the women were downstairs practicing, he had sex with me. I was searching for love and attention. He told me I was special and more mature than other girls. He was like a daddy figure to me—he and his wife took care of me and showed me the attention I was desperate for. His wife didn’t know what was happening for a whole year.

My mom was going through her own crisis, so I moved in with Ralph and his wife where Ralph continued to have sex with me. I thought I was in love. In fact, I was just a child and didn’t realize I was in a relationship with a predator. I believed what he said, that I was more mature than the other girls my age.

I was just fourteen when Ralph’s wife came home early and caught us together. She took me home and told my mom what was happening. Ralph wanted to marry me. I told my mom I was going to run off with him whether she approved or not, so she consented, and I was emancipated. I married Ralph and was pregnant at fifteen. Ralph was 42. I had three children by the time I was eighteen.

While pregnant. I learned that Ralph had cheated on me. I tried to kill myself on New Year’s Eve. I woke up in the hospital and committed myself for treatment where I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

It didn’t take long to find out Ralph was cheating on me again. Everything was falling apart. We got into a fight, and I was the one who got in trouble with the law. He did not. He was so good at manipulating the police. He made it seem like I was beating him and that I was a threat to our children. Because of that fight, I went to prison for 4 ½ years for battery and he stayed home with my kids. That’s when he started molesting them.

While I was in prison, someone gave me a Life Recovery Bible. I turned to a page that said, “The truth will set you free.” I started getting legal mail telling me the truth about what had happened to my children. Finally, I started knowing the truth about Ralph that I could not see before. The truth about what was happening to my children was hard to hear, but I needed to know so that I would do the right thing for myself and for them. While in prison, I started attending church services and feeling the Spirit again—the same Spirit I had felt when I was thirteen. I went through the whole Bible, inside and out. That Bible saved my life.

Finally, welfare removed my children from Ralph’s care.

While I was still in prison, we had a court hearing for custody of our children. Ralph’s parental rights were revoked. At that point, I knew there was no chance he would get custody of them, which made it safe for me to surrender my parental rights. As I was telling the judge my decision, I was holding my hand out like this. What no one else could see is, I was holding Jesus’s hand because that’s all I had. I felt peace in knowing I had done my best to give my kids the ultimate act of love, and I felt a strange freedom in that surrender. I was 23 years old.

After that court hearing, I did not see or hear anything from Ralph for 20 years.

I met someone and was soon pregnant with Layla.

I was raising Layla on my own and couldn’t afford much. I was prostituting myself with two men in order to survive. During this time, I was trying hard to get clean.

I met a man named Mike and we were together for twelve years.

We started using meth. I tried it once, and it made me feel like Superwoman. We started using regularly. Mike and I were fighting constantly while also caring for my Mom, who soon after passed away. Losing mom was particularly hard since becoming a grandmother to Layla had changed her life.

There was so much turmoil going on in our lives, so I had a friend of mine take Layla to live with her so she wouldn’t have to see what was happening. I thought I could stop using, but after my mom died, I couldn’t deal with all the trauma of my past.

I needed healing but I didn’t know it yet. At this point, twenty years had gone by since I had seen Ralph, my abuser. I needed healing from the pain that he had caused me and my children.

While visiting a family member in the nursing home, I was shocked as I looked up and saw the name “Ralph Fortenberry” on a door. I started trembling. I said “God I want to say I forgive him, but I don’t mean it.” God said “just say the words.” I walked into his room and saw a very frail and dying man. I grabbed his shoulders and said, “Ralph, It’s Tina Fortenberry” and whispered in his ear, “I forgive you”. At first those words felt like mud in my mouth, then they flowed out like honey. He cried. He was now a little old man instead of the monster he had always been. I felt free. I took off running, even forgetting my purse in his room. He died three months later of kidney cancer.

After using for awhile longer, I was able to get clean, but Mike continued to do meth. I started attending Brianna’s hope. I felt the joy of the Lord at those meetings. One night after returning home from the meeting, tragically, Mike overdosed on meth. He died beside me in our bed.

A couple of months later, at a recovery meeting, someone suggested I come to WeCare — and that decision changed everything. For the first time in a very long time, I walked into a place that felt safe. I had a clean bed, a supportive environment, and people who truly cared about me. I remember feeling overwhelmed with gratitude… and for the first time, a small spark of hope.

At WeCare, I grew closer to the Lord and slowly began to find myself again — not the broken woman I thought I was, but the woman God created me to be. Day by day, He helped me rebuild my life. I learned how to live as a Christian woman, a loving mother, and a person with real purpose. For the first time, I believed my life could be different.

WeCare didn’t just give me a place to stay — it gave me hope. Hope that my past didn’t have to define my future. Hope that healing was possible. Hope that God wasn’t finished with my story yet… that He was just beginning to write a new one.

And today, I stand here as living proof that hope is real, recovery is possible, and no life is too far gone for God to restore.

Because when God steps in, broken stories don’t end… they become testimonies.

You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” So be still and know that He is God… and wait patiently on the Lord.