Desperate for Jesus: Melody's Transformation Story

Meet Melody Gray.

Melody lives at Cagle Terrace Apartments, a community of more than 400 residents right here in Bearden. Over the past year, more than a dozen residents from Cagle Terrace have become members of our church. It’s a place filled with people carrying stories of hardship, addiction, heartbreak, and survival.

Just four days after our church completed its first prayer walk through Cagle Terrace, I met Melody.

She was five days sober.

She had reached the end of herself in addiction and was desperate for Jesus to change her life. And what happened next was no coincidence.

Melody started showing up on Sundays. Week after week, month after month, she came hungry, hopeful, and expectant. She told us she was looking for a church that felt like home, and she found that at Two Rivers.

Then we started watching Jesus change her life.

Sobriety coin after sobriety coin.
Opening God’s Word daily.
Bringing her life into community.
Choosing obedience one step at a time.

About nine months ago, we celebrated with Melody as she was baptized and became a member of our church.

And now the very place she once desperately wanted to escape has become the place God’s called her to minister.

Today, Melody walks the halls of Cagle Terrace praying with residents. She looks and feels different. She helps lead a large small group in the apartment community room on Wednesdays, and she’s part of a launch team helping start a new community at an apartment complex downtown called Morningside Gardens Apartments so we can do it all over again!

In the middle of darkness, Jesus is using her to bring light.

And every time I hear her story, I’m reminded of Paul’s words to the Corinthians:

“If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

Next week, Melody celebrates 16 months of sobriety.

That’s the power of Jesus and where He’s been leading us.

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