One Gambler's Story
Guideposts|October 2019
We spend billions of dollars a year dealing with it. We don’t spend nearly enough time talking about it
Melissa L. Dale
One Gambler's Story

The Prairie Meadows casino in Altoona, Iowa, has more than 1,700 slot machines. The machines are in an 85,000-plus-square-foot gambling hall that looks and sounds like something out of Vegas. The action is 24 hours a day. No matter when you go, you’ll find people hunched in front of screens, punching buttons with a hungry look in their eyes.

I used to be one of those people. The first time I went to Prairie Meadows, I was young and carefree, out for a good time with my husband and some friends. The last time I went, I was a forty-something gambling and methamphetamine addict, who sold drugs to support my addictions. I’d lost jobs and mortgaged my house and my father-in-law's house to pay gambling and drug debts. I’d been arrested for dealing and had thoughts about killing myself. Now I was on probation and my driver’s license had been suspended.

Late one night, I was running low on meth. I drove to the edge of the city where one of my dealers lived.

I was on an unlit back road, driven by the same bottomless need I always felt. The need for more drugs, more money, more something to fill the emptiness.

Tonight I felt a new need. I wanted out of this dead-end life. To be clean. Free from those hypnotizing slots and the financial chaos they caused. Free from debt, addiction, crime, and shame.

Out of nowhere, I spoke a prayer into the night sky. “God, I can’t go on like this. I need help.”

I was not a praying woman. Why should I be? My mom was an alcoholic when I was a kid, then died of emphysema soon after she sobered up. My dad left our family when I was four. I reconnected with him as an adult, and we grew close. Then he died of cancer. I loved my husband, but drugs became a bigger priority for him than I was.

Everything and everyone I cared about got taken away. No reason for God to start listening to my prayers now.

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