At Thanksgiving, a Story of Redemption

Thanksgiving seems an unlikely companion on the dank and shadowy streets where, on any given night, tens of thousands of homeless people live among furtive glances, drug dealers and cardboard box shelters that leave little room for gratitude.

This was Beverly Hunter’s world.

For 20 years, thanksgiving for her meant another score of crack cocaine. She begged, worked as a prostitute and rented her tent in a dark alley off MacArthur Park to girls and their johns to support her addiction. She once fled an ambulance after she had been shot twice rather than give up her crack.

But this Thanksgiving, Beverly Hunter is a pilgrim in a new land--a land not found on a map but written in her heart.

“I’m praising God. I’m all right today,” she said. “I understand about Jesus and God now.”

Her smile is bright, accented by long golden earrings.

Her story of hopelessness and redemption, coming as it does at Thanksgiving, when Americans count their blessings, is a fresh reminder of the lives affected by scores of faith-based missions and outreach programs in Southern California. Their work goes on year-round, but it is at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when thousands of holiday meals are dished up for the poor and discouraged, that the missions are most remembered by the public.

Founded in 1949, the Los Angeles Mission, located at 301 E. 5th St. and one of four major missions in downtown Los Angeles, is a nonprofit, privately supported Christian organization. The mission offers temporary shelter, live-in rehabilitation programs, medical services, vocational training, classes in English and high school equivalent diplomas. Last year, the mission provided 112,452 articles of clothing and 109,433 nights of shelter to homeless men and women--and served 497,278 meals.

Among the thousands who are being helped is Hunter. Now 41 and a resident at the mission’s Anne Douglas Center for women in downtown for the past nine months, she is soon to graduate from one of the rehabilitation programs. Hunter also holds a part-time job as a clerk in the mission’s development office.

Two Lives, One Faith

In her first public testimony of her faith, Hunter took her story Sunday to the First Congregational Church, a grand Gothic edifice on the edge of MacArthur Park, near which she was shot just over a year ago.

After church, the memories rushed in as 70 church members and Hunter rode a bus past the park. Hunter jumped to her feet, her eyes riveted on the scene outside the window.

“ ‘That’s the corner! That’s the place I was shot!’ ” the Rev. Steven Berry recalled Hunter exclaiming. “Here she’s sitting in the midst of all these parishioners, 80-year-old women and others, and these people are going, ‘Oh my goodness!’ ” Berry said, almost amused by the naivete.

One parishioner, Mary Ledding, who is senior vice president of legal affairs for Universal Studios, was seated directly in front of Hunter on the bus when they passed the park.

“This was the place where the most significant event in her life occurred, ever,” said Ledding, who serves on the congregation’s board of directors.

“In other people’s lives it’s ‘the place where I graduated’ or ‘the place where I had my first job or my baby was born.’ In her life the most significant thing . . . was where she was shot, and where she chose to get more crack instead of medicine.”

Ledding said she was struck by Hunter’s willingness to share her story--and the conviction with which she credits God for her turnaround.

That the lives of two such disparate women--one a recovering addict reclaiming her life, the other a successful executive with a major studio--would converge in a shared faith is what churches and faith-based service organizations like the Los Angeles Mission are counting on.

“It’s certainly a wonderful opening to the Thanksgiving time when people are thinking about giving and also a lot of people do want to go down and serve Thanksgiving dinner,” Ledding said.

It took years for Hunter to get to the mission. Over the years, her addiction had cost her jobs as a health insurance claims examiner in Oakland as well as a position with the Los Angeles County assessor’s office. She lost her apartment and lived in her car until finding one day that it had been towed. She was homeless and on the street.

And yet, she didn’t want to give up crack, even after she said a man she calls her brother went to the mission and turned his life around.

“I used to get high with brother. I stayed high, high, high when he got sober,” she said in an interview. “Then I didn’t smoke around him. I had a new respect for him. The mission had changed my brother’s life,” Hunter said.

But she couldn’t wait for the end of his visits with her so that she could light up.

Then came the fateful shooting. One man was killed. She was wounded twice. “He put a bullet in me and I’m still trying to smoke these bloody rocks. I can’t believe how stretched I was,” she now says. Several hours later she went to the hospital, but not until she had smoked the crack.

In the next two years she would be jailed three times on charges of being under the influence of drugs, she said. Eventually, her “brother” convinced her to turn to the mission.

Just three days before she was to begin a rehabilitation program, she was arrested and jailed the final time. The mission picked her up at jail.

Even as she headed into the program, she says, she was afraid that she would never be able to smoke crack again

“It was scary. You know, I still have those thoughts now. I think about crack now. . . . But then all I have to do is just think about where I was living.”

Her conversion occurred about three months ago, she said, when she was asked to give her testimony at the mission’s downtown chapel.

“It was while I was telling my story, I could see myself walking down the street and being shot,” she recalled. “I realized how pathetic I was. Right then I just changed. I really accepted Jesus. He had to save me or I would have been dead.”

A New Place in Life

Next week at the mission, among those dishing out an estimated 4,500 meals on the day before Thanksgiving will be Hollywood celebrities and their families. There will also be one whose last photograph was one taken by a booking officer at County Jail.

“I’ll serve the homeless,” Hunter said, beaming. “I’ll just help serve the homeless in the line I used to be in.”

She paused, momentarily taken aback by the significance of what she had just said. She held back a tear. “The line I used to be in! That’s so wonderful! The line I used to be in.”