In a short recording posted by First Baptist Church of London in April 2020, a woman stands before the congregation and runs through her children the way a bandleader calls off the players before a count-in. Joshua is 17. Marissa is nearly 16. Mason has just turned 13. Alex turned 12 about a week earlier. Erica is 8. Nobody in the room needs the ages explained. What they are getting is the long way round to how five children ended up under one roof: roughly ten years of active addiction, thirteen overdoses in a single summer, a jail cell, a handwritten verse found in a prayer room, and a courtroom where a judge sent the children home with her. The talk, delivered under the title "Each One Reach One," is a testimony in the older sense of the word. It is less a sermon about faith than an account of a life in which faith arrived in the worst place available and rearranged everything after it. Its real subject is surrender, and what that surrender looks like once it becomes a daily routine of reading Scripture and praying with children at the kitchen table.
The speaker opens with the kids because they are the proof, and because the church's own history with them is part of the story. Early in the recording she says the children "came here and everybody just loved them," and that the congregation "has like really been involved in their life their entire life." That detail matters for how the rest of the talk lands. A testimony like this is never only about one person's rock bottom. It is about the people who were watching when the bottom came, and who stayed around afterward.
It also sets the stakes of the arithmetic she will return to. Five children is not an abstraction. Each name carries an age, and the ages are the clock. A reader who has never sat in a church pew for a testimony may still feel the weight of that roll call: these are kids who were old enough to remember what happened.
The speaker's account of addiction is not a catalogue of drugs or a set of cautionary scenes. It is a description of a search. "Since I was a kid," she says, "just always searching and trying to find that love." She looked for it in men and in other people's attention, and she describes the people around her as "always trying to just you know make me feel better." The insight she arrives at is the one that gives the talk its emotional center: "when you're lost in addiction it's not a real love you know you can't even love yourself let alone five little kids."
That sentence explains a great deal about how the story is built. Addiction, as she tells it, is a closed loop in which the need for love is real but the places it is sought are empty. Her children did not stop being the center of her life; the addiction simply left her unable to act on that love. She is careful about this distinction. She does not say she did not love her kids. She says she could not love them in any way that counted, because she had no ground to stand on herself.
The summer of 2018 is where the account turns hard. Social services had become involved. Her caretaker, Joanne, had been keeping the children, and the speaker is openly grateful to her: "she was there when I wasn't." Then the number: "summer of 2018 I overdosed 13 times. I was trying to die just because I don't have no help." It is the kind of detail a testimony cannot dress up. Thirteen is a number that stops a room, and she lets it sit without elaboration.
After one of those overdoses, the speaker found herself alone in a hospital room with a nurse named Lisa, who came in every morning and cared for her. Lisa's own faith gave the speaker something to hold. "She said I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me," the speaker recalls, citing the verse as Philippians 4:13. Her first reaction was dismissive ("I was like lady's crazy"), but she says the words "did something to me inside. It really did."
What she describes next is a prayer that is less a performance than an admission. She tells God that she does not know what to pray, that she cannot manage this herself, and that "something has got to be how to be something more." That is the hinge of the whole account: a woman who had run out of her own strategies beginning, however awkwardly, to ask for help from outside herself. The phrase "it was just me and God there" carries the weight of that moment. There was no program or institution yet. There was a bed, a nurse, and a plea.
About a week after that night, she was arrested. Most people would not describe an arrest as the good part of a story, and she does not frame it entirely that way, but she does name the paradox directly. "I never thought I'd say it," she tells the congregation, "but man saved my life and it saved my soul." She had been in and out of addiction long enough to know that the chase itself was the prison. In the moment of arrest she felt something she had not felt in years: "I was truly free like there was no more no more chasing no more fear none of that. It was over."
When the judge handed down a 365-day sentence, she says she was happy, and that for the first time she had joy in her. The sentence was the consequence of everything she had done, and she accepts that. But she describes a change that began in the cell. She started praying for people she would never normally have prayed for. She noticed that she was different without quite knowing how. The language she uses is careful. She was "not chasing, seeking at this point," she says, but she "knew I was different." That kind of unsought change is a recurring idea in testimonies of this type: the sense that something is happening before you have the vocabulary for it.
