Meet Cheri, a Real Life Penny

Before I start on the next full-length novel in the Forlorn series, I have been working on a novella called Penny’s Journal. This was partly to fill in the time gap in Forbidden—when you get to that part, you’ll know what I’m talking about. But then I decided to start the journal from Penny’s first encounter with God at the beginning of the series. 

Penny is the “Mary Magdalene” of the Forlorn series—of all the characters, she is the most fully committed to God, the most completely transformed by Jesus. Yet she’s usually on the periphery. I wanted to give her a chance to speak for herself, to tell her story. Penny becomes a more pivotal character later in the series, so it’s been nice to delve deeper into her personality and her strong relationship with God in this journal-style format. 

People sometimes ask me if any of my characters are based on real people. In this case, I met a woman much like Penny after the first book was already written. I want to introduce her to you because her story is pretty profound.

Her name is Cheri. She was sitting by herself in women’s Bible study at my church on a Tuesday morning several years ago, so someone from my small group invited her to join us. 

Cheri didn’t look like the rest of us. She had beautiful green eyes, bright pink hair, a nose ring, and tattoos. And she had a story to tell. She had only recently started coming to church after kicking a very severe heroin addiction. Her husband had gotten her hooked on heroin, although she’d previously been addicted to prescription painkillers. The years of her addiction were a blur of partying and heavy metal music. Her parents had taken custody of her young daughter because of her erratic behavior. Her husband had crashed her car, ran through all their savings, and lost their house. After that relationship ended, Cheri was forced to move in with her parents. That was when she went to church for the first time in five years and heard a sermon that changed her life. The pastor spoke of filling the void in your life with Christ rather than cheap substitutes like drugs. That regardless of what you’ve done in your past, God forgives and offers you a new life of abundant joy, love, and peace.

Cheri was convinced the pastor was speaking directly to her. She had her drug paraphernalia in her pocket, but she heard God telling her to immediately surrender it at the altar. Instead, Cheri surrendered it to her mom after the service and asked her to take Cheri to a hospital.

It was a tough road, but Cheri got into rehab and got clean. She still lived with her parents, but she got a good job and seemed to be on the road to recovery.

But the job and other personal pressures took their toll. Cheri stopped going to church. Old habits took over, and soon she was using again. This time she got kicked out of her parents’ home and was living on the streets of Buffalo, doing whatever she could to stay alive and get high. 

I had lost touch with her because she had dropped out of our Bible study. But then, a year or so later, she turned up at a women’s Christmas event at church. And she told me a truly miraculous story.

One night the winter before, Cheri had been living in her car, with no money to buy gas to keep the heater on. It was bitter cold, and she thought this might be the end for her. She had nothing left. She had burned all her bridges. Her parents would not let her come home to see her daughter. She felt utterly hopeless and alone.

She sent up a tiny prayer to God.

Then someone knocked on the window. It was a woman. Cheri rolled down the window. The woman told her to come into her house to get warm. Cheri followed the woman into her home. The woman allowed her to take a shower and fed her a warm meal. She even let Cheri sleep on the couch that night, no questions asked. Cheri couldn’t believe this woman would leave her alone in her house with a TV and valuable electronic equipment in plain sight. But she did. 

In the morning, the woman told Cheri she had to go to work. Cheri got up to leave, but before she did, she thanked the woman and asked her name.

“My name is Gabrielle.”

Cheri is convinced that woman was an angel.

That very day, Cheri got back into rehab. Miraculously, a spot opened up for her, even though she had been told it might take weeks to get a placement. After several weeks of rehab, she moved to a halfway house, and her parents had started to allow her to see her daughter again. By the time I saw her the following Christmas, she had been clean for almost a year. And she was back in church. She’d even bought a bicycle so she could ride the twenty miles from her halfway house to the church on Sundays. Unfortunately, the bike got stolen.

God never gave up on Cheri. She proclaims His love and His faithfulness in everything she does. She is living proof of what God can do in the lives of people who love Him. She still had to deal with her demons, which was a long, hard road to recovery, but she did it with great courage, always believing God had her back. She is probably the most courageous woman I have ever met. 

Cheri has expressed her faith through art. At an artist event I held at our church a few years ago for my novel Forgiven, she presented her own story of Forgiveness in words and pictures. 

As someone who led a relatively sheltered life, meeting a true warrior like Cheri was, for me, a window into how Jesus works profoundly in the lives of His saints. Last summer, I attended her wedding…what a glorious occasion, another reminder that in Christ, there is victory. I’m honored that she allowed me to share her story with you.

Here is a video clip from her baptism so that you can hear some of her story in her own words.

The pre-Forbidden parts of Penny’s Journal are available in installments to subscribers on my website, ginadetwiler.com. The second half, dealing with the timeline of Forbidden, will be released at a later date.

I hope by now you have gotten your copy of Forbidden! Let me know what you think or, better yet, leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.