#41 Fifteen-Year-Old Runaway Captured by Grace - Catherine Zoller — Compelled Podcast

At age 15, Catherine Zoller was sentenced to 8 years in prison for grand theft auto, larceny, arson, truancy, and more. But when she escaped custody and started hitchhiking across the nation she was picked up by a country pastor who would share a message with her that would transform her life.

The following is a summary of the podcast interview above with Catherine Zoller. Many more details are included in the original podcast episode and we encourage you to listen.

Written by Jace Bower

“I always believed in God, but I never heard the Gospel.”

That’s how Catherine Zoller describes her years growing up in Oklahoma City during the 1960s. Her mother brought her to church each week, but Catherine never grasped what it all meant.

“I heard all the Bible stories, but I never heard that Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for my sins and rose again and went to Heaven to reconcile me with God. Never heard that.” Catherine recalled. “They never presented the Gospel. It was not that I wasn’t connecting the dots. They were not presenting the dots to be connected.”

Although Catherine never heard the Gospel growing up, her own life story is a beautiful picture of it. Catherine’s story is one of redemption. It’s a unique story of God redeeming mistakes and drawing Catherine to Himself, despite, and sometimes through, her sinful behavior.

Out of Place at Home

Growing up in church culture, in a home with high standards, Catherine felt out of place. She struggled to sit still for hours at school and her naturally curious spirit often led her to push boundaries.

Her parents didn’t know how to help her. Despite a dysfunctional relationship with her parents at home, God was planting seeds in Catherine’s life.

For example, her grandmother loved Catherine unconditionally and showed grace to the girl who was living to meet near-impossible standards.

“She just really had a heart for me.” Catherine says of her grandmother. “When I think of the Agape love of God, I think of her.”

“There Must Be Something Wrong With Me”

But while Catherine was grateful for the kindness of her grandmother, it still didn't diminish the difficulty she felt at home.

When Catherine was nine years old, her parents, at their wits end, brought her to a psychiatrist.

“It was just crushing.” Catherine recalls. “I immediately began to believe two lies. The first lie was that there must be something wrong with me. And the second lie was that because there was something wrong with me, it’s not okay to be me. And those lies stayed with me longer than I’d care to admit.”

She was plagued with feelings of self-doubt, worthlessness, and helplessness. Just a couple of years later these feelings were compounded with anger when her dear grandmother died.

At the age of eleven, Catherine found herself angry with God.

A Drastic Decision

In the wake of her grandmother’s passing, Catherine describes herself as a “ball of anger”. This anger led her to act out, get hooked on drugs, and get in trouble with the law.

Her parents feared they would never be able to help their daughter, so when Catherine was fifteen years old, they made a drastic decision.

They severed their parental rights, made her a ward of the state, and sent her to live in a place called the Sunbeam Home, a state-run facility for juvenile delinquents.

“It was all in an attempt to help me, but again, I’m fifteen and I don’t know anyone else whose parents...gave them away.”

Without help from focused caretakers or responsible peers, Catherine says she just became a “better juvenile delinquent”. She and her friends made a habit of stealing cars. One day they stole a car with a government license plate. One of her friends got caught, the FBI showed up at the Sunbeam Home, and carried Catherine and her friends off to jail in handcuffs.

Catherine sat in jail for a week before her mother reluctantly came to pay her bail.

Off to Florida

Although her parents had revoked their parental rights, Catherine was still allowed to visit with them and go on family trips. A few days before leaving for a family skiing trip, Catherine decided she would hitch-hike to Florida instead.

She skipped school and ended up at the highway with just the clothes on her back, some drugs, and a couple of dollars.

While Catherine intended to travel from Oklahoma to Florida, God had other plans.

She got as far as Monroe, Louisiana, when she was picked up by a preacher from a small country church.

After treating Catherine to a Dairy Queen hamburger, the preacher sat with her, opened his Bible, and shared the Gospel with her - something Catherine had never heard before.

After the preacher dropped her off, Catherine prayed without anger to God for the first time. She prayed, “God, if you’re like that man says you are, I hope I get caught tonight.”

Divine Providence

Sure enough, that night, while wandering the streets of Monroe, Catherine was arrested for drug possession and vagrancy. They held her in a juvenile detention center, but Catherine stubbornly refused to tell them her name or where she was from.

As a result, she was held in her cell for 23 hours a day. She was let out for one hour so she could mop the other cells on the hall. During those hours of mopping, Catherine realized her cell included something none of the others did. A Bible.

She began reading the Bible, trying to find the verses the preacher had drawn her attention to just days earlier.

