Impact Story: Shawnee & Ricky

 Shawnee and Ricky's impact story

    God always changes family trees, even though we like apples fall close to the tree because of our flesh, God renews you in the spirit, allowing you to be separate from hang-ups, habits, and hurts that family trees bring. So that’s why we share impact stories, it’s important to us as a church to share with each other our past hurts of addiction and or home life situations.

Introduction

    I’m Shawnee Potter. This is my husband, Ricky Potter. We’re the founders of an organization called Lion of Judah New Life Ministries. We’re working on opening a long-term recovery home here in McDowell County. We met Paul and a group  from Prosper McDowell and toured our facility, and we’ve come a really long way, but we still need to do a lot of work before we can fully open.

What was your life like before Christ? What have y'all been through? Why is this mission so dear to your heart?

Shawnee: I am from McDowell. I struggled with an addiction for 20 years. I started using it when I was nine years old. My mother worked in a bar, and I grew up in it. She had seven children by six different men, and growing up, people used us, and I would say that I can remember grown women telling me that the trash on the side of the road is worth more than I was, so we just had a really hard childhood. My mother was never there. I really raised my siblings. I watched her use drugs throughout a lot of her pregnancies. I watched my siblings withdraw things like that. A lot of the men that my mother got with, we didn’t even know she didn’t even know who the father was, so we grew up really broken and kind of lost, searching for, I know, for me. I just really didn’t know who my family was. What my identity was, and I saw her use drugs. I started actually using them with her. She was the first person I ever used cocaine with and I was 11 years old, but she lost custody of us when I was 15 and I moved away from here as soon as I could as soon as I turned 18 and tried to better my life, but I ended up coming back here and that ended up being a huge mistake for me and the people that I needed the most kind of turned their backs on me. My mother stole everything that I had of value. I became homeless with my two children, and I just could not get on my feet. If you’re from here, you know that there are no real buses that travel, and if you don’t have a support system, you can become stuck, and I became stuck. I didn’t have any help. I couldn’t get on my feet. I went to the safe house and mentally I remember what I was going through with my mother when she lost custody of us and we went to safe and it was reliving my life through her eyes and it was a a huge thing that I never wanted to do was become like my mother and I started to see those things, but I’m really broke and I just could not get it together. I ended up losing custody of my children, and they were adopted at two and three, and for 10 years. I was not OK. I left from here, and when I’m telling you that, I was probably one of the worst of the worst. I really didn’t think that I would ever come out of it, but God had another story and I hate he’s the one that pulled me out of the mess that I was in and I begged him for change for a long time and I was just like Lord I spent most of my adult life incarcerated to where I didn’t know how to survive outside of the prison system and I can’t remember being in jail and talking to the Lord telling Him I don’t know how to change when I get out of here. I just didn’t want to be back on the street with meaningless survival. Being a female, I was in prostitution and human trafficking, and I’ve had a couple of pimps in my life and escaped from one of them. Then the Lord has shown me a lot of different things about speaking up for those who cannot speak up for themselves, and I was lying in a Jail cell crying out to the Lord and asking him to change me, but I didn’t know how. I then had the opportunity to go to going into a face based program and it changed my life when I surrender to God it was like miracle after miracle started to happen and it didn’t happen right away like it was a process like it was like I was walking with God for a while and then it was like back to back to back miracles.

There’s so much to choose from your story. I wish I could ask more, but you mentioned a friend of yours who pointed to a place that already existed. She was with you when you were incarcerated in Tazwell, and when she got out, she kept in touch with you. A faithful friend who stayed with you. Tell me about that.

Pray for those who go before us in Christ, and Jill and I grew up together. We were addicted together. We’re both from here, and I had never really seen anybody come out of addiction before. I had only seen people die or be in prison for the rest of their lives. We were in jail together, and we both were starting to do Bible studies in different things, and we’ve said that we were going fast when we said we were going fast. Drugs came into the jail, and I fell to my knees, and she stayed strong, and I watched her change her life in there, and when she got out, she was walking with the Lord, and she became a pure recovery specialist, and she started, she would never leave me. She would always pour out her heart and just talk to me and try to reason with me. I tried to get myself help, and it was seeing her and her testimony that gave me a glimmer of hope that I could do this.

How did you two meet? How does that connect to your mission in Anawalt, WV?

