Seeking Love in All the Wrong Places

"'You don't fit in with us,'" Mary Hooks remembers hearing. “'You're an outcast, you're a black sheep, you're too skinny, you're not pretty enough.’ Everything that they were saying to me, it would replay over and over in my head. I would hear all of this stuff and instead of lashing out, I would just bottle it up in the inside.”

Mary was in middle school when the bullying started. She made good grades and was involved in sports, however her small size made her the object of ridicule. If that wasn’t bad enough, she felt her efforts went unnoticed by her busy parents.

She recalls, “I knew that my parents loved me, without a doubt. But they did not show me any attention because they were working so hard to provide for me and my siblings.” So at 13, Mary decided to ditch her “good girl” image and started hanging out with the “cool kids,” skipping school and smoking marijuana.

She says, “The attention thing became an addiction. Once I started to feel the affection that I was longing for it was like, ‘Yes, I want to be here with these people because these people are showing me that they love me, they care about me.' You know, they're having conversation with me, they're not too busy for me."

It wasn’t long before Mary was having sex. Then at 15, she got pregnant. She recalls, “I was dying on the inside because I was holding on to all of this frustration and confusion because as a child I’m now a mom.” During her pregnancy, Mary stopped partying. That, however, changed after giving birth to her daughter when Mary slipped into depression.

She says, “The smoking, drinking, and sex was taking me away from reality. It's a high. You're in another place. And in that place it feels good for the moment. And so you try to stay in that place as much as you can to forget about what's really going on.”

Then, at 17, Mary met a man who promised her the world, giving her the attention and affirmation she was looking for. She recalls, “He was affirming me in ways I’d never been affirmed before. Just showing me affection. It wasn't sexual with him. It was just, ‘You are beautiful, you're the most beautiful girl I ever seen.’ Things like that just did something to my self-esteem because that's what I was lacking.” Which made Mary an easy target. Under his influence, Mary would become and exotic dancer and, eventually, a prostitute. What money she could keep went to support her daughter, and her growing drug habit.

Mary says, “It gave me that sense of numbness. When you're high, everything that's bad – it doesn't seem bad. You're just floating around. I was disgusted with myself. But he had painted this picture of what life could be like. You know, this glamorous life, this life of a fairy tale. And so wanting that and wanting to continue to feel loved and accepted by him. I really hated myself. It actually took me into a deeper depression because it looked like I had myself in something that I don’t even know how to get out of.”

After graduating high school, Mary spent the next three years, trapped in the sex trade, afraid to leave, and addicted to alcohol and ecstasy. All along she knew she was destroying her life as well as her daughter’s. She says, “I would be in the hotel and I would just cry and cry, and I was like, ‘I have really let her down.’ I would think, ‘I really let my baby down. And there's nothing I can do to get out of this situation.’"

She also knew she was disappointing God. Mary recalls, “My dad always talked about the Lord. He always told me, ‘Jesus loves you’ and things like that. I knew that I was outside the will of God, but I didn’t know how to get out.”

Then one night, high on pot, Mary says she heard a voice. “The voice said to me, ‘Why are you doing this? Do you see how you're hurting yourself? Do you see how you're hurting your daughter?’ It was the voice of God saying, ‘Look at you Mary, this is not what I designed for you. This is not what I have for you.'” 

That week Mary started going to church. She also cut all ties with the man, as she worked hard to get off drugs and alcohol. However, still a single mom, there was one thing missing in Mary’s life. So when an old boyfriend got out of jail, she decided to rekindled that relationship. She says, “I still wanted somebody. I still wanted attention. I was like, ‘Okay, God, you stay there, I’m going to enjoy my relationship in this family that I’m trying to build on my own, and then when I need you, I’ll come back and pick you up.’ So I kinda putting God to the side.”

However, this man was an abusive alcoholic who pulled her right back into drinking. They had a son and for a year Mary struggled to find peace. She recalls, “I would still go to church on Sundays, but then I would leave church and then I would go drink. I wanted the love and attention from him, which he was not a believer, but then I also had felt the love of God and I knew that God was calling me higher in Him.”

Finally, in 2017, she had him arrested for domestic violence and left with her kids, never looking back. Mary says, "I got to a place of, ‘God, everything that I tried to do in my own power is not working, so I need you to fully take control. I don’t know what that looks like and I don’t know where it’s going to lead me, but I trust you and I need you to have your way.'”

Mary rededicated her life to Jesus and was baptized. She recalls, “I fully surrendered and I just shut down from talking to men and solely focused on my relationship with Christ. I was filling myself up with the Word of God. And so, God was affirming me through his Word. So the affection I was looking for within people, God was giving me without a physical person.”

Today Mary is a life-coach, helping people experience the true grace and acceptance she’s found through a relationship with Jesus. She says, “Now I see myself as a beautiful woman of God. I see myself for who God sees me as; I am a masterpiece and I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. I don’t need anybody to affirm me because He has already affirmed me. So today I'm just whole, I'm free. And I don't care how nasty, filthy, or dirty your past is, I don't care what kind of mistakes you have made, surrender to God and He will make you a new creation in Him.”