Goodwill Rescue Mission

Our Mission

Goodwill Rescue Mission offers help and hope to North Jersey’s urban poor and dispirited.

•	For mind and body: food, clothing, shelter, training and teaching.
•	For soul and spirit: the life-changing message of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ.

Special Project

Hope Totes
Can you join us in this front-line ministry by collecting items to fill the totes?
Click here for more info.

The Gift of a New Life

James Jolly woke up on his 31st birthday and decided that this year, he wanted the gift of a new life. Since he was a teen, his hunger for drugs had eclipsed everything else. Now he wanted to celebrate his birthday clean and sober. So he came to Goodwill Rescue Mission for help.

“... Let the light of your face shine upon us, O LORD. You have filled my heart with greater joy.”

— Psalm 4:6-7

James had a rough childhood. His mother, a heroin addict whom he rarely saw, died when he was just 13. A few months later, the father he never knew died in prison. But James didn’t really feel the blow of grief until his beloved grandmother, who took care of him, passed away when he was 15. “Basically, I had to raise myself, so I went to the streets,” James remembers.

He dropped out of school, started using drugs, spent time in jail and was homeless most of the time. Then, the floor crashed out from under James when he was shot in the head during a drug deal gone bad. After undergoing surgery, he was told he probably would only live six months and never walk again.

Program graduate James Jolly is now a construction foreman in NYC.

But God had other plans for James. Miraculously, he fully recovered and decided to make some major changes in his life. “No matter what I had tried, my best thinking wasn’t working, so I had to step to the side and hand over the keys to God,” he explains.

James joined our Project Emmanuel Recovery Program and gained the tools and support he needed to overcome his addiction and face the troubles that led him to escape in drugs. Now, three years later, James is doing wonderfully. He has his own apartment and is the foreman for a construction crew at a commercial building in New York City.

He credits much of his success to his time at Goodwill. “I think Goodwill is excellent and will work for anybody who goes there and really means business,” he says. “If somebody goes there and is serious about what they want to do, they can do it.”

Read other Stories of Hope

| | |