Warrior Stories

A NOTE FROM DAVID

FEATURED STORY

“God changed me without my permission.”

There are some stories that refuse to fit neatly inside a testimony. They are simply too complicated and human for that. We don’t move in a straight line from brokenness to redemption because life itself isn’t linear. Instead, we move through good days and bad until one day we look back and realize God had been walking beside us long before we ever thought to look for Him.

Just ask Angelina McClain.

Today, she is the Bootcamp Director at the Warriors Center’s Olive Branch campus where she welcomes women who arrive frightened, exhausted, and skeptical that their lives can ever be anything more than what addiction has made them. She understands those thoughts because she carried every one of them herself, years earlier, when she walked through that same door as a resident.

Out of Places to Run

By the time Angelina arrived at the Warriors Center in 2018, she had already been through fifteen treatment programs. She knew the language of recovery. She knew what intake felt like, what group sessions sounded like, and what promises people made during those hopeful first days. She also knew how those promises unraveled when the weight of addiction settled back in. Fifteen times she tried to leave that life behind. Fifteen times she returned to it.

As she walked through those doors, there was little reason to believe her sixteenth attempt would end differently. Her father had died three months earlier, and she had never let herself grieve him. The meth had started long before that. She was arrested for shoplifting in the months after he died. Looking back on it, Angelina can’t help but feel the irony, because by that point the only two futures she could imagine for herself were prison or death.

Angelina in 2018, months before she walked through the doors at Olive Branch.

It was in jail that she first heard about the Warriors Center. Her mom had learned about the program at church, and she would spend the next several months insisting that Angelina give it a try.

Twice she agreed to come, and twice she disappeared before she made it there. Finally she used the last of her Adderall pills to find the strength to call Hershey Burnett. Hershey was the executive director at the Olive Branch center. Realizing that Angelina was in desperate need of help but in no condition to get herself to the center, Hershey came to her. Now that she had finally arrived, she wasn’t hopeful. She was just out of places to run.

She was also too tired to run.

She had been awake for days. She finished the intake paperwork and crashed. Today, Angelina recalls very little about those first days. She only remembers feeling hopeless.

She had tried and failed on her own fifteen times. She knew she didn’t have a sixteenth try in her, and she doubted that God had one in Him, either. But one night, lying awake in the tiny top bunk in the bootcamp room, she asked Him anyway.

It wasn’t so much a prayer as it was permission.

“Ok, God,” she remembers saying. “Do your thing.”

If God took her up on it that night, she saw no sign of it. At least not right away.

Going Through the Motions

In the days that followed, she got clean, of course. She had done that fifteen times before. What she had never done was lose the obsession to use drugs, her phrase for the thing that had run her life for as long as she could remember.

But this time, getting clean stripped away the one thing holding her father’s death at arm’s length. She spent her first two months in the program grieving him in silence, sinking deeper into a depression she had brought in with her. She did not share in group. She did not want to talk at all.

She did everything else she was told. She took the jobs she was given. She memorized her verses. Fifteen programs had taught her how to look like a woman in recovery, and she could do it in her sleep. Not one of them had ever gotten her to say a true thing out loud.

Holly Ince could see it. She was the assistant director then and would run Olive Branch herself before long. She had watched enough women come through to know that Angelina was not working the program because she was healing. She was working it so she would not have to sit still.

There was also the tattoo: a single word inked on her arm that stayed in Holly’s memory long after she had forgotten whatever answer Angelina gave when she was asked about it.

The word was Death.

This told Holly all she needed to know. Angelina was a young woman addicted to drugs, grieving a father she would not discuss, so certain of what her future held that she had written it on her arm.

And yet Holly saw something more in her. Under all that quiet and depression was a toughness she did not often find in women who came in that broken.

The evidence was hiding in the thing everyone else read as failure. Fifteen programs had not held. Angelina had walked into a sixteenth anyway. Whatever else that record proved, it proved she did not stay down.

The Morning She Was Still

That toughness was the only thing Angelina had left to give, and for the next several weeks it was the whole of her contribution. She got up. She did her work. She said nothing about her father, and she did not leave.

It was not faith. It was only that she refused to quit. But God has never needed much to work with, and He has a habit of taking whatever small thing is handed to Him and giving back something infinitely greater.

It happened for Angelina on a Saturday morning about two months in. She was sitting on the side steps outside the center, and for the first time since her arrival she allowed herself to be still.

Looking back on it, Angelina believes that simple moment of stillness was the opening God had been waiting for. It took her a moment to understand that something was very different. When the realization came, it nearly took her breath away.

