He Gave Me Exodus First. Literally.
I worked the steps for seventeen years. I just didn't know whose they were.
Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
— Step Twelve, Narcotics Anonymous
Step 12. The one we wait for. The one where the great profound revelation is supposed to arrive.
Did I experience that? No.
I know that now. On this side of it.
Back then I didn’t know what I was missing. You don’t know what you don’t know. I just knew I wasn’t in it.
But something in me did wake up. I wasn’t putting poison in my body anymore. I was rebuilding my life. I made new friends. I found a higher power, one step better than believing in nothing. I was sponsoring women. I was going to meetings. I was writing, working steps, learning who I was. I was inspired.
And I couldn’t ignore the feeling that something was still missing.
Empty.
I put the drugs down years ago. I wrote multiple inventories (step 4). I cried. I confessed to my sponsor. I let the resentments go.
Or so I thought.
I made amends, made relationships right. I was giving back to the program that had saved my life.
So why was I still always looking for something to make me feel better? To fix my insides? I was still picking up the fork. Picking up the credit card. Picking up the remote. Letting friends fill the nights.
I never picked up the drugs again. I picked up everything else.
The panic attacks had tapered off. The dread hadn’t.
It was an undercurrent deep below the surface. Anytime life was good, my inner critic was waiting for the perfect moment to remind me something bad was coming.
The strongholds that had formed from childhood.
Waiting...
Something bad is going to happen, I just know it. Don’t get too excited