Tony Blackwell
My testimony…started out simple enough with two parents and my younger brother Jonathan. We lived just outside the city limits of Raleigh, NC in a very normal middle class neightborhood. We went to church frequently. But as I got older, my misunderstandings and unbelief of God just grew stronger. As a teenager I moved between groups of different people just trying to fit in. Then I found drugs and felt at home anywhere…anywhere but at home with my family. As time went on, struggling to maintain a sense of normal, I continued to push my boundaries and found there were more drugs and hard drugs. Soon it was all I could think about.
When I was 21, I met the love of my life, Cambria, and we would spend the next 17 years together. We partied together, lived together and worked together. As the years went on, the drug use, losing jobs, getting clean and attempting to fix our relationship, went on. I never felt whole on the inside. I always felt there was more but had no idea of how to feel complete, or what I was looking for. I could only look for my next fix. I was living a hopeless life. I was just surviving with no direction. When things couldn’t get any worse, I was arrested for selling heroin and while out on bond, on May 5, 2021, Cambria and I were involved in a car accident and she did not survive.I found myself in a hospital with a crushed arm, broken hip and 4 broken vertebrae in my back. To say I was a complete mess would be an understatement. I was a hopeless junkie facing 7 years of prison time. I did not want to move on with my life at all. I had lost everything, stripped down to nothing, angry with God. He was my last resort, but I needed Him. I called out and He answered.
Little did I know that the seeds my parents put in my life at a young age would come into play as an adult. God made a way for me to come to the Crossville Mission and my life has been forever changed. Walking with the Lord has been the best thing I have ever done. As long as I am willing to walk this out, the Lord has met me where I needed Him every single time. Twenty years of drug use and worldly ways of thinking have been reprogrammed (something I never thought was possible). I have been here at the Misison since January 2022 and I am going to stay obedient to what He asks of me. Let me leave you with a scripture I stand on…2 Corinthians 4:16 “Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day.”