From Crystal Meth and a Riverside Lapa to the JustGospel Studio: Chantel van Rensburg's Testimony

The first time I really met Chantel, I didn't know I was meeting her. About a year and a half ago we filmed a promo video for blankets for the Breach the Gap ministry here at Delta Community Church. A friend of ours, Gavin, said he knew someone who would sit in front of the camera, and she did. Very thin. Very quiet. I remember thinking afterwards, is she okay, and am I using her vulnerability to get people to sponsor a blanket? She told me on air that it was fine, and I'm holding her to that.

Then, a few months ago, I was at a funeral and a woman walked up to me and said, Carlett, do you remember me? I said no. Just like that, bluntly. Gavin was sitting next to her, he mentioned the promo video, and the penny dropped so hard I nearly fell off my chair. Same woman. Different person. I could not get her into the studio fast enough.

A house of trauma

Chantel says she drank for 23 years and never thought of herself as an alcoholic, even when a session ran two or three days without stopping. She wants you to understand that she comes from a good family, so this didn't start where you'd expect. It started when she was eight or nine and was molested. It carried on when her father died at twelve, and she went looking for fatherly love in one boyfriend after another, some of them abusive. Her mother raised the children alone and never remarried, because nobody could fill her father's shoes. Nobody ever helped Chantel work through any of it. She tried to fix herself with what was nearest, which was a bottle.

She married, and eight months later her husband died of a heart attack. She was in her early thirties. She calls it building a house of trauma, one layer at a time, and I haven't been able to find a better description. She married again at 40 and divorced in the middle of Covid. Then she started her own ice business and, in her words, did well, praised the Lord and quit drinking for a while. Don't skip over that bit. It's the proof that she wasn't a lost cause waiting for a miracle, she was a woman who had been sober and succeeding, and still ended up where she did.

Never say never

The divorce brought the drinking back, and in 2022 a man brought crystal meth with it. She had always said she would never become a drug addict. I asked her what she'd say to that now and she laughed and said, never say never, because that's when God brings you to your knees. She had a worker at the ice business who was an addict, and she'd hand him a hundred rand so he could go and get his fix and still pitch up for work. She chased him away when the stealing started. A few months later she was the one smoking it.

She sniffed it first, stayed awake four days, hallucinated, and thought she was going mad. Within six months she had lost the ice business, the house and the cars and was living in one rented room. People who used to wave at her in the street started crossing over. She had been famous in her little corner of the Vaal as the party girl who greeted everyone. Now nobody knew her.

Two years at the river

She couldn't pay the rent in town because the drugs always came first, and one day she was on the street with a big suitcase of the clothes and shoes she loved. The suitcase became a target the first night. She left it behind. She and her boyfriend ended up at an old fishing stand on the Vaal that had been abandoned after the floods, a lapa with a roof and no walls, and that was home for two years.

She weighed 39 kilograms. She shaved her head. She waded into the ponds at a golf course to fish out balls and sell them. She says plainly that she did things out there the woman with the ice business would never have done, and she doesn't dress any of it up. I respect that more than I can say.

What stayed with me is what she said about the others on the street. People who had nothing looked after each other. If she had enough for her own bread and milk, she would buy for somebody who hadn't. It's the same truth I keep hearing: the ones with the least share the most, and the ones with the most hold on tightest.

One day a stranger walked up to her on a corner in town and she braced herself, because usually when a man approaches a woman sitting on the pavement he wants only one thing. Instead he said that God had told him to give her something, and handed her a hundred rand. She burst into tears. Then he told her he had to give something to someone else as well, so she called over the first homeless person she saw and went into the shop to break the note. She gave him fifty. She spent her own fifty on drugs. She told me that without a flicker of embarrassment, and I think that's exactly why it landed.

24 February 2025

Three years into the meth, she had hit the bottom. She had prayed a few weeks earlier, and what she prayed was that she couldn't do this anymore, that either she needed to die or God needed to help her, because it was getting too rough and she wasn't going to make it. Then came a night of violence and no sleep, ten days of smoking without a break, and the edge of psychosis. On the morning of the 24th she walked into town barefoot, in a pink t-shirt and tracksuit pants.

The woman at a tuck shop in town recognised her as someone Gavin knew. Chantel and Gavin went to school together. Gavin had recently done the funeral of a friend of hers, a woman who had been set on fire by her own boyfriend, and now here was Chantel. The shop owner phoned him. Chantel was angry and sore and fighting everyone, and Gavin came to fetch her anyway. On the road to Duncanville he asked whether she wanted to go to rehab. She said please.

"If you ask God to help you, He will send Gavin. God doesn't tell you where He's sending you."Chantel van Rensburg

One obedient friend and one phone call. That's all it took to turn the whole thing around, and I keep thinking about how easily Gavin could have said it wasn't his problem.

Yahweh Rapha

She had to wait a week for a bed, and the night before, on 5 March, she took one last hit. The doubt came in the morning. She didn't want to go, she could stay on the plot, she'd come clean on her own, she promised. Gavin put her in the car anyway. On 6 March she walked into Yahweh Rapha in Vanderbijlpark, run by Pastors Gary and Tracey, who gave her a grace bed because she couldn't pay for one. She spent a week in intake sobering up, then moved into the house.

She says she knew about God before, but she didn't know Him. In the programme she learned to pray and worship, did Celebrate Recovery's twelve steps, sat through relapse prevention and a class called Truth About Drugs, and talked to counsellors who took her all the way back to the beginning. The hardest lesson was taking responsibility. Addicts, she told me, are the most manipulative people you will ever meet, always blaming the family or the situation, and God works on that deep inside you.

Two or three months in, she stood up in the dining hall, said something didn't feel right, and blacked out. She had stopped breathing. They gave her CPR, rushed her to hospital, and it was a stroke. That same night she was back at the rehab, walking, talking and doing praise and worship. She calls it the healing power of God and trusting Him, and I'm not going to argue with a woman who was there.

The programme runs six months. She stayed about a year and a half, because she wasn't strong enough to go out and she knew she'd relapse. That's a wisdom most of us never reach.

Where she is now

She's out now, working, and says she hasn't been depressed or anxious for as long as she can remember. When she cries it's from joy. She still gets a bitter crystal meth taste in her mouth on bad days. Last time she dealt with it by going to work, telling her employer, Esti, who understood, and surviving on toffees and praise and worship music. She says the cravings don't just disappear. It's about what you do with them and who stands beside you.

A while back she walked through Duncanville and met a man she used to stay with on the street. It took him an hour to work out who he was talking to. She says it was all grace. She didn't deserve it, and now the question is what she does with it.

She finished the way we finish every Testimony Tuesday, by recording her own version of the station ID. Hers goes: this is Chantel van Rensburg with Just Gospel, good news, great tunes, have a lovely one. I played Mourning into Dancing before she told us about the turnaround, and I'd play it again for her any day. Her words at the end were that she's never going back, and that it's only Jesus from here. What do you have to lose? she asked the listeners. Nothing. You've got everything to win.