“I was just randomly flipping around, and I’m telling you...the Bible is the living, breathing word of God...The Spirit can penetrate. I got down on that cold tile floor and I cried out to God and asked Him to take this mess of a life that I had made in just fifteen short years...and to turn it around. And He showed up. And I got radically, unbelievably born-again.”

Redirected to Delaware

In just the course of just a few days, Catherine had run away from state custody, hitchhiked across a good portion of America, heard the Gospel from a complete stranger, got arrested, and was placed in the only cell in the detention center with a Bible. As she read the word of God over the course of three days, she was transformed into a new creation.

Catherine told the staff at the detention center her name and they contacted her family back in Oklahoma. She was returned home, the night before her due date in court.

The next morning, she was charged with six counts of grand theft auto, as well as arson, truancy, drug possession, and more. Finally, she was sentenced to eight years in prison, pending six months of probation. Meaning if she couldn’t stay out of trouble for the next six months, she would be immediately locked up for eight years.

Catherine felt hopeless. She knew there was no way she could possibly stay clean for six months. Her life trajectory proved as much.

But then her aunt and uncle arrived unannounced from Wilmington, Delaware, and offered to take her in. Catherine’s mother was adamantly against the idea, but because she had severed her parental rights, she had no say in the matter. The judge agreed that moving in with her aunt and uncle was the best option for Catherine.

So, Catherine flew back to Delaware with her aunt and uncle, and a few months later her charges were dropped.

A Growing Faith

While in Delaware, Catherine was invited to church by a new friend who had gone through similar things she had been through. This helped ground Catherine’s faith and let it grow. Her life witness also impacted her aunt’s family, and each of them became Christians because of Catherine’s time living with them.

As her faith grew, Catherine felt called to be a missionary. She got involved with YWAM (Youth With A Mission) for several years. But her zeal for God grew cold upon her rejection from missionary school. Instead, she went back to Oklahoma and attended college.

While at college, she met Jay. They dated and Catherine found herself pregnant. After getting married, Catherine gave birth to their son, Jordan.

Grieving for Jordan

When Jordan was just six months, he was diagnosed with a heart murmur. As time went on, Jay and Catherine found out his condition was worse than they originally thought. Jordan had a hole in heart and scarring in his lungs.

The prognosis was that Jordan would die as a child or in his teens.

This was the beginning of multiple invasive surgeries for Jordan, and even a heart attack. Finally, shortly after he turned seventeen, Jordan underwent a heart-lung transplant which seemed to have a miraculous effect on him.

Sadly, after his transplant, Jordan was diagnosed with bronchiolitis obliterans. Catherine describes this disease as a “death nail” for lung transplant patients. Jordan passed away five years after his transplant, just before his twenty-second birthday.

Catherine and her family grieved the loss of Jordan, but Catherine lives with the hope and expectation of seeing her son in Heaven.

“I Want You to Write”

One night, lying in bed unable to fall asleep, Catherine lifted her hands to God and asked Him what He wanted her to do with her hands. He answered her: “I want you to write.” She didn’t know where to begin or what to write about, but the Lord was working.

She attended a Bible study with her mother-in-law and studied the book of Genesis. When the time came to share her takeaways from the study with the other women in the group, God used Catherine’s creativity to spark something.

Once again, she was awake in the middle of the night, thinking about the study and her takeaways. Rhyming couplets began to fill her mind and she quickly wrote them down.

...This is the one true story,
of how everything began.
Because of love our God began,
to formulate a plan...

Line after line appeared in her mind that night - coming out as if from nowhere.

...For six short days He labored,
as He shouted His commands.
Up popped the stars, the trees, the seas,
the mountains and the lands!

And then the Lord let loose,
with His vast imagination.
Creating all the animals,
and all the vegetation!

By morning, the entire book of Genesis was set to rhyme.

When she read her rhyming, poetic summary of the book of Genesis at the Bible Study later that day, it was received with wild enthusiasm from the other women.

The audience encouraged Catherine to publish her rhymes as an illustrated children’s book.

Today, Catherine’s illustrated, rhyming Bible story books have been shared around the world and have blessed countless readers, both young and old.

Redemption

Catherine’s story beautifully reveals how God redemptively works in our lives through the simple obedience of individual people: Catherine’s grandmother who showed her examples of unconditional love and grace, a Louisiana preacher who faithfully shared the word of God with her, and Catherine’s friend in Delaware who invited her to church.

Catherine can see God’s redemptive Hand on her life when she recounts her story. “God redeems everything. He redeems our immortal souls. He redeems the things that are done to us. He redeems the things we do to ourselves. And one day, He’s going to redeem the entire universe!”

—
Jace Bower is a writer with a passion for justice and biblical principles. He writes at jacebower.com.