Dawn Damon: And so you married him, and now you're living in Georgia. You're married. You have two children by him. How long did that marriage last?

Cheryl Bonds: About four years.

Dawn Damon: Okay.

Cheryl Bonds: So I was 17, divorced, and couldn't live with my mother. She even threw my clothes out in the yard and locked the door, and so I didn't know what to do. I called my ex and said, Will you come get the kids and keep them? I've gotta get on my feet. So he did. But that was a battle. He had a girlfriend. I had to ask his girlfriend's permission to speak to my children. That was just another hard story to live through, you know? But that's what divorce brings: a lot of problems. You do not foresee. Yes. I told you I have four children. I told my children. Go out in the yard and duke it out, get it over with. You know what the problem is; you might not be able to deal with the new set of problems.

Dawn Damon: Yep.

Cheryl Bonds: But I was uneducated, untrained. I had no. Nothing. And I met, I was working at a steakhouse, and there was a beauty shop next door, and I got to meet the girls that worked there, and one of them said, Hey, you wanna go off with me this weekend? I said, Sure. She took me to a bar, and I fell in love with it. I fell in love with dancing and laughing all night long. It was something I had never been familiar with, and one of the waitresses said, You're gonna come in here all the time. You might as well work here. I said, A brilliant idea. So I told them I was 21, but I went but 17. So working there was this good-looking guy coming in there calling me Honey and Baby, and I thought nobody's ever called me that. And the next thing I knew, a couple of days later, I was living with a prostitute.

Dawn Damon: Oh.

Cheryl Bonds: And she must not have been very good at it 'cause we were broke. We were hungry. But she had a good mother who would come and bring us our bare necessities. And the prostitute kept saying, look. You're no better than I am not to do this, but in my heart at heart, I just couldn't do that. I didn't think I was pretty enough. I didn't think I had enough figures. I just thought I wasn't enough to even do that. I wouldn't go beyond doing a lot of other things, but I just couldn't do that.

And so I thought, I gotta get outta here. So another one of the waitresses invited me to rent a room and move in with them. But yet this good-looking guy started coming around more and more. And the first time we went out on a date, of course, I had to take my kids with me. He took us to a shopping center, and he bought my kids an outfit because my ex, I had asked my ex if he would bring the kids to me, let me spend the weekend with my kids.

And he said, yes, but he wouldn't bring them any clothes. He said, You can go buy. I didn't even have how am I gonna buy them clothes? So I would wash their outfits out at night. They slept in their underwear. The next day, they put their outfits on, and I washed their underwear. So we were doing this. So when he took me out and bought them an outfit, I thought, I've hit the lottery.

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Cheryl Bonds: Then he buys him a toy. Then he gives me money and tells me, You go buy yourself something. I thought, Oh my word. Where did he come from? And he said, I'll make a deal with you. You move in with me, and I'll take good care of you and your kids. I'll show you things you've never seen before. And I said, Hot Big Getty dog. I said, Okay, but I gotta tell my ex we're married 'cause I'm scared he'll take my kids from me.

Dawn Damon: Mm.

Cheryl Bonds: You know, packages can look mighty pretty.

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Cheryl Bonds: Until you open them and there's nothing in them. He was very bad to hit me. I mean, very bad. The first time he blacked both of my eyes, and my mother saw me. She said, What did you do? And I thought, what do you mean, what did I do, pat this beat outta me, and you wanna ask me what did, and that hurt me. So I just never forgot that she was saying, What did you do wrong?

Dawn Damon: Yeah. What'd you do to deserve that?

Cheryl Bonds: Yeah. It was just common. It was just a lot of that. When my little boy was 17 months old, he drank Drano.

Dawn Damon: Oh my.

Cheryl Bonds: And I didn't know what he had drunk when he was saying, Get it. Get it. And I saw him, his bottom lip was black, and I thought. Have you drunk shoe polish, and I set him up on the kitchen counter in blood, blood, hunks of meat. And I told his sister, who was just a year older than him, to go run and tell our neighbor to come and take me to the hospital. How did she do that at three years old? I don't know.

Dawn Damon: Wow.

