Walking in Victory
By Torri Acheson
Reprinted with Permission from Grace Community Church

It was a cold day in January 1997 when Eddie Baiseri decided to get serious with God. Only six years earlier her life had been much like everyone else's. She was a woman with a home, a family, and a career in accounting ... typical ... average.

Average, that is, until her marriage disintegrated and her world started to fall apart. Her divorce in 1991 triggered a series of bad choices that would take her down a dangerous road leading to brokenness and despair.

In an effort to ease the pain in her life, Eddie began using and eventually selling drugs. Over time her life became completely consumed by drug addiction.

"The multitude of sin that comes from choosing that lifestyle of rebellion is devastating." She recounts, "I lost everything I had in the world."

Eddie was not raised in a Christian home but she had always believed in God. She was a God-fearer. As a young girl attending a vacation Bible school program, she had memorized 1 John 4:4: "You dear children are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world." Even while living a life consumed with sin, this verse would come to mind and she would wonder what it meant.

Finally on Jan. 28, 1997, Eddie realized she'd had enough. "I came to the point where I was just at rock bottom in terms of how I felt about myself, and the toll that my lifestyle was taking on me."

In agony she cried out to God. "I told God that I'd never doubted that He existed, but that I doubted He could ever forgive me for what I'd done. And that if He cared anything about me, He'd have to help me because I couldn't help myself," Eddie recalls.

Two hours later her prayer was answered when she was arrested.

On the way to jail in the backseat of a patrol car, Eddie realized that the police officer had the radio tuned to a Christian station. She listened to the last verse of "Amazing Grace" and then to the announcer who said, "If you have ever doubted God's love for you, today is the day for you to realize that God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life."

"At that moment," Eddie says, "thirty-six years worth of tears just started pouring down my face, and the Lord spoke to me at that very moment and said, 'I do love you enough and I do want to help you if you'll let me.'"

Eddie gave her heart to Christ in the back seat of a patrol car that day, and then she went to prison for two years.

While incarcerated, Eddie fully embraced her new life in Christ and immersed herself in the Word of God. Encouraged by Christians who came to the prison to conduct Bible studies, she spent hour after hour reading the Bible, sometimes staying up almost all night long. During this time the Lord brought Gen. 39:21 to her attention: "But while Joseph was there in prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him loving kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden."

Eddie knew that the Lord was with her too when she was chosen from a group of 5,000 to be one of 10 tutors in a program designed to help women get their GED.
"Everyone there knew me as a Christian." Eddie remembers, "The girls would come to my table for tutoring, but at the same time I was sharing Christ with them. Very often they would be distraught over their situation and ask me to pray for them. That would open the door for me to tell them that they didn't need me to intercede for them but that Jesus Christ would intercede for them if they would accept him as their personal savior."

Upon her prison release in 1999, Eddie found it difficult to get a job. "I went on probably 40 job interviews and the only place I could get a job was at KBJS, a Christian radio station."

Now she has the opportunity through radio to minister to people the same way she was ministered to in the patrol car. "It's so funny because now I get to go on the air everyday and tell people about God's love for them."

In addition to sharing God's love on the radio, Eddie has given her testimony to various Christian groups. On one such occasion, Eddie shared that she had been praying for the police officer that arrested her since the night she got saved. She knew that he was probably a Christian by his choice of radio station, but she never shared with him her decision to accept Christ that night.

"He thought I was crying because I was going to jail. I wasn't crying because I was going to jail; I was crying because I was broken before the Lord and my sin became so real to me." She assumed that she wouldn't meet him again until heaven.

After giving her testimony a man approached her and introduced himself as the senior pastor of the church and a sergeant with the Dallas Police Department. He asked Eddie if she would like him to help her find the police officer. She excitedly gave him the information he needed and he told her he'd get back with her. A couple of months later she received a phone call from Sergeant Jerry Cockrell, the officer who arrested her.

About a month later, Eddie met Sergeant Cockrell and his wife at the same church she had spoken at a few months earlier. This time Sergeant Cockrell shared how he is able to serve the Lord in his job. "Since then, I've gone to his church and given my testimony and was even invited to their daughter's wedding. God really does redeem all things!"

While she thankfully boasts of what Jesus Christ has done for her, Eddie still faces the same struggles as other Christians and sometimes to a greater degree.

"The more sin you build up in your life, the more you have given the enemy an entire quiver full of fiery darts to use against you. The only defense you have when you have committed a great magnitude of sin and fallen to the depths that I fell to is memorizing Scripture," she says.

Eddie encourages fellow Christians struggling with past sin to apply God's Word in their lives and "walk in victory." Eddie says, "Don't catch yourself in the same sin as Eve, believing the devil over God's Word."

When we're reminded of our failures, we need to be able to hold up the shield of God's word and claim a verse like Eph. 1:7: "In Him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace."
God's grace is something Eddie continues to share with others. She currently leads a precept Bible study appropriately titled, "Lord Heal my Hurts."

"I know that the day I prayed to accept Christ, He delivered me from a horrible life of drug addiction," she says. "It's so sad when I look back, but I know that the Lord has his purpose and even though He would not have had me to go that way, I know that He saved me in his time and He's used that all for his glory."