“I was raised in a loving Christian home. I knew I was loved, I never questioned that. But one day when I was eight years old at school, I had these friends of mine look at me and say, 'You're weird and different,'" recalled Steventhen Holland. Growing up, he never felt out of place within his family, until one day at school, kids pointed out he looked different. 
  
“I come home that day, I sit on the edge of bed with my mom, and I find out in that moment that I was actually a foster child at seven days old, and officially adopted by my family at two years old,” said Steventhen. “That's the first in my life I ever remember feeling broken and asking God, 'Why? Why would a mother not want her son?' That cut really deep for me as an eight-year-old. Was I really loved? Was I wanted? Struggling with my identity and where I fit."  

Steventhen continued, “When I was eight years old, I had been given this information. It was eight pages of typewriter paperwork from 1982. It had my birth mom's name in it, and then it had broken information, but that's all I had. I kind of knew a little bit of where my roots were from, but that identity and worth was found in trying to find it in everything but the Lord. And it wasn't until a night at a church service that we were having a revival. I just knew in that moment this Jesus I'd heard about my whole life, I needed a relationship with Him. So, I came running in the middle of the service to an altar and fell on my knees and accepted Jesus as that broken little eight-year-old boy. Even though I had a relationship with Him, it was the sports and trying the dating life and all those things, but nothing seemed to fill that void.”

Steventhen excelled at sports during his college years, where he majored in youth ministry and met his wife. He recalls a difficult time, “I'm youth pastoring in Florida at this time, and my wife and I decide we want to try to have children, and she gets pregnant. We have a miscarriage, and it literally just breaks our heart, and we're both asking, 'Why, God?' So we get through that loss and we actually have Isabella, a successful pregnancy, and then we have our third pregnancy. We lose another baby, and it messed me up. It broke my heart, just as a dad and a husband excited to be dad and having to go not through one loss, but two.”

Steventhen paused, “This is where God found me, literally this broken dad and husband, just seeking Him out, really crying out, 'God, why?' I was depressed and God met me right in that moment, and He said, 'It's time to look for your mom.'"

Pouring through those eight pages and searching the internet, he was able to locate his birth uncle. Two months later, he traveled to meet him. “He told me that there were six siblings. My mom was one of six, and all of them except for him were mentally handicapped,” says Steventhen. “My mom only functioned as an eleven-year-old child. So at eighteen, when she aged out of the system, their parents had actually died. She was alone, had no family, no resources, so she became a ward of the state of Georgia.
She was placed into a mental facility, and what my uncle told me, standing in his living room that day at twenty-seven, was, 'Your mom was actually raped by five men, and you were conceived in that way, and you talk about two grown men weeping and crying.' To hear that kind of news all those years, wondering, 'Why would my mom not want me?' We knew that she made it somehow to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and made it to this little town where I grew up.”

He continued, “It just happened to be a family that had four kids of their own and had a miscarriage two years prior, and God opened their home to actually bring one more child in. They were foster parenting because of a loss that they had and brokenness that they had, and God was about to restore that through me.”

“Can you imagine this woman? She has no money, no job, no family, no resources, so the only option that they were giving her was, 'You have to abort.' But by the grace of God, she literally ran away from this facility to save her baby. Even as only an eleven-year-old mental mind, to me it's a miracle.”

He pauses again, “My uncle got quiet. He looked at me deep in the eyes, and he said, 'You know what? Your mom is alive. She's five hours south of where we sit right now.' He said, 'Do you want to meet her?' So we jump in the car and drive five hours south and I get to meet the lady I call my hero, Mama Glenda.”

Video excerpt:
“You had a little boy when you were about 18, and you missed that little boy. The family that you gave him to take care of, their last name was Holland. So his name is Steventhen William Holland.”

Steventhen continues, “One thing that I didn't even know that I needed that she said to me was, 'I love you, son. I would have never given you up if I could have kept you.' I didn't even know I needed that closure in my heart. But just to hear her say that, all those questions of why in my life were answered, and that she loved me, she cared about me, she wanted me.”

They got to spend 11 years reconnecting before Glenda's passing in 2020. Stevethen is now a national pro-life speaker and has helped raise millions of dollars for pregnancy care centers across the country.