Cheryl Bonds: So we took off. We got to the hospital. Even though we ran red lights, police cars were following us, but it was like they knew we weren't running from the law. This was an emergency. And so when we hit the ramp of the hospital, they all came out, and they just grabbed him and took him from me.

I did not know he had already quit breathing. And that was like eight o'clock in the morning, and it was midnight before they came out and told me they had to put him in a coma because of the pain that he's under. They had to do a tracheotomy to open him up so he could breathe, and they said, Go home, get some rest. Come back tomorrow. We don't have anything else to say tonight. Well. What happened, what's going on?

So when I get home, my supposed-to-be husband beats the snot out of me because I'm not a good mother. And so I had that to deal with. I had a 3-year-old to deal with and did not know what I gonna do for my son. Like, I got no say so, these strangers take my baby from me, and I can't comprehend. So I'm cleaning up the kitchen, and there I saw the Drano can with blood on it. Oh, and he did have his front teeth, and he had popped that child safety lid off, and it shook in his mouth, and I did not know at the time, Draino is nothing but red Devil lie. And so it just eats you up. And it had burned all of his bottom lip off. It had burned three-fourths of his tongue off.

Dawn Damon: Oh my goodness.

Cheryl Bonds: He was in the hospital before he came home. 10 and a half months. Mm. And then his c and it, it was like a teaching hospital, and they said. My son doesn't need a new doctor every other month. He needs to be with one doctor. And so one surgeon said, Let me take him to Eggleston Children's Hospital. And so we did. And we were there for about 16 years in and out. They operated on him about every other month.

Dawn Damon: Oh my goodness.

Cheryl Bonds: They did all kinds of stuff. Nothing worked because the mouth stays so wet. Yeah. One time, from his top of his leg down to his knees, they took skin and did skin grafts. They wouldn't take the worst that I saw. They cut him from the ear. Ear and opened him up, took his chest, raised it up, and put it in his mouth. They said, if you hook live skin to dead skin, you can grow skin. They made tubes outta his chest for blood flow.

When he come outta surgery. He was in a body cast, so he couldn't move. And these big brown cow eyes were just dancing at me, asking me what they had done to me?

Dawn Damon: Hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: So when he was 18 years old, and he woke up from another surgery, and they had cut him this time here and opened him up, he said, That's it. Y'all have scarred me from head to toe. I don't want any more. The doctor said, Well, you could live your life out as you are. And him being so little, he didn't have a lot of, he couldn't open his mouth as big as we can because if you've ever seen a burn patient, how their skin matters, that's what his jaws were doing.

Dawn Damon: Right.

Cheryl Bonds: But he learned to talk that away. He is a wonderful man today. Everybody loves him. Everybody loves him. But that was the hardest to write about.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Cheryl Bonds: As a mother, as a protector,

Dawn Damon: Of course. No. Is that one of the things that, as parents, I think we carry a lot of guilt in our lives? We can forgive ourselves for a lot of things, but sometimes, when we feel like we've done something that was negligent or painful, our child took the brunt of it. That could happen to any parent at any time. A child takes a wrong step. They slip in a pool, they fall through the ice. All kinds of tragedies happen, but I hear in my own heart, too, that those are the hardest things to forgive myself for. How did you find the ability to do that?

Cheryl Bonds: Of course, amazing grace. I don't wanna say writing about it helped, but my kids didn't know my story. They never heard my side. My son never threw it up to me. He's never said, Why didn't you look after me better than you did? I don't wanna pass, shake it off, and say it was a freak accident.

Dawn Damon: Of course it was.

Cheryl Bonds: Yeah. But you're still the parent. You're supposed to have responsibility. Mm-hmm. Do I wish I could take those days back? Of course I do.

Dawn Damon: Of course. Yeah. Oh, so incredibly personal and intimate and painful. And thank you for sharing that part of your story. I think our vulnerable children, like when they, as I said, are in our care, and those are hard things to carry.

Cheryl Bonds: It is, and I talk to God a lot, and God talks to me, and you know, I asked him one time, Why me? Why do I gotta go through all this stuff? And he said, Why not you? I know now, looking back, he had a plan all along. And there's an elderly man at church who calls me his bulldog because we did street ministry together.