The turn that gives the talk its title comes at Hope City, the residential program where she was sent after her release. She did not want to go. Her plan, as she tells it, was another jail cell, "maybe a smaller one," or somewhere full of people who wanted to change. When she arrived, she told the staff that they would have to take her back. "I can't face me," she says. "I can't face all the hurt that I've done to my kids. I can't face my family." The staff pushed back. They told her God had a plan for her life and that she could do this.
What happened in the prayer room is the part of the recording most listeners will remember. She describes fighting it: rolling her eyes, sliding up and down the pews, restless and resistant. Then she found that she could not get up. Looking back, she says she understands it as "Lord keeping me still." She walked to the pulpit, picked up a white Bible, and a handwritten scripture on a piece of paper fell into her lap. The verse, she says, was the one she had framed at home, the one about doing all things through Christ. She calls it her "first real God moment."
The surrender itself is worth reading closely, because it is not a tidy act of gratitude. She prays: "Though you slay me, I'll still serve you." She asks God to help her accept that this is his will for somebody else, to use her situation for his glory. Surrender, in her telling, is not the removal of fear or doubt. It is the decision to keep serving while the fear is still present, and it is hard. "Tears just start rolling," she says. She describes the effort of trying not to doubt and not to fear as "super hard." What changed was not her feelings about the outcome. It was her direction. "The more I have him," she says, "the more that emptiness inside was filled, it was gone. I no longer ate for love."
The legal outcome is the other half of the story. Her recommendation going into the courtroom had been supervised visits, which she describes as "the best shot at being a mommy to them kids." Instead the judge ruled that she should go live with her mother, work the case plan, and that all five children would come to Hope City with her on July 1. She reports that she dropped to her knees in the courtroom, threw her arms in the air, and praised God on the spot. "I knew it was only by his grace and mercy," she says.
From there the talk moves into what she describes as her calling. "We are called to disciple our children," she says. "That is our ministry as women. We are to teach them about Jesus and the true love of God, and to make them good godly young men and women and raise them in the Lord." The word "disciple" here is not abstract. It is a daily practice she lays out with some precision: every night the family reads the Word together, chapter by chapter, and every night they pray together.
The most striking passages of the talk are the children's prayers, as she recounts them. She describes each child's nightly contribution with the attention of someone who has been listening closely. Mason, whom she says "everybody thinks is gonna be a preacher," opens with gratitude for grace and mercy. Then he thanks God for something most parents would never want said aloud in a church: "thank you for letting me see my mom and dad be drug addicts," because, as she quotes him, "I know who you are." Alex prays "let this be a short life so I can see your face." Erica prays about the land of milk and honey, a phrase the speaker admits she is not sure the child fully understands, though she believes Erica does. Joshua plays guitar and sings to the Lord. Marissa, she says, seems joyful.
It is worth pausing on Mason's prayer, because it captures what the talk is doing. The gratitude is not a denial of what the children lived through. It is a reframing: the parents' addiction is included in the account of God's faithfulness rather than erased from it. A listener might find that uncomfortable, and the speaker does not smooth the edges. She simply reports what her children say.
The recording closes in the language of the two great commandments, to love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor as yourself, and then turns to the idea of breath in the lungs as the reason for gratitude. That is a fitting end for a testimony built around a single question: what is a life for once the search is over? For the speaker, the answer is not a return to some earlier version of herself. It is a set of daily obligations, a house full of children, and a discipline of reading and praying together that she describes not as heroism but as obedience.
The title, "Each One Reach One," points to the same logic. A testimony is a way of reaching one person. Her story reaches the congregation, the children who pray at night, and anyone in the room who has ever felt that the search for love was pointed at the wrong places.
If this testimony has you thinking about your own version of the turning point, start with the passages the speaker names: the verse she found framed at home and the verse in the prayer room, both about doing all things through Christ. Read them in their full context rather than as slogans. If you are working through addiction in your own household or family, consider looking for a faith community or recovery support near you, the kind of place where people will stay around after the crisis, as this congregation did for these children. And if you want to hear the recording in full, the video is posted by First Baptist Church of London under the title "Each One Reach One" from April 2020. Listen for the rhythm of the family's nightly prayers, the pauses where the speaker lets a number or a name land, and the moment she describes the paper that fell into her lap at the pulpit. That detail, more than any sermon line, is the part of the story most worth carrying with you.