“It just amazes me that today I'm a dad of three beautiful daughters that wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that choice to choose life,” he smiles as he says, “it's so amazing that I literally have been in 39 states and I get to stand on stages, and raise support, and awareness for these beautiful organizations that are fighting for life, affirming life every day.”

“When I get to share our story, I get to champion and honor my mother, because she truly is the hero of the story when it comes to my life. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her and it's truly an honor to get to carry that torch and to keep her name alive. 'Mama Glenda, I love you and I thank you for life.'”

For more information about Steventhen Holland, please visit his website: www.Steventhen.com, and to learn more about the ministries Steventhen is involved in, please visit: www.BrokenNotDead.com.

“I felt like I couldn't breathe. I felt as if I was suffocating. I remember waking up and taking a deep breath and realized that I was in the hospital.” Joseph Barnett will never forget the day he almost died from a fentanyl overdose. “I didn't even know how I got there. I didn't know what had happened,” he recalled. 

Joe grew up in rural Ohio to a stable, traditional family, and was raised in church, but when his grandmother died of cancer when he was 13, he became angry at God. “It took a really big toll on me. We were really close and I didn't understand why such a more or less perfect woman was taken so early. My life completely changed. My thoughts changed. My everyday life changed. I stopped wanting to go to church. I stopped wanting to do things with our family.”

The event sent him on a course that spiraled down for many years. “I tried smoking marijuana,” he said. “When I would ride to school with my friends, they would be eating pills. It was the Percocet and the Oxycontin era, when they were really big. And every day became more and more expensive, so I got introduced to heroin, which was a cheaper method, but the same effects. I just knew from that point that that's what I was going to be doing.”
 
The death of several friends to drug overdoses and two arrests were not enough to pry him away from his addictions. “Once the fentanyl came around, it started killing people. I mean, it seemed like once a week somebody was dying. I wasn't scared to die, even though I knew that if I died that I would go to hell. I knew that.”
 
Joe entered a rehab program after one incarceration and was even able to stay sober for five years until he ran into an old friend. “I just saw somebody walking down the street that I used to use with and that was all it took,” Joe said. 

In October, 2019, Joe bought what he thought was heroine--but was actually pure fentanyl. “I was with one of my friends and had he not been there, I wouldn't be sitting here today,” Joe said. 

His friend drove him to the E.R. Although it was not verified, Joe believes his heart stopped on the way to the hospital. It took hospital staff eight bottles of Narcan to get the drug out of his system. “That’s what was my ultimate wake-up call, was I had a second chance at life,” Joe recalled. “And I decided that I would stop using that day.”

Shortly after that, he met Deidra who was a former addict and now born-again Christian. Deidra recalled the meeting having said, “He had a little bit of that party boy mentality, but he was still sweet and sensitive." 

Around that time, Joe attended a service with his mother. “Every Sunday, she would call me and ask me to go to church with her,” Joe remembered. “And so I came to church with her and it was almost like somebody came and just sat down beside me and said that they would never let me go. When I heard the voice, I sat up and looked around and there was nobody even close to me. I was sitting by myself, so I knew that it was God talking to me. For the first time I had heard God's voice because the whole time that I was away from church, that was the only thing that I asked, was I would pray and ask God to just, 'show me that you're real, or let me hear your voice, or let me know that you're here.' And He did.”

After this experience, he was able to stay clean and sober—this time for good. “Since then, my life has changed a lot,” Joe stated. “I'm a lot happier. We're both working. We have everything we need. We have a church family. I had just recently went back to my old job. They were shocked from the person that I used to be to the person that I am today.”

Joe and Deidra are now married and raising their baby, Joe Jr. They serve in their local church and hope to one day spearhead a drug recovery program there. “You can come out of addiction. You don't have to be stuck there for the rest of your life, that you can beat it,” Joe encouraged.

Deidra added, “He's a good husband, a great father, and he holds his values true to who he is. And I love that about him. It's just beautiful to see today compared to who he was when we first met.”

“Jesus filled that void in my heart and my soul that nothing else can compare to it,” Joe added. “Nothing can fill it. Nothing can quench the want except for God.”
 

Maryam is a widow who works very hard to provide for her children. Maryam explained, “I cannot afford to pay their school fees, but I feed them. I cut and sell firewood, but it only brings in a little money. When I can, I help people on their farms. When I have to, I beg for food, so my children will not go hungry.”
 