And I wouldn't take no for an answer with people. And I think when he calls me that, I think, I know that's you guys calling me a bulldog and. There was a lot more I had of, I carried shame for 53 years. Nobody knew till last year my testimony; I had hidden it so well. I didn't even have to remember it.

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: That I had pushed it down so far. But God just keeps nudging me, nudging me, and a very good friend. My mentor, Robin Dexter, told me one time. Get over yourself. It's not about you. And that runs with me. That's right. It's not about me. This is God's story. I walk through it so I can share with other people walking through it that don't have to hang on to it.

I'm also a prayer intercessor at my church, and people come up to me wanting me to pray for them, and I hear horrific stories, secrets that they're carrying. On the cross, didn't it mean for us to carry these secrets? He wants us to give them to the foot of the cross, and he'll redeem us.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Amen. And I can hear, I know Robin Dykstra, and I can hear her saying that in a way that only Robin can, because you could have been offended by that, but you saw the truth in it. This isn't about you. I mean, it is a fact that this is your personal story, but it's for God's glory.

Cheryl Bonds: Amen. Amen. Amen. And I wanna serve him with excellence. And so, with excellence is telling you my stories to give you hope, to let you see. I thought I was beyond help. I thought I was too far gone to ever be saved.

Dawn Damon: Wow.

Cheryl Bonds: And we're not, we're not hopeless, and now I say hooray. I'm happy I got to experience what it truly is to be born again.

Dawn Damon: Yeah,

Cheryl Bonds: I wasn't raised in church. I'm not going to church because my parents weren't my grandparents. I got to know what it was like to be forgiven and be redeemed and be given a new, new life. And I'll never stop being grateful for that.

Dawn Damon: That's beautiful and beautifully said. Thank you for that.

And so let's fast forward just a little bit because you said you got the chance to be born again. That happened in jail, too. So how did you end up in jail? It changed your life, so I'm glad that you did. But tell us about that. So you're married, I imagine the second marriage eventually ended as well.

Cheryl Bonds: Yep. So did the third one.

Dawn Damon: And so did the third. All right, so now you're past three marriages. You're still working with your son in the hospital, and now you're doing what to get yourself in jail.

Cheryl Bonds: As I said, I was a brat. I read about girls who were molested becoming very promiscuous. I didn't take that route. I was full of anger. I fought a lot. I wasn't scared to fight anybody, and I became very good at it. I'd even been hired to go fight. I did a lot of street fights. It's not a brag; I just didn't want anybody to come close to me.

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm. I can understand that.

Cheryl Bonds: And so I got arrested for aggravated assault. I didn't even like myself, and I knew. This ain't how I wanna be, but I don't know how to be anything else. My whole world was like this. I would see people driving a nice new car wearing pretty clothes, and I'm thinking, How to do that? Why can I do that?

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: But, I saw no way out. Of course, now I do get some education. You know, put job skills ahead of boyfriends. But I had no training. Nobody, you know, spoke to me about staying in school, you know, none of that.

So anyway, when I got arrested, I didn't care what they'd done to me. I deserved whatever they wanna hang me from the highest tree, so be it. So I pled guilty, but refused to testify. There were six of us who were arrested that night. So, because I did that, I nailed my coffin. So all of them said she did it. She did it. I didn't care. I didn't care. So I was sent to prison, and I never said I was smart, but I said, I ain't staying here. So I knew I had to act like I was a model citizen because I didn't want their eyes on me at all times, because I was gonna run. So I signed up to go back to school. I signed up for the dirtiest work detail, signed up for every church service, and there was this little Bible study on Saturday morning. I signed up for it. She had tops, maybe five prisoners that came to the little Bible study, and she would give us a little track, probably not much bigger than this, and just a couple of pages.

And then on the back was a true or false question that you would answer. I couldn't read, I couldn't write. I had dropped outta the elementary school. So I just randomly checked the back of the boxes, and one Saturday, she said, Cheryl, stay after class. I would like to speak to you. And I thought, yep, here it comes. Nobody wants something from you without asking you for something.

