Claiming Her Crown of Life
“I remember seeing the back, tail-end of a motorcycle. And the last I knew is I hit it. I came upon it and I hit it… my first thought was, fight or flight. It was authorities coming. I just wanted to get away,” recalls Shannon Baum.
She grew up in Espanola, New Mexico, the heroin capital of the world. After she had her heart broken at age fifteen, she started using drugs and alcohol. “I wanted to use it as something to forget. Just get him out of my mind at that point in time. I wanted that pain to go away.”
She got married at 17 and brought her drug use into their young marriage. “That’s how we would go out and have our fun. That’s what we called fun. I would deal a little bit of drugs here and there to support my own habit. As long as I was being able to go to work, I felt like my life is fine. I have control,” says Shannon. “I was so caught up in the addiction part of it, and I was so caught up in using that I didn’t really see it as a problem.”
But she wasn’t in control. She had three children in her 20’s, then ramped up her party lifestyle. “I just saw that as normal. Everybody has a DWI. And, you know, most people have one or two on their record. What’s the big deal? I still didn’t want to take any responsibility for what I was doing,” remembers Shannon. “It wasn’t my fault, you know. I was running on a beer run. I got caught. Whatever it was, everybody does it.”
Shannon was powerless to stop using and hid her addiction and shame. “I would leave my family, and I would go off and I would use by myself so that I could use, you know, the whole night. And they wouldn’t see me, how really bad I was,” says Shannon.
“I broke down and I started crying cause I got this overwhelming feeling over me that death was around me. I just could feel it. And I knew that he was – death was coming for me. And I thought, 'I’m going to die soon.' And I said, 'God, I need your help. I can’t do this. I can’t get off these. I don’t know what to do. I’m destroying. I’m gonna die, and I don’t wanna die. I don’t want to. I have my kids to live for, and I need your help.”
God answered that prayer when she was drunk and took the police on a high speed chase that ended with her hitting a young man on his motorcycle.
“I woke up in the emergency room – handcuffed to a bed. I looked up and there was a policeman standing there. He looked at me and he said, 'I see that you woke up.' And he said, 'Well, at least you did because the kid that you hit is in the ICU fighting for his life.' It hit me like a knife in the heart. I didn’t even know what to do with that. I just thought what a horrible person I was and how am I going to tell a mother I took their kid?” Shannon says with tears in her eyes. “And I remember bargaining with God. I said, 'God, if you help this kid and you let him survive, just let him survive, I will do the rest of my life in prison. If it’s in prison, that’s fine.'”
She was transferred to the local jail where she received a phone call with news she dreaded to hear.
“I remember I just kinda held it there till I heard somebody on the other line. And when I heard it was my mom, I said, 'Yeah.' She said, 'Shannon, you need to fall to your knees and you need to start thanking God because that kid you hit just walked out of the hospital with cuts and bruises and no one knows how. They’re calling him a miracle.' I knew it was a miracle. I knew it was from God. And I knew that He heard me.”
Shannon completely turned her life over to God. For the next tens days in jail she went through a painful detox, then immediately, felt different.
Shannon recalls, “All of a sudden, I felt this feeling, and I like to say it was the hand of God. He just touched me, and I felt brand new. I opened my Bible because I just wanted to thank the Lord. I just wanted to say, 'Thank you, God.' I opened this Bible, it took me to . In it says, 'Do not fear for some of you Satan shall come and test. And some of you shall be thrown into prison for ten days. And if you survive the ten days, I will promise you the crown of life.' And right there for me, that was it, because it was ten days to the day.”
Shannon smiles, “You know that scripture, that was for me. This was God. That was all I needed from Him to tell me I made it. You know, 'Here’s your crown. You’ve got this. You got this. Now, just pick up your crown and start walking.'"
Shannon spent over a year in prison, fervently studying God's word, becoming an ordained minister while behind bars.
“There is where I really found the Lord. That’s where my relationship with Him really grew, because I stayed in His Word,” says Shannon. “I stayed wanting to know who He was. I learned a lot of lessons. He showed – He gave me a lot of lessons about my anger, my bitterness. About how to forgive.”
Today Shannon is the director of a homeless shelter, where she shares the love of Jesus and the power to overcome addictions.
“There’s a way, and His name is Jesus,” says Shannon. “And that’s a big thing, just putting that trust, that faith, and knowing that with Him you can do all things. If we take on Jesus, we come from the victory. We don’t go to it, we come from it. And we have to see that He already won it. He conquered it. He conquered death. He conquered sin. That’s who we have to hold on to. That’s who we turn it to is Him.”
To read Shannon's book, "Breaking the Chains," please visit: https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Chains-Supernatural-Power-Jesus/dp/B0B9W5VNVM/ref=sr_1_1?crid=26IJ6V5IIGQ58&keywords=breaking+chains+shannon+baum&qid=1662730158&sprefix=Shannon+Baum%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1
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