The Search for Fulfillment Ended with God

“Love, I think love, attention. That I’m worth it, that I’m worth the time, I’m worth a hug, a kiss, that even though for everybody, I was nothing, a drug addict.”

At 27-years-old, Astruid Gomez had become the person she swore she’d never be - a mom living with a verbally abusive man and a drug addict. Astruid said, “I always used to say, I don’t want to live this life. I don’t want to grow and be married to a man and end up like my mom. I saw she had so much pain.”

The oldest of three, Astruid left home at 16. She had gotten pregnant as an excuse to move in with her boyfriend to escape the toxic home environment. She longed for her parent’s love but they were too wrapped up in their own problems to give it.

“Always feeling like I wasn’t enough, always feeling like I was lacking something. I try to look for so many things to fill that emptiness,” she said.

By the time she was 19, Astruid was living with a different boyfriend, Jose. In the coming years they’d have two sons. Like her parents, theirs was a toxic relationship. They often lashed out at each other, angry and hurt. “He would always call me like, 'You're trash. Nobody would ever love you. Look at you.'”

Her self- image broken, Astruid started taking diet pills. “Because I always think, 'I’m so fat. I’m so fat, I’m so fat,' and I just keep saying that to myself and I make it an identity. 'I am fat, you know,'” said Astruid.

There was more. “It made me forget about everything.” In time, her addiction to diet pills gave way to cocaine and, eventually crystal meth.  

“It was like one time a day. Then at the end it was like two, three times a day. Even for hours, I was going in the restroom, lock myself, and I would just do drugs all day,” she said.
 
Too often her children would come home from school to find their mother strung out. Family members tried to convince Astruid to get help, but she refused. Twice, she tried to overdose hoping she wouldn’t wake up.

Astruid said, “How can you give love when you don’t have it? How can you understand another person when you don’t understand yourself? I couldn’t take care of my kids when I couldn’t take care of myself.”

The couple had been together ten years when Jose decided he needed to turn his life around and started going to church, taking the kids with him. The few times Astruid did go with them, she was high. “I would always fight with God even though I didn’t believe Him, that He was real. That was in my mind, high, I would fight with God, 'Why you want me here? Why don’t you let me die?'”

Then her 12-year-old daughter told her she was moving out to live with her grandmother. “So that was like where I hit rock bottom. It was like I’m going to lose my daughter. I put her through so much. It was like she slapped me, like wake up. I was done. There was no way out for me after this. I couldn’t leave the drugs on my own,” recalls Astruid.

One Saturday night, Astruid tried again to kill herself by overdose. “I woke up! Oh my God, I didn’t die again? So, I started telling Him, 'If you are that God that everybody says that you are, show me.' I told Him, 'Change my life. I don’t want to be this way anymore. Like take this drug addiction away.'”
 
Out of habit, she went into the bathroom to smoke some meth to satisfy the craving that had controlled her for years. Astruid said, “It was gone! It was God! He came in my room, He took it away, it was amazing! God took it in that instant. It was gone. And He just didn’t take the drug addiction, He took all the pain. It’s like I was free.”

The next morning, Astruid went to church with her family and accepted Jesus Christ into her heart. “I just felt like it was, like, something that just pushed me to the front. Like they grab me and take me there,” she said. “And then I heard the voice that told me, 'I never left you. I was always with you.' And I knew, I knew!” 

Astruid and Jose began to live their lives for the Lord, they forgave one another, and were married within the year. She also reconciled with her daughter. 

There isn’t a day that goes by that Astruid doesn’t think about what God did for her, and her family. “When you have that encounter with God, your life changes forever. You fall in love with Him, and you’ll never be the same.”