Heide
A family together once again, thanks to you!
Heide belies the stereotype of a homeless woman.
Poised and well-spoken, she once held a job and took care of her mother and grandparents when they were dying. She attended the University of Toledo for two years. And owned a house in West Toledo where she was raising five children who clearly adore her.
But then Heide’s world began to fall apart.
“I inherited the house from my grandparents,” she explains. “Then I found out that they’d never paid the [property] taxes. They also had planned to fix up the house and sell it, but they never did, and it was falling apart.” Heide couldn’t afford to pay for repairs, let alone tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes.
“I was overwhelmed,” she recalls. “I began to hang out with the wrong friends and started drinking.” But alcohol only made her problems worse, because Heide was taking prescription drugs to deal with chronic pain from serious neck injuries and subsequent surgery that resulted from a 2004 car accident.
Facing foreclosure—and with no extended family to help—Heide turned to Calvary Assembly of God. “I didn’t have a faith background,” she says, “but my 18-year-old son had attended Calvary with a friend for five or six years. Tommy has grown up to be a remarkable young man, very spiritual, a success in all he does. What he had, I wanted.” She got it, accepting Christ as her Savior during a Calvary service.
The church began to help Heide by arranging for her children to live with members’ families while she resolved her dependency problem at a local treatment program. About the same time, someone reported her to the Children’s Services Board.
“Once CSB got involved, I had to go to Family Court, and I was court-ordered to the Sparrow’s Nest after I left treatment last November,” she recalls. “At first, I didn’t like it. There was the stigma of being in a homeless shelter, and I’d never lived in a communal setting like that.”
But gradually, life grew better. She adjusted to the shelter’s structure and schedule, attending Bible studies and doing personal devotions morning and night. Soon, she’d made enough progress to be moved to The Oaks, a residence for former Nest guests who are in the restoration phase of the Ready for Life program. “The ladies were wonderful, especially when my kids visited,” she says. “I made lifelong friends there. The staff was wonderful, too.”
Late this past summer, Heide left The Oaks and was reunited with her children. They now live in a house provided by FOCUS, but she hopes to finish her bachelor’s degree and be self-sufficient again within two years.
“I don’t think I would have succeeded without Cherry Street,” Heide says. “With God, everything is being restored better than it was before.”
