Almetia’s father was an alcoholic. She craved his attention but never received it. So she looked for that love in others. At 18, she met Thomas. She became pregnant. So she left home, and they married.
But Tomas was just like her dad. He would drink a lot and chase women.

But what Almetia didn’t expect was his violent nature, which erupted soon after they married.

One day they had a little argument, and then Tomas  hit Almetia. She was thinking, “I’m just going to hit him back, and that’s going to be the end of it.” But when she hit him back he beat her really bad. And from then on he would keep beating her.

Almetia remembers: He took the shotgun, and he put it right to my throat. And he said, “It wouldn’t take anything for me to just blow you away.” And I remember praying and praying that he would calm down.
This pattern of abuse lasted for 18 years.

Most of the abuse took place in her house. Almetia says, “My husband  would put his key in, and I would get so afraid, so scared when he would put that key in the door. He would do the open hand in the face, the back and forth with the slapping. And he would take my head and he would, like, hit me in my head. And if he did a fist thing, it would be where you wouldn’t be able to notice, like in my back or in my stomach”.

Almetia’s oldest son, Gerald, remembers how helpless he felt when he tried to protect his mother. He says, “When he began to beat her, I got in between and I pushed him. And he just slapped me down to the floor. And ever since then, I was always kind of afraid of my father”.

Twice, Almetia took out restraining orders on her husband. She even left him, but her own mother encouraged her to return. One day, Almetia agreed to go to church with a friend. After the service, the pastor came over to talk to Almetia.

He said, “Would you like to be saved?” And she said, “ I don’t know.” But he began to tell her about God and how Jesus came and died to bring us back to Him. Tears began to just stream down her face, and she said, “Yes, I want that.”

That day, Almetia asked Jesus into her heart.
She could feel a heavy burden lifted off of her.

Almetia wanted her husband to come to know the Lord and experience that same freedom, so she began to pray for him.
She would say, “God, I want him to know what real love and liberty is before he leaves this earth.”

But Thomas never changed. A year later, he died of a massive heart attack.

Almetia could forgive her husband. She said,  “I forgive you. I forgive you for everything that you’ve done to me. I forgive you for everything that you did to my kids.”

God began to restore her life. Instead of becoming a victim of her past, God gave her the courage to reach out to other victims of abuse. Over for the next eight years, Almetia studied to become an ordained minister. She also met Bobby, the man she eventually married.
Today, Almetia enjoys a loving marriage with her new husband. It far outweighs any pain of her past.

Almetia candidly shares her struggles and victories in two books, What Do You Do Once God Delivers You? and Soul Ties. Out of her passion to reach victims of abuse, Almetia founded Beaten, Battered and Broken to Mended Ministries.

Now she says, “ It gives me great joy and pleasure to see that God can use me to minister to them, to bring them to a place where they can say, “I can come out of this,” a place where they can have hope. God is a healer. He’s a deliverer, because he has delivered me, I mean, totally delivered me. He’s everything. He’s everything to me. God did not allow death to come, and God allowed me to make it through that, because He had a plan and a destiny for my life. God has blessed me. He has turned everything around in my life. So I know, without a shadow of a doubt, all things do work together for the good of those that love God.”