Ricky:

We met at Recovery Soldier Ministries in Elizabeth, Tennessee. Shawnee went there as a participant in the women’s program. I went there because I was seeking healing from the other side of addiction. I’ve never struggled with an addiction, never smoked a cigarette, alcohol, or drug. I’ve never drunk coffee either. It’s just from a different story, but my first wife actually passed away. She overdosed in our living room, and my daughter and I, when my daughter was 6, found her dead on our couch. My aunt, who recently had her daughter, my cousin, passed away from an overdose. Eventually my aunt told me about recovery, soldiers, and that they would wanna hear my testimony and at that time I didn’t even know what a testimony meant cause I wasn’t walking with the Lord either I was just caught up in my own flesh desires like money and things like that, but I went there seeking healing and I met the pastor and I thought he was crazy Jesus people. He was just hyper-focused on Jesus and Jesus everything, and I was like it’s strange, but I like the feeling, and I got when I went there, and I started seeing people getting healed with people going out to the altar of lesbian changed. I gave my life to the Lord previously, but I didn’t. I didn’t continue to walk when I saw the addiction clear up. I just kind of fell back into my own stuff, but anyway, I told him I wanted to get involved in any way I could to help out down there, and he told me to keep coming. Maybe if I got to drive the vans to shuttle the guys around, and I was just excited about that, then I ended up getting an opportunity to start working in their garage for them. They had an automotive center, and that’s what I do. I’m a master technician, so I told him I can teach these classes down there so we can teach the guys, get them certified. That way, they have something to leave when they leave. They have something to take with them, and I remember that was something I wanted to offer cause my first walk when she went to recovery programs, she told me, " Well, how am I gonna get a job when I come out of here? What am I supposed to tell him? I just spent a year in recovery, you know, like that doesn’t look good on an application, so I wanted to give what I could to God‘s kingdom, and through that, I met Shawnee. She was actually working on the vehicles at the women’s center, and she had a problem with one of them. They needed my opinion on it so we met that way, and so we waited till she graduated before I talked to her and ask her out or anything like that because I wanna be respectful of her recovery first but then after she graduated, we started dating and I was late into marriage, cause I was praying for a godly wife to help me raise my daughter and that’s where I like to joke and tell people like you need to be careful what you pray for cause you might get it too cause she’s very disciplined and I needed that. I needed somebody to help hold me accountable and keep me discipline cause the man, the flesh is strong and tries to pull you back in, but then so that’s where it leads to. She had a vision of a recovery program. She wanted to come back and start one here, and I’ve never been up here, as it was a culture shock for me, but then we found a building. It’s like the large just dropped in our laps cause there’s no way that we would’ve had money to buy a building or build one like what we have. I mean, it’s a true blessing. It’s fully furnished already. It was an incredible blessing, and on the spot wanted to go over where she had her vision, so what we want to do is just take what we learned at recovery  from one through the program, teaching him there too for me, you know, talking to the guys, it’s a guy at the garage and you know seeing what they wanted to learn to help them. It’s a lifetime to provide for your family, too. That’s one thing the men struggle to do, and they felt bad about that is that they couldn’t provide for them because they didn’t have skills, because they made the wrong choices in their development in their professional development, so we want to offer those things to those trades that we can equip them to go on outside of the Ministry.

What are the next things with the lord that you need prayers for?

Shawnee: When we are able to open our doors and start housing people, but definitely we need prayers, and in a community that wants to get behind us and pray for us, your prayers mean a lot to us. Pray for the Lord to give us strength to step out in faith and do what he’s calling us to.

Ricky: For me personally, I just need prayers, and just you know, making that move cause I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’ve lived in my current house for like 28 years, you know, so I bought it from my parents, so it’s very comfortable, and moving up here, we’re gonna be stepping out in my conference, so I have to worry about that. I mean, it’s not a worry. It’s just an inconvenience for me, but I’d worry about my daughter where she’s gonna go to school. She fits in things like that cause she’s nine years old, and she goes to a private school right now. I’m hoping that you teach good things, but you know, I just have a personal concern, so if you could just pray for me, and that’s been my biggest hurdle, just reading behind everything.

Shawnee: people who haven’t even walked through the doors yet to be able to find true transformation and recovery, and most importantly, the love of Christ, so that we would be able to really make disciples and send them out to make disciples.