TESTIMONY
Karen Reagle: Breaking Her Chains
By Zsa Zsa Palagyi
The 700 Club
CBN.com
– “I was not a good person. Married men were awesome. You could have a relationship, nobody told you what to do, and they’d have to go home. There wasn’t anything about myself that I liked. There wasn’t anything that I hadn’t done. The 10 commandments, I did them all, every one of them, including murder (when you have two abortions, which I did).”
At the time, Karen Reagle didn’t even think about it. The only thing on her mind was her next drink.
“Every time I drank, it was to get drunk. Not just have a cocktail. Literally, I was blacking out by the time I was 18,” Karen tells The 700 Club. “There wasn’t anything about myself that I liked.”
There was just a lot of anger. It started brewing when Karen was a child.
“There was a babysitter who did really horrible things to me. There was an uncle who did things that were wrong. My father left when I was five years old. I literally followed him out the door, got on my three-wheel bike and followed him down the road. He had to pick me up, bring me back and put me in the house. He told me that night, ‘I’ll be here to pick you up tomorrow’ because I was a daddy’s girl. I didn’t really get along with my mother. The next day, he didn’t come and get me.”
It was three years before she finally got to live with her dad. But even that had its challenges. Now, Karen had to compete with her step-mom for her father’s attention.
“I took all those things and said, ‘I’ll do what I want when I want’ and wanted to be bad. I wanted to hurt people the way that I had been hurt. What I didn’t understand was that I was hurting myself.”
There were lots of suicide attempts.
“Had my stomach pumped at 16. Slit my wrist at 18. It was torment to be on this earth,” Karen recalls.
Karen thought getting married and having a baby was the answer, but it just made things more difficult. Alcohol destroyed her first marriage. Her addiction got so bad that Karen even neglected her baby girl.
“Once in awhile, if it was early enough, I’d call the girl across the street or the girl next door. [I would] say, ‘Look, Kaitlyn’s sleeping. I’m going to be right down the road.’ They knew where I was going to be.”
Then Karen married Ronnie. Things started to fall apart when he asked her to stop drinking.
“I wanted him out of my life ‘cause no one was going to tell me what to do.”
One night after a big argument, Karen almost blew her head off with her husband’s shotgun.
“I tried to put my foot in the trigger of the gun. I had both barrels in my mouth, but I was just so drunk. I couldn’t make it happen.”
Ronnie found her, passed out, with his gun pointing directly at their daughter’s bedroom. It was a close call that night for Karen and for her little girl.
“Then 9/11 happened and my husband felt very called to go to church. He’s like, ‘You’re going to church.’”
Karen went to church, but very reluctantly. Then after a few Sundays, “I went and I sat down on the pew. The music starts, and I got real quiet. All I heard that day was, ‘Karen, come to Me.’ I don’t know what even possessed me, but I got up. I went to the altar, and I got on my knees. It was the first time in my life that I said, ‘I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know a life without drinking. I don’t know a life without everything I’m going through.’ And again… ‘Come to Me. I will love you.’ I said okay.”
She continues, “The day that I accepted Jesus Christ, I went home and had like maybe three or four beers. I didn’t get drunk that night.”
With the help of God and some people at her church, Karen was able to give up alcohol all together.
“I haven’t touched it. It’s been five years. Now my favorite thing is to sit on my porch, talk to my humming birds, read my Bible and drink coffee. The hope and the peace that lives and dwells in me now I can’t even describe it. It just is there and it takes over. I wake up in the morning and it’s: ‘Thank you Jesus for the life that I have, what You’ve given me.’ I have had things that I have never had in my life. I have a home. I have a husband who adores me, kids who have forgiven me. I have love in my heart.
“There’s a box out there, and every sin I’ve ever committed, I could pick one out and His name is written on it and says forgiven. He took dirt from the road and made a vessel that loves and adores Him. Every chain that ever held me is gone. The only chain that there is now is really not a chain. It’s a yoke, and I am yoked with Jesus Christ. My man is right here.”
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