A Diamond in the Rough

And so it begins, our first story. I’ve been so excited about sharing this amazing woman’s story. She is the perfect picture of what it means to be courageous and beating the odds. She was determined to make something out of herself despite her difficult situation. I hope this story can inspire you the way it has inspired me. Let us get started…

Her name is Andrea Hubbard.

We decided to meet at Homewood park, in the middle of the night, so I apologize if anyone saw these three random people roaming the park with a camera… but it was the perfect setting to start her story. We agreed that we would walk and talk all the way to steel city pops because she has never had one… (by the way she loved her pop).This perfectly describes Andrea. She is one of the most laid back people and enjoys her life of chaos with her 5 young girls and a husband at home. Once we began the interview she joking said, “I need to turn my cell phone on silent because I will have 50 something calls from my kids…” We all laughed but knew she wasn’t kidding. We started our conversation with some get to know you questions. I asked her to tell me about herself and she stated, “I love to write. I am the mother of 5 girls. And I have overcome a great deal of obstacles in my life, that I am proud of. I have no regrets.” I asked her if she could elaborate on these obstacles, she was extremely willing to describe her past. She explained, “Being a child growing up without a mother and a father, that was an obstacle, a huge obstacle in my life. And then trying to find myself inside of hurt, inside of pain, and the feeling of rejection was another one. I’ve been shot, I’ve been stabbed…” She kept talking but I had to interrupt her and I exclaimed “You’ve been shot!”… She just confirmed my statement like there wasn’t anything to it. I let her continue to explain all her other obstacles which included: being molested, emotionally abused, involved in a domestic violence relationship that she nearly lost her life in… and she stated, “that’s just a few.” In this moment I asked her if she wanted to tell me what her biggest struggle was but I didn’t know if she could really tell me because of all the things she’s been through. She proceeded to try and explain what her biggest struggle was and she said, “My biggest struggle wasn’t that I had to go through those things, but the biggest struggle is not loosing yourself in the mist of it all. And still trying to be a good mom and a good wife, and still having to deal with your own issues. Plus working with children because they can remind you of the places you’ve been.” (*Andrea works at Grace House Ministries as a House Manager, so she really gets to love on girls that have been through some of the same obstacles that she has been through herself).

We transitioned to talk about where she grew up and what her relationship was like with her parents. She grew up in North Birmingham in a little town called Collegeville. She was raised by her grandmother with her other three siblings as well as her grandmother raising her own eight. That makes a total of twelve people she was raising. She explained to me that she never knew her father, and her mother didn’t want a relationship with her. She discussed that she had to get to a place where she realized that she would never have a relationship with her mother, but that didn’t keep her from trying. She stated, “My mother died three years ago, and still tried to rekindle the relationship up until her death. She never really wanted it, and I was okay with that because I had made my peace with it. I still wanted to be the best daughter to her. Even though she treated me a particular way, I still wanted to help her. So when she would need things, I would still try and be around and show her the love that she didn’t show me.”

That statement in itself, shows Andrea’s heart and how she is just full of Christ love. But it gets even better and you will think she is even more amazing by the end of this… so lets continue…

We began to talk about her own family. Andrea is married and has four biological children, as well as one adopted child. All of them are girls. She explains that she sees her adopted daughter as her own, so she always tells people that she has five girls. With her having all girls, I asked her to discuss with me what she wants her girls to either learn from her or certain qualities she wants to instill in them. She explained, “Two things: the first thing I would want them to know is that God’s plan is always perfect, even when you don’t understand it. It’s perfect, and if you can just trust in His will and trust in His plan then you'll be able to see how much of the victory you do have. The second thing is that you’re Beautiful! Because when you take a child that has already been hurt or been scarred sometimes they loose that beauty. Beauty isn’t just on the outside, it’s on the inside, it’s in deep. Sometimes you don’t feel beautiful, you feel broken… If you just know you're beautiful you can see stuff in a different way.” This led us to talk about if she felt beautiful. She said she does now, but that it took her until she was in her thirties to really feel that way. I asked her what her most beautiful quality is and she said her smile… which y'all she has such the contagious smile… And it’s beautiful as you can see.

We finally made it to steel city pops after a long walk and I enjoyed showing and explaining to Andrea all the amazing flavors that they have to offer. We all got a pop and decided to move outside to continue our conversation over pop sickles. We were sitting right beside the loud brewery as Emily flashed the camera, but this was the best part of the conversation. This is when we truly got to know Andrea’s heart, and the deeper parts to her story.

We started our conversation with talking about her amazing partner in life, her husband. I asked her how they met and fell in love, and she explained, “I met my husband at my first job at Burger King, and I was so excited about the job. When I first met him I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me, he said I had a bad attitude. I said ‘hey what’s your name?’ and he said ‘my name is Kerry and I’m a student at Alabama State and I’m 23’… Well in fact he was in the 10th grade and was 16 (the same age as her). He asked me one day, ‘if a guy likes you, what can he do?’ she said ‘you can give me your number and I can decide if I want to talk to you or not.’ So the very first night we talked, we stayed on the phone all night. It was like every night, every night, every night… And so he came from a broken home as well and he would do the smallest thing just to make me feel overjoyed, like my favorite snacks. On friday he would bring me Oreos and a pepsi… every Friday. So we dated for a couple of months, and it was time for school to go back, and I wanted a pair of AirMax shoes. He bought them for me to go with my uniform and made sure I had everything for school. He just made me feel so loved. And then I just feel in love. We were talking one night, just kidding around, and he was like ‘you want to marry me?’ and I was like ‘yeah I’ll marry you.’ and had no idea that we were going to sneak and go do it a couple of weeks after that. We were 18. I didn’t tell anyone. I told everyone I was going on a school trip. I had literally gotten away with it but I didn’t know that they put it in the newspaper. One of my sister’s friends called my sister and asked if I was married and she said no, but indeed I was married.” We all laughed and decided to call them the Burger King Sweethearts… (by the way they are still happily married!).

