Summary

SummaryI’m Amy, and I want to share how my life felt broken from the very start. Growing up, my dad’s anger loomed over our homeβ€”he’d lash out at my mom, and I remember feeling terrified as a little girl 😒. When I was four, they sent me to preschool hoping I’d be safe, but that day something inside me shut down. By eight, I tasted a sip of whiskey Coke, and suddenly I understood a numbness I couldn’t get enough of πŸ˜”. By age thirteen, I was already drinking heavily. My family only went to church on Christmas and Easter, and those stories painted God as angryβ€”flooding the earth or sending fire from heaven. To me, He felt like my father.

In my early twenties, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and the constant pain made opioids easy to come by. I grabbed my dad’s pain pills on Christmas Day 2008 and swallowed as many as I couldβ€”I just wanted to be done. But when I woke up in the hospital, my friends from Lincoln were there, telling me about Jesus’s loveβ€”that He wasn’t angry or judging me πŸ₯Ί. They showed me it was safe to hand Him my brokenness and walk through the pain together.

It wasn’t an overnight fix; recovery took years. With women from Celebrate Recovery who never judged me and truly reflected Jesus’s grace, I learned what it meant to surrenderβ€”not just my addictions, but my anger toward God. Now, I’m filled with joy, stepping into real friendships and finding freedom from the chains of pain and the need for any more β€œfixes” 😊. It’s glorious freedomβ€”this Christmas, I have hope because of Jesus πŸŽ‰πŸ™.

Amy has struggled with substances for most of her life, but when she least expects it, Christ finds her.

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Time Chapters
Β 
00:10 Troubled Childhood & First Drink
02:34 Opioid Addiction
03:31 Awakened by God's Love
04:17 Stepping into Recovery
05:46 Embracing Joy
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Lincoln Berean
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