God's story, your life.

Unfolding short stories.

Hey, this is Meredith Foster.

On our last episode, we shared a special Mother's Day episode about amazing moms.

Well, today on unfolding short stories, we're going to hear about one woman who's not only an amazing mom, but she's an amazing daughter as well.

April Wilson is a morning show radio host at a Christian music station in Waterloo, Iowa.

Today, she shares two short stories, and both are on the topics of addiction and motherhood.

The first story has to do with her own

struggles with addiction to cigarettes, coming to faith in Jesus, and saving her mother's life

through an organ donation. Here's that story. I am April and I'm an addict. I actually used to be

an addict. I'm no longer an addict. But cigarette smoking was part of my life for 25 years.

I started very young and it controlled my life. Like the moment I got out of bed, the first thing

I did was I lit a cigarette. My friendships were determined by who smoked. Where I would go to dinner was determined by where they would allow people to smoke.

I was raised in the church, went to Catholic school, found out I was pregnant my senior year,

and the school said, you can't come to school here anymore.

Once you start showing, you can't come here. And that moment, I left God.

Like, I walked away from him. I felt so ashamed, not worthy, and unloved because of the way that

that made me feel. So for 20 years, I didn't walk with Christ. And in June of 2018, I decided to step foot into a church.

It was the best day of my life. I felt the Holy Spirit, and I knew that I had been missing

this all my life. From that day on, I started to just build a personal relationship with Jesus

that I had never known.

Even growing up in the church, I never knew how to be a friend with Jesus.

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