Sometimes it takes a profound event to bring us close to God or realize our life’s worth. For Brandy, hers happened while she was in prison for manufacturing and selling drugs.
Brandy, a former Laminin employee, shares her story of redemption and how through years of seclusion she found God and her purpose in life. She vividly remembered when her life took its turn for the worst after she and her little brother moved in to live with their mother eight years after they abandoned them at the doorstep of a drug addict.
They lived with their grandfather after they were taken to child services but wanting to get to know their mother, they decided to move in with her. This was when “all hell broke loose.” Brandy started smoking pot at 10 years old just three days after they moved in. Weeks after she was raped by her stepdad and injected with drugs while her arms and feet were tied. She said that as a child she would go on days without a shower and the sores from the injections were all visible on her body. All this time, her mom never stopped the abuse and even helped her stepdad rape her.
“They would sell me to the pimp, they would take me to truck stops to provide for their drug. My worth was not very much,” Brandy shared during an episode of Pureflix. com’s “Restored with Missy Robertson” series.
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The abuse continued until she left home at 16 but her life did not improve. She was arrested for manufacturing methamphetamine and was imprisoned for seven years. After her release, she fell in love and got pregnant but was in a damaging relationship that put her in a battered women’s shelter. After her daughter’s birth, she landed back in jail and it was there that she went through the worst transition one could only see in psych wards.
She was in seclusion for four years. There she had lost her mind, lost hope and just wanted to die.
“I was throwing feces … I had literally lost my mind … I was eating toilet paper. The things that you see in the psych wards,” Brandy said.
But God did not abandon Brandy during her worse. It turns out that her cell was next to a Christian barracks, where inmates would wake up early in the morning to sing praises to God. At first, she tormented the women worshippers and tried to disturb their sleep at night by pounding on their walls. But they still wake up early the following day to praise the Lord.
A female chaplain even spoke faith into her life but it wasn’t until she left lockdown that she felt the Holy Spirit. The Christians inmates made her realize that there is a God who loves her and they welcomed her despite her past actions.
“When I got out of the lockdown the people that I was trying to disrupt all that time let me come in there. … and they knew that I was the crazy lady that was beating and banging. I walked in it was like everyone was holding their arms open. I’m like, ‘This is prison and I’ve never felt more free.'”
Brandy decided to lead a straight path with God’s guidance and her daughter as motivation the moment she left prison. She landed a job at Laminin, a jewelry business founded by Missy Robertson that employs women who have come out of prison, escape trafficking, a former drug addict, and so on. Now Brady calls herself “a blood-bought child of God.”