Luauna Stines' message is simple: If God can change her, he can help anyone.

Stines is the president and founder of the evangelical Christian fellowship in Ramona called A Touch From Above and has her own evangelical Christian television program on cable 25 times a week in California and across the nation.

"Luauna doesn't soft-sell the Gospel," said Joel Philips, senior pastor at the Escondido Christian Center. "She has a heart for people, and you can see her reaching out through the camera. She comes from the perspective of having been there herself, rather than preaching from an ivory tower."

Stines has been to hell and back, she says, but was kicked out for selling ice water. A drug addict, single mother, homeless person, widow and foster child herself, she says she is walking proof of the miracle of God's grace. Or, as she puts it: "The Good Lord scraped me off the bottom."

In ministry for more than 25 years, Stines received a district ministerial license from LIFE Bible College of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Los Angeles and has a teaching certificate from Oral Roberts University. She has also taken her message all over the world, visiting Malawi, the Czech Republic and South Korea as well as planning a series of tent revivals across the country that she calls Mission America. "Our goal this year is eight states," she said. "We'll spend a month and a half in Colorado starting in June, go to Arizona, Kansas City, and we would like to hit Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas as well. We go to the tough areas."

"There is something special about tent meetings," she writes on her Touch From Above Web site and recounts in person. "The Holy Spirit had been speaking to my heart to buy a tent as a tool for evangelism. I asked the Lord, 'Are you sure?' The still small voice kept speaking to my heart. So I began to negotiate with the Lord: 'If you really want me to have tent revivals, you will have to bring in the money to buy the tent.' Well, the next day, the exact money came in for our first tent. I surrendered to the Lord and purchased the tent."

The Rev. Phillips discovered her on cable TV years ago and was instantly captivated. "She is a true evangelical, in every sense of the word," he said. "She feels she has a real calling to reach people who consider themselves Christian and have fallen away from the fold and don't want to come to church, but will come to a tent. You can set a tent up in the field and people come to hear her."

Drawing on her own life of heartbreak and sorrow, Stines often begins her sermons with a testimonial.

One day as she stood outside a 7-Eleven in Colorado Springs, Co., she said, a cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other, and a gram of cocaine in her back pocket, a stranger approached her and said she wanted to tell Luauna about Jesus. Luauna told her to get lost and went to her car.

But the woman persisted. "God loves you and has a plan for you," the woman said, knocking on the window of Luauna's car.

"Don't you remember me?" the woman finally asked her. "I'm Maria." Luauna said she stopped and looked hard into her eyes, finally recognizing her as the sister of a friend who was a heroin addict and had recently shot herself.

Eight months passed. "I blew it off," recalls Stines.

Then one night she got a baby-sitter for her two young children and went out to a bar - but left early.

She thought, "What the heck am I doing in this place with all these plastic people?" So she went home.

Taking off her trenchcoat, she sat on the couch in the living room of her little apartment and looked down at her two children asleep in sleeping bags on the floor. Then, she said, she rolled up her sleeves, pausing to stare at the bruises on the inside of her arm from shooting up. She recalled that she had once sworn to herself that she would never shoot up.

"I had been a coke head, but I told myself that was totally different," she said. "And there I was."

That was her moment of truth, a moment, she said, that felt like looking through clear glass. "That was the first time I prayed," she said. "I said right there, right then - God, I don't know if you exist or not, but I will give you three months to prove yourself to me."

The next morning she got up, looked in the phone book for a church to attend and asked a friend if she could borrow a dress. "I was going to church, so I thought I should wear an ugly polyester dress," she said with a smile. "I thought people who go to church dress like that."

Then, she said, she put her hair back in a bun for good measure and headed for a church she remembered seeing on the corner.

She said it was a spirit-filled church, one with congregants speaking in tongues. And at the end of the service, she answered an altar call. "A little red-headed girl asked if she could pray with me," she recalled of her first day in church. "I was waiting for them all to mess up."

But instead she found herself moved to tears. After the service, she said, she sat down in the back of the church and cried steadily for the first time since she was 6 years old.

Stines said she grew up in Colorado Springs as one of four daughters. Her mother was always in between boyfriends and husbands and had no time for her. She left Luauna in an orphanage in Pueblo, Colo., when she was just 4 years old. She came back once to pick her up, only to leave her with her biological father, a man she has met only a couple of times in her life and who wanted to have nothing to do with her. "Less than a year, my mother came back to pick me up again, but she was in between stepfathers, so that was when I started running away and getting into fights," she said. Finally, after two stints in detention facilities in Denver, she said, she ended up back in Colorado Springs, where she was married at the age of 15.

Five years later, with a toddler and pregnant with her second child, a daughter, Luauna found her husband in an alley, murdered.

"My husband had been brutally beaten by his girlfriend's husband, and I didn't cry," she said.

After that, she said, things only got worse. At times, she was homeless, sleeping in her car in the bitter Colorado winter with two small children. She started using drugs and even was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at one point. "When I think back, it's amazing I'm alive. I should be dead or in prison. My life was one tragedy after another," she said.

She never cried. "I was so bitter," she said. "I had learned to suppress those feelings, but I felt that crying would leave me in a vulnerable state."

It was not until that day in church 28 years ago, she said, that she finally broke down and cried. "I drove home and cried for three days," she said. "My son asked what was wrong and I told him I had been born again."

God came that morning, she said, but the healing came later. She said she took her cigarettes and crushed them up and poured jugs of wine down the kitchen sink with 6-gram vials of cocaine.

"I was so transformed, and for a month later, I didn't tell anyone," she said. "I thought they'd think I had been brainwashed. I had to learn everything new, how to be a mother, how to cuddle my children. His love for me rescued me."

One year later, the newly reformed Stines said she opened her first Christian women's home to help women get off the streets and out of battered relationships. She reached out to young prostitutes and drug addicts and disabled homeless.

"There are so many hurting people," she said of the 13 years she spent helping more than 500 women through her Victorious Homes for Men & Women. "I want to help them not have to go through what I went through."

Stines also hopes to open a new women's home in Escondido, to be called A Touch From Above Women's Christian Home. "I didn't know anything about grants in those days," she said of how she has financed her Christian homes for women. "I worked two jobs, full time. I worked my butt off to bring in those monies."

In fact, a couple of the women she helped in those homes, Beverly Maes, Jill Campbell and Lisa Robinson, followed her to their new 24-acre Ramona ranch called Prayer Mountain, where Campbell works as a chief financial officer and Maes in administrative support. The property has two small cabins and one large one that sleeps 20, as well as showers and restrooms that are available to pastors and others interested in visiting for prayer and to "get direction from the Holy Spirit."

Stines is also planning to build a television studio on the property to produce what she calls "powerful messages of hope." She has recently received local planning commission approval for the construction and after having battled with the commission in the past, she now sits on the board.

She says she's only beginning on her mission. "I want to help people not only now but for an eternity," she says.

Contact staff writer Ruth Marvin Webster at (760) 740-3527 or rwebster@nctimes.com.