Angie Taylor - prostitute now wife

Angie Taylor was a drug addict, alcoholic and prostitute. She served a prison sentence in Holloway Prison, spent years in a psychiatric hospital and slept rough on the streets.

One day she met someone who changed her life forever. 'Who else but God would have chosen the drunk on the bench?' she says. 'People will tell you you’re no use. But that’s a lie because you are the very one God will pick. He will turn you around and treat you like a king or queen and use you to help other people.'

'I want to say to the world – it doesn’t matter how low you fall. God’s arms can reach you.'

Stabbed

In an account of her story, Under the influence, Angie tells how she was brutally assaulted and stabbed by an ex-drug addict, attempted suicide, and passed days in a drunken haze to hide the pain she was feeling inside.

Living rough on the streets of Sutton, she picked up a piece of paper and saw it was a black and white picture of Jesus. 'At that moment my whole life changed. I'd loved Jesus when I was little. I'd been brought up a Catholic and went to a church where I’d looked at pictures of him, but this picture was different. As I gazed at his face he seemed to be speaking to me.' The face was thin, there was a crown of thorns on his head, and there was blood running down his face.

As she looked at the picture she thought Jesus looked in a worse state than she was and she felt empathy between them and a compassion for him. 'A lot of people would say I had the DTs – it was all a delusion. Well, if that was so they were the best DTs I ever had because they saved my life! But I know it wasn’t a delusion.'

As she looked at the picture somebody spoke to her, although there was nobody near. 'If you drink again you will make him cry.'

Angie says: 'I don’t really know why or how, but I know it was God talking to me. He knew that no one else cared about me and he was telling me that he loved me so much that if I picked up another drink it would break his heart.' She says she became aware of the presence of God: it was as if the King of kings had left heaven and was sitting next to her on the park bench.

Loved

'I'd never felt so loved in all my life. Then I felt something move beside me and it was as though the person next to me actually came and moved to be inside me and I felt loved from the inside out!' Angie surrendered her life to Jesus and found that great freedom, forgiveness, peace and joy he promises.

In the book Under the influence, Angie tells of her long haul back to health, getting a job, setting up a home and eventual reconciliation with her two children, Chay and Borita; reconciliation that was not to last long because Chay was killed in a forklift truck accident.

She also tells of her sponsored walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End in support of family life.

Under the influence by Angie Taylor is a true story to encourage and strengthen faith in God, whose arms of love are long enough to reach out to anyone.