As a baby, Gabe was abandoned on the steps of a police station. He was adopted several months later, but when he was 12, his adopted mother suffered a breakdown and kicked Gabe out.
He bounced between friends’ houses, never having a real home. Never feeling a part of anything.
“When I was 15, I discovered meth,” Gabe says. “Everything else in the world took a backseat to that.”
Drugs became his reason for living for the next 30 years.
A Dead End on a Hot Street
Eventually, Gabe wound up homeless and was arrested for possession. He was sentenced to serve his time at Tent City, the outdoor jail that was shut down several years ago.
“You lived in the tents year-round,” Gabe says. “During the day, they’d roll the sides up, and the sides stayed up, and so you’d have bunks that were in the sun, from sunup to sundown, 115, 118, whatever degrees, and that’s where you lived.”
One day, desperate to get out of the sun, Gabe went to a class Phoenix Rescue Mission offered at the jail.
“At that point it was just to get out of the heat. But then . . . I just kept coming back, and back, and back, and back,” Gabe says. “The teachers were just so genuine. . . They just drew me in.” Two volunteers who were teaching the class encouraged Gabe to go to the Mission when his sentence was up.
The Shock of Happiness
“It was another world from what I was used to, coming out of jail. The guys here were happy, they were smiling, it seemed like they cared about each other! I didn’t know what it was. It was new to me.”
Gabe completed our Men’s Recovery program in 2018, and is now our Street Outreach Supervisor and oversees special projects including our heat relief efforts.
“We’ve found people almost comatose, where they’re virtually unresponsive, shallow breathing, body temperature completely elevated, possibly a combination of drugs and just dehydration,” says Gabe. “It sounds cliché, but Code:Red’s saving lives. It saves lives every day.”
Many of those lives aren’t just saved today, they are saved for eternity.
A New Purpose
“Now my faith is everything. I mean, this is the one thing I love about the Mission is finding the Lord, but then working here gives my life a whole new purpose. . . I think I was barreling through my entire life, searching for anything that mattered, anything to feel like I was part of something that was good, I guess.”
Now that Gabe has found his purpose, he loves helping others find theirs too. Your support makes that possible.
