I had breakfast with a hooker the other day.

        Wait — let me explain.

        We were at a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry. She was speaking. I was listening.

        And here's the best part: She's not a hooker anymore because Ann Taylor cared enough to bring her in off the street and introduce her to someone who could help her straighten out her life.

        When she spoke last Wednesday, she had to be helped to the microphone. She was wobbly and foggy like someone waking up from a coma.

        She said she has now been clean from drugs for almost 70 days. “To you, that's just 70 days,” she said. “To me, it's like 70 years.”

A slave to drugs

        Before that, she never missed a day getting high for 10 years. Not one day.

        She was a slave to crack and heroin, driven to sell her body to feed strangers' appetites so she could quench her addictions.

        She has dreams again now. An education. An honest job. A life with dignity and self-respect. And she said she owes it all to the day Mrs. Taylor introduced her to her best friend, Jesus.

        One afternoon her empty stomach took her to the Lord's Pantry at the corner of East Liberty and Walnut on the tattered cuff of Over-the-Rhine.

        Mrs. Taylor was there. “She asked me to make up my mind how I wanted to spend the rest of my life,” the woman recalled. “I said I was too tired and I'd tell her tomorrow. I was hoping she wouldn't ask again, but she did.”

        Her street-corner “office” was directly outside FOCAS Ministry. She held up the flimsy red dress she used to wear to work. It was the same one she had on when she went to jail for 60 days.

She found hope

        I don't know how her story ends. She might put that dress on again someday and stick the needle in her arm. But the FOCAS ministries led by Ann and Dick Taylor have an amazing way of turning lives around permanently.

        You could call it miraculous.

        I've heard about it from former street thugs and addicts and homeless women who had lost all hope until they dropped in to the Lord's Pantry for a hot meal, or visited the Lord's Gym to pump iron.

        Now they are college graduates. Entrepreneurs. Fathers and mothers with good jobs, dreams and the most important ingredient in life: hope.

        There are thousands of inspiring stories to be told about hundreds of ministries and charities in Cincinnati. But the annual fund-raiser for the Lord's Gym never fails to touch my heart.

        Last week, businessmen in suits listened to a prostitute describe what it's like to be in a prison with invisible bars, in the pit of human despair.

        She told them how God reached down and lifted her out, with help from an angel named Ann Taylor.

        The business guys swallowed the lumps in their throats and took out their checkbooks.

        If you want to help, call 621-5300 or visit www.focas-us.org.

        You can learn a lot having breakfast with an ex-hooker. I learned the meaning of the Lord's Gym motto: “Changing one life at a time.”

        E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com, or call 768-8301.

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