Just when she thought life could not get any more difficult, things got even worse. Maryam said, “I woke up to the sound of my son shouting, ‘Mama, mama! Water is coming into our room.’I got up immediately, took my baby, and we all ran out of the house.”

Their village was hit by a severe flood. After the water receded, Maryam and her children returned and found their home destroyed.  
“I lost everything!” exclaimed Maryam. “My children and I sleep in the cold. We put some sheets on the bare floor and sleep there. I often catch a cold, because we have no extra clothes to protect us. Mosquitoes bite me a lot, too.” 

Because of the constant exposure to mosquitoes, her children caught malaria. Maryam’s son said, “My head aches and I get a fever when I am sick.”

Maryam had no money to take her children to the hospital, and she was losing hope that things would ever get better. “I felt like giving up. I didn’t have the strength to live anymore,” said Maryam. “After the flood, we went for days without food. I had nowhere to turn.”

When Operation Blessing heard about the flooding in Maryam’s village, we went with food and other relief supplies to help struggling families like hers. Maryam and hundreds of other families got food, mattresses, mosquito nets, clothes, and construction materials to help them rebuild their homes.

Maryam said, “I was overjoyed when Operation Blessing visited with food and other things we needed to survive.”

Maryam’s son said, “Thank you for the food and the new clothes. I love it all!”

Operation Blessing’s medical team also provided medical care to Maryam and her children.

Her son said, “We’re no longer sick, because Operation Blessing’s doctors treated my family for free.”

In addition to helping Maryam rebuild her home, we gave her two goats to help her start a livestock business. Now, Maryam can give her children hot meals in a safe and happy home free from mosquitoes and cold. 

Maryam said, “You changed my life completely. Thank you for your help. I pray that God will continue to bless you and keep you safe.”

In moments of crisis, the strength of the human spirit often shines brightest. This sentiment rings true in the harrowing tale of Melissa Jones, whose life was forever altered by a sudden medical emergency. Supported by her loving husband, Jerris, and her devoted family, Melissa's journey from the brink of death to a miraculous recovery is a testament to resilience, faith in Jesus Christ, and the power of prayer.

The evening started like any other for the Jones family. Jerris, Melissa, and their two young daughters were enjoying a night out for dinner when tragedy struck. Melissa, suddenly gripped by an unseen force, began to shake uncontrollably and lost consciousness. In a panic, Jerris sprang into action, calling for help as he cradled his wife in his arms.

As Melissa was rushed to the hospital, Jerris and their daughters trailed behind, their hearts heavy with fear and uncertainty. Upon arrival, they were joined by Jerris's mother, Pat, and other family members; all united in their desperate prayers for Melissa's recovery, including a call to The 700 Club. Their vigil in the hospital waiting room was a testament to their unwavering faith in the power of prayer.

The news from the doctor was dire – Melissa had suffered an aneurysm, and her condition was critical. The medical team acted swiftly, but time was of the essence. Despite their efforts, Melissa's flight to a specialized hospital was delayed, prolonging the agonizing wait for treatment.

When Melissa finally reached the operating room, the extent of her suffering was palpable. The pressure in her brain caused excruciating pain, and Jerris could only watch helplessly as his wife cried out for relief. The road ahead was fraught with uncertainty, as Melissa faced multiple surgeries and an uncertain prognosis.

Yet, through it all, Melissa remained steadfast in her faith in Jesus Christ and her determination to overcome the odds. Supported by the prayers of her loved ones and the skill of her medical team, she defied expectations and embarked on the arduous journey of recovery.

The road to recovery was long and arduous, marked by moments of triumph and setbacks. Melissa's body bore the scars of her ordeal, but her spirit remained unbroken. With each passing day, she grew stronger, her faith in Jesus Christ guiding her through the darkest moments.

As Melissa reflects on her journey, she is filled with gratitude for the unwavering support of her family and the countless prayers offered on her behalf. Her story is a testament to the enduring power of prayer. And as she looks to the future, she does so with renewed hope and a deep sense of purpose, knowing that she has overcome the greatest challenge of her life with courage, grace, and the unwavering presence of Jesus Christ.