I asked her to give some advice to all the married ladies out there because her and her husband have been through a lot together and she has a lot of wisdom, here is what she said, “I would suggest her to always love herself first. It’s so hard to give someone love when you can’t love yourself. It will keep you separated… Forgive. That was the hardest thing for me to do because I had been through so many things. When someone would do something to me, I would remember like someone just posted a sticky note on me, so when I became angry it would come out… so forgive quickly. And to make sure that you know that love doesn't mean it has to be perfect, it means that you’re not giving up!”

Being married myself, this hit home. She is so right. When you marry someone, you vow to never give up and things won’t be perfect because we are imperfect people. In this moment, I just kept thinking how wise this woman was, and so we continued.

We moved to talking about what she thought is the biggest struggle for women today. She explained that women need to not feel like they need to live in someone else's shoes. She goes on to say that women tend to look at other women, look at other relationships and try to paint that picture for their own life, but emphasizes that that might not be that woman’s journey. She says, “It’s important to stand in your own shoes, and carry out your own journey because that’s what makes you, You.” We not only touched on her being a woman in today’s world, but also being an African American woman in today’s world. I asked her to explain the obstacles she felt like she faced because of being an African American woman. She explained that she was told she wouldn’t make anything of herself and says it was one of the hardest things to try and be something when no one else believed that. She thinks her race had something to do with that but her not having her parents also played an important role. She goes on to discuss how she felt like people pitied her instead of trying to help her. She explains, “Pity is not good. I needed someone to help me, and tell me what to do to get to the next step. Tell me I can smile in the middle of the storm. Instead of people doing that, people just said ‘oh its okay’ and I never got that someone that would say ‘hey this is what you do, this is the path you need to be on.’” We went on to discuss something that she feels like she struggles with currently. Just as a real moment with her. She stated, “My struggle would be, sometimes I think back on some of the things I went through because healing doesn’t happen over night. When I was asked to come back to Grace House (She got shot at the house next to one of the Grace House houses, several years back) and when I came back, I thought I was over it, but when I drive down the ally by that house, every memory that I thought I had dismissed and every painful thing, I had to go back and deal with it. That let me know that it was still there. I wouldn’t say that’s a struggle, but I’m still healing.”

So you’ve seen twice that Andrea has been shot.. and it’s time to tell that story before we close out Her Story. She explained how she got shot to show that she finds it hard for people not to believe in God because all that He has done for her through her obstacles, including being shot. (She was also in a gang…). So here’s her moving story:

She begins by saying, “Two weeks before I got shot, the Lord gave me specific instructions, he said ‘On Sundays, get your children out of the house, and be on time to church.” This particular Sunday came around, May 23rd, and I didn't want to go to church. I didn’t have time for Jesus today. He gets enough of my time. And at 12 o’clock and got up and knew something was off, but I didn’t know what it was. I just had my third baby, she was three weeks old, and I put her on the table with my other little girls around me and I heard a loud pop. I looked at my babies to make sure they weren’t hit, not knowing it was me. I didn’t feel it at first and all of sudden I felt this heat, the inside of my body felt like it was on fire. It made me feel like I needed to go run. I could hear my three year old say ‘mommy, you got blood on my new shoes.’ and at this one moment in my life, it didn’t matter what anybody thought or what I had been through or what I had felt. I prayed, I prayed with all that I had. I prayed that God would spare my life because if He didn’t I would be in hell. And I prayed that He would allow me to raise my own kids because I didn’t want my kids to not have their mom. And that was May 23rd, when I woke up it was the end of July. I remember having on all the tubes, and the doctor said they didn’t think I was going to live. I got shot with a 45, and it literally tore my body up. It was by the grace of God I didn’t die. It went through my breast, it split my liver, hit the main arteries in my kidney, and ended right next to my spine. And remind you I’m not sitting in a wheel chair, I can digest my food… you will be so grateful. All those times when you think You just did me so wrong, I knew He loved me then. And that wasn’t the big factor of it. When I got shot, God told me ‘Ball up like a baby.’ I was on the floor and my husband was saying ‘Andrea, Andrea.’ I got up and turned the air down to try and cool down. I went to go sit on the couch when the ambulance was coming. The paramedics came and they were touching my face telling to say my name and my ABCs, asking me to count, and I couldn’t. But I could see two men literally on horses, with long spears on opposite sides and they were charging. God fights for us, and I am here. Anything that I’ve ever been through, every tear that I’ve ever shed, that outweighs anything… he gave me another opportunity.” Tears began to well up in her eyes as she finished her story. Emily and myself really couldn’t believe this amazing story of the Lord’s faithfulness. Andrea was not only shot but was also stabbed in the face a few months before and the doctors didn’t know how she didn’t loose her eye.

Andrea’s story is quite the inspiration as you can see for yourself. Andrea hopes she can touch people and be a blessing. She explained she isn’t here for herself, but is here for others. She is a true testament of the gospel. She said she used to be ashamed to share her story but she’s not anymore (thank goodness for that). If there’s anything that you take from her story, she wants you to remember this quote: “Sometimes in life, there’s a thing we call a place too long, and when you’re in that place too long, you can’t be in position.” She ask y’all to get out of that comfortable place, there’s always someone that needs your help, so you need to be in position and ready to help.

A special thanks to Andrea Hubbard, you are amazing, and never let anyone tell you differently.

We would love to know our reader’s thoughts about this story so please leave a comment and/or share with your friends. Thanks for reading Her Story.

Story Written By: Mary Beth

Photos By: Emily