The obsession was gone.

Her constant companion through fifteen programs, suddenly but undeniably absent. In its place was something she did not recognize: a desire for a future other than the one written on her arm.

“It was like a miracle,” she says. Two months earlier she had told God to do His thing. Two months later, on the steps outside the Warriors Center, He did.

The obsession was gone. The grief was not.

Grieving her father took until the following June. Holly remembers the change surfacing on a work trip, when Angelina came home carrying a peace about him she had not had going out.

“It was like the hand of God had touched her,” Holly says.

Ready Ground

Angelina does not blame the other fifteen programs for failing her. No program works on a person who isn’t ready, and for fifteen tries she wasn’t.

She reaches for the parable of the sower to explain it. She had spent years begging God to take the obsession from her, and years drawing conclusions about herself out of His silence. She thinks now that the seed was never the problem. The ground was.

But she is just as quick about what ready ground cannot do by itself. Somebody still has to sow it, and somebody has to nurture it when nothing appears to be coming up.

Fifteen programs had structure. Some of them had scripture. According to Angelina, the Warriors Center had just the right amount of both. In addition, it gave her something that nobody else had ever given: grace. Structure without judgment, is how she puts it. A place that meets a woman where she is and does not give up on her if she falls.

You Mean Me?

She graduated on September 30, 2019. One year to the day from the morning Hershey Burnett drove out to bring her in.

By then she knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life, but she had no expectation that anyone would let her.

So she told Holly she would do whatever was needed, and braced for nothing.

What came back was a job. Bootcamp assistant.

It is not a large title, but to Angelina it was inconceivable. She had never been trusted with responsibility or held a job for any length of time, and she had spent her whole life believing herself to be a person nobody would hire.

“Like, what?” she says. “You mean ME?”

She said yes and amen.

The Front Door

She has done nearly every job this ministry has since. She ran bootcamp. She ran the program. In 2021 she was sent to Hardeman County to run the women’s center there, and in 2023 she came back to run Olive Branch.

Then, in the spring of 2025, she asked to be relieved of it. She had recently gotten married and was now working toward a bachelor’s degree in urban theological studies with a Master of Divinity behind it, and a center director’s job does not end at five o’clock. Something had to give, yet nobody wanted her to leave. What they found for her was bootcamp, the place where it all started for Angelina.

Angelina at Union University, where she earned her associate’s degree.

David Vincent, founder and CEO of the Warriors Center, is careful about how that gets described. It was not a step down or a demotion, he says, and in many ways it is a much harder job. A director spends most of his or her day doing administrative work. In bootcamp you spend it on men or women who walked in this morning on the worst day of their lives.

Which is where Angelina wants to be.

Every woman who arrives at Olive Branch meets Angelina first.

It is also the most fragile room in the building, especially at Olive Branch. Almost every woman who quits the program quits early. Carry her through the first month and the odds of her finishing the whole thing increase dramatically. Lose her in the second week and she goes back to whatever she came out of. When one of them announces she is leaving, Angelina says what was said to her. Play the tape out. Walk through that door and you already know where it takes you.

Eric Barnett, the ministry’s Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff, credits Angelina with much of the program’s success. “I think it’s fair to say that a lot of ladies who otherwise would have left during that first month stayed. Over the past few years, Olive Branch has had the highest graduation rate of any of our centers. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Angelina was either the executive director or bootcamp director during this time period.”

She has an assistant of her own now. It is the same job she once could not believe anyone would offer her.

Without Her Permission

Angelina has been sober eight years. She is married. She has a home, a church, an associate’s degree already behind her and a bachelor’s in progress, and a calling she is preparing for on purpose.

Angelina and her husband, Corey.

None of that was on the table the night she lay awake in a top bunk and told God to do His thing. She was asking to get through the week. She was not asking for a marriage, or a vocation, or a job standing at a door she had run from twice. She had not thought that big in years. It would not have occurred to her that she was allowed to.

Which is why she does not call what happened to her an answered prayer. She calls it something that was done to her, by someone who had plans she knew nothing about.

“God changed me without my permission.”

Every morning, women come through the doors at Olive Branch the way she once did. Some have been through four programs. Some have been through fifteen. Almost all of them believe their record proves something permanent about who they are.

Hers is the first face they see.

By the Numbers

Behind every story is the daily work of recovery, accountability, and rebuilding lives across all Warriors Center locations. Bootcamp is twenty-eight days. The full program takes most residents a year.

Celebrating Our July Graduates

Lives Changed • New Beginnings • Purpose Restored