Dawn Damon: Mm-hmm.

Cheryl Bonds: But I stayed, and she said, Cheryl, I think you're ready to receive Jesus. I said, Get out of here. I said, No, no, no. You need to take that talk. One of the others, not me. She said, Yes, I thank you. She said, I want you to bow your head and repeat after me. She said, the simplest, basic. She said, Jesus, forgive me of my sins and come into my heart. Now, where's Jesus? I said, I don't know. She said, Bow your head again, the simplest prayer. She might have asked me that three or four times, and all of a sudden, I started crying. I hadn't cried in years.

Dawn Damon: Oh my goodness, girl.

Cheryl Bonds: And I said it was like a golden teardrop hit my heart and busted it wide open.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Cheryl Bonds: And before that, when I told her to take that away, I thought, I'm gonna make her leave me alone. I'm gonna tell her some things. I said, Look, I've done this, I've done that. I've done this several times. I didn't realize at that moment I was confessing before God, and he was gonna redeem every bit of that.

Dawn Damon: Yep.

Cheryl Bonds: So that was on a Saturday morning and Monday night when I was going to class, a guard said, Did you just wake up? You look so fresh. I said, No, I got saved. I can't believe I just said that.

Dawn Damon: I just said that.

Cheryl Bonds: Yeah, I can't. And then it started hitting me. Well, What is that? I couldn't read. I didn't know anything. And the Gideons had given all the prisoners a little red Bible.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Cheryl Bonds: I couldn't read it. So I kept it up here because in prison, you don't set anything down. It'll get stolen. And I told the Lord, I said, I want, who are you? I didn't know what denominations were. I thought you went to the Baptist church. Could you live by it? Or you went to the Presbyterian because that's what you lived by, you know, like school districts. I didn't know. I knew nothing. Nothing. And so I said, if I can't read about you, I'm gonna keep you close to my heart. I said, but God. If you'll teach me how to read, I give you my word. I'll read something every day.

Well, God did teach me how to read, and I have; he kept his word to me, and I've kept my word to him. I read my Bible every day. Every day. And so I didn't escape. I was sent immediately. To work release on my sentence, that should have never happened, and I did not know. The lady who led me to the Lord was she wasn't famous. But her husband had went to school in college with all the, with the governor, with the Mayor of Georgia, and everybody. Oh my, yes.

Dawn Damon: Wow.

Cheryl Bonds: And my son and I didn't know about that till years later, but my son was coming up for a surgery, and I thought, I can't let him go through that all by himself. So I told my mama, you go to the parole board, you tell them to let me outta here. I don't care if you have to cry; you do whatever. She did nothing, nothing. So when I got to work release, I called the parole board, and I said, Look, y'all gotta let me out. If you won't release me. At least let me be that one day with my kid in the hospital. And they said, Well, we can't do that. But I will tell you this. Somebody high up is pushing to get you outta here. Holy Spirit told me it was her.

Dawn Damon: Mm.

Cheryl Bonds: So, years went on. I did get out all that, but years later, the Holy Spirit put it in my heart. I gotta find that lady to thank her. I didn't know anything about her. But one time, she had Kay Arthur come to the prison Christmas party. So I called Kay Arthur. Kay Arthur answered.

Dawn Damon: Oh my goodness. Wow.

Cheryl Bonds: I told her, I said, I was saved under the ministry of gay Hatcher at the prison where you came. She said, Lovely, lovely. I said, I wanna find gay. I wanna thank her. She said, Well, I don't have her personal number, but I got her church number. I said, Good enough. I called her church. Her church gave me her personal phone. Woo. So, she answered the phone.

Dawn Damon: Aw.

Cheryl Bonds: And that started a 40-year best friend's relationship.

Dawn Damon: Aw, what a wonderful story.

Cheryl Bonds: Yes. God, how can we be nervous about a situation? He's already working. He already knows the situation. He's already moving the rocks out of our walkway. He's got a plan. Just go with the journey.

Dawn Damon: Just go with it.

Cheryl Bonds: He's got it. He's got it all worked out.

