No one knows what darkness feels like quite like Janet Gillispie does.
Sometimes it’s the recklessness of selling yourself to a stranger for $5, shame of being raped or fear of having a gun pressed to your head. Sometimes it’s the loneliness of lying huddled on a mattress pulled from a dumpster, trying to survive a winter night on Birmingham’s Southside. Sometimes it’s the desperation of crying out to God for one more hit of crack cocaine.
But always it’s hopeless.
“I just wanted to hurry up and die,” Gillispie said. “My life was disgusting and sick — no morals, no thoughts of right or wrong. And I didn’t see a way out.”
It wasn’t always that way. Her life wasn’t always that desperate.
Growing up, the Birmingham native was a straight-A student in a tightknit home where there was always a meal on the table and clothes ironed. But something was still missing, Gillispie said. “I knew there had to be something else, something more. I wanted love; I wanted to feel more love.”
So she went looking for it — in all the wrong places. At 13, Gillispie started sleeping with her 15-year-old boyfriend. At 15, she got married and, soon after, got pregnant. “I loved him and I thought he could put that happiness in my life. I thought a baby could, too.”
It didn’t work.
Soon the marriage fell apart and she fell into drugs and alcohol. Barely hanging on herself, she didn’t put up a fight when her former mother-in-law asked to adopt her son.
“I was only thinking about myself at the time,” Gillispie said.
She managed to pick up her GED and a college degree as an X-ray technician after dropping in, dropping out and dropping in again, but then she had trouble keeping a job.
“I had become bulimic by that point, too, so my life consisted of working, binging and purging, drinking and crashing,” Gillispie said. “At work, I was telling lies and smelled like alcohol. I kept quitting jobs before they could fire me.”
She moved in with a man in Mississippi to “start over” but quickly found herself in an abusive relationship. The couple’s foundation rested on cooking crack and getting high. “I didn’t care if I had a car, didn’t care about working. All I cared about was the high, the hit,” Gillispie said.
Going from high to high eventually brought her back to Birmingham alone and sent her into a downward spiral at full tilt. The need for crack drove her to prostitution, and she made a life of eating food from dumpsters, trading sexual favors for a place to sleep and begging for just one more hit.
Months passed into years and Gillispie logged more than 20 arrests for theft, drug offenses and prostitution. She also had an abortion, gave a baby up for adoption and had another taken away by the state’s social services.
“As the years progressed in sin, so did the darkness. I never felt satisfied — only hurt, empty and unloved,” Gillispie said. “I looked to everything in the world to make it better. The dark alleys only matched the darkness within, and I had come to believe that I would die that way.”
It all came to a head when Gillispie — pregnant again — went into labor one night in a crack house and was thrown out into the streets. She passed out in a park, and an ambulance took her to the hospital.
“I was lying there in the delivery room, about to have a baby, and all I could think of was getting another hit,” she said. “I was cussing, saying, ‘Where do I sign the papers? I don’t want this baby.’”
And then she heard a voice — one with a very different message from the lies she’d been hearing. “He said, ‘When will you let Me love you? I love you. I want you.’ I felt a peace and love I never knew existed, and for the first time, I believed in God and I believed that He loved me.”
And as He delivered her, Gillispie delivered a beautiful and healthy baby girl, Brittany.
“Minutes before, I didn’t want her but as God spoke to me, I held her and I loved her,” she said.
As soon as Gillispie was placed in a hospital room, she reached for a phone book so she could call a rehab program. And when she finished 18 months in that program, she called the Christian Women’s Job Corps (CWJC), a ministry of national Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) that equips women with life and job skills.
That’s when June Whitlow — an “angel on earth,” according to Gillispie — entered the picture.
Retired after more than 30 years at national WMU, Whitlow signed on to be Gillispie’s mentor through CWJC, a “very frightening” thing, Whitlow said with a laugh. “I had never been around anyone who had been on drugs or alcohol.”
But the two hit it off. “I fell in love with her and her little girl,” said Whitlow, a member of Mountain Brook Baptist, Birmingham.
Through their weekly meetings and frequent phone conversations, they became fast friends, and Whitlow began teaching Gillispie how to live life as a Christian woman.
“Everyone around here knew me as that addict, that panhandler, that liar Janet. But June loved me unconditionally,” Gillispie said. “She showed me what it was like to be a Christian, to be a lady and to be loved regardless of your past.”
Although Gillispie had lost her license as a radiological technician because of her record of misdemeanor arrests and lack of continuing education, she reapplied for her license, took a test and was reinstated. In 2006, she was named Employee of the Year out of more than 18,000 employees of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
And Whitlow, Gillispie and Brittany, now nearly 8 years old, maintain a strong relationship, taking vacations together, as well as traveling around telling their story.
Whitlow is even keeping Brittany this summer while she’s out of school. “She’s like a granddaughter to me,” Whitlow said.
And Gillispie said Whitlow is a blessing to Brittany and her — part of a blessed new life.
“I remember those dark years just like yesterday. I never knew what living was. I know now what life is — I have it in Jesus Christ.”
For more information about CWJC, visit www.wmu.com/VolunteerConnection/CWJC. (Sammie Jo Barstow contributed)
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