Dawn Damon: Yeah. Oh, so beautiful. Wow. Well, you know, I could just talk to you forever and ever.

Cheryl Bonds: I could, too.

Dawn Damon: It's just so beautiful, and I love your accent, but more importantly, I love. What God has done in your life, and you are definitely a trophy of his grace and his goodness, and I don't see you being all about. I see such a beautiful, humble servant of the Lord.

Cheryl Bonds: Thank you.

Dawn Damon: And I see just such an authenticity in your life. Like you're not trying to impress anybody. It's just like, here's my story, here's me. And I'm excited about what God's gonna do through you and with your book. And I know there's so much more to your story.

Dawn Damon: I might have to, if I could say it like you might coulda you on again. So we could talk about the rest of the story.

Cheryl Bonds: There you go. You're rubbing off on me, and I hope I'm rubbing off on you.

Dawn Damon: You're rubbing off on me. I could spend so much time with you, and I hope that I can. You can, because our time is basically gone, but I don't care about time right now. We've got, you've got a story to tell, but what I would love to know is what you would tell someone, and you already really have, but a woman listening feels a lot of shame about some decisions that she's made, regrets, and she can't change them. We can't change it.

Dawn Damon: What would you tell her?

Cheryl Bonds: I'll tell her, usually I don't pray for men. But I did one Sunday, have a young man come up to me, and he whispered in my ear. He said, I was molested when I was little, and I can't get over it. And I said, Take your shirt off. He said, What? I said, Take your shirt off and throw it down at the altar. I said, That's what you do with that stinking thinking.

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Cheryl Bonds: Quit rehearsing that over and over. Find out what God says about you. Find out what God wants to do through you. He gave you, it didn't kill you. Because God's going to use that for his glory, quit walling it in. Take that shirt off, shame, and look up. Look up. He's got good plans for you. No, I don't think God ever intended for us to be ordinary people. He wants us to be something that the world will see and say, I want some of that.

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Cheryl Bonds: You know, it's hard to let your hurt go. It is hard. Read your Bible and find somebody that you can talk to that'll buddy up, that'll love you, and put their arm around you, and you can spit it out, get it out, and don't take it back in. It's a daily walk.

Dawn Damon: Yes.

Cheryl Bonds: But reading the Bible is my biggest medicine.

Dawn Damon: Amen. The word of God is alive and active. It transforms. It changes. It heals. It convicts. It trains us. It grows with you. It grows with us. And here I am. The privilege of speaking today. Cheryl Bonds, 77 years old in prison, didn't know how to read, and now an author, and I'm gonna go ahead and prophesy a bestselling author. Let's just say it. Your book is going to be amazing. It's going to be read by hundreds and thousands because it's powerful and it's life-changing. There's even a movie in your life. You know, we could say, God, take it the distance, do what you wanna do with it.

If you would be interested in having Cheryl as a guest on your podcast, speaking at a conference, or giving her testimony, we have a way for you to reach her, and that will be available in the show notes once I publish this.

And you'll see, you'll find that. So we wanna make sure that we have a way for you to get a hold of her. This is an incredible story. There's so much more to it. But more importantly, you're an incredible woman. I am honored to call you my sister in the Lord, and thank you for coming on the BraveHearted Woman Podcast. You are a bravehearted woman, and I thank you for those closing thoughts, and then I'm gonna wrap it up.

Cheryl Bonds: I love you, girls. Yeah, don't be a broken heart. Be amended heart.

Dawn Damon: Beautiful. Don't be a broken heart. Be an amended heart, which leads you to being a Braveheart. This is Dawn Damon, your Braveheart coach. And I'm gonna leave you like I always do, but first, if you are looking to encourage and build and grow your identity in Christ, like you heard my sister today, what does she have? Such a strong identity when she had none at all. Well, I'll tell you how you do that, and I have a 7-day identity challenge that you can find on my website, the braveheartedwoman.com/resources. You'll find the 7-day identity challenge there. Learn about what God's word says is true of you, not just me and not just Cheryl, but it's true of you. And now I encourage you, find your brave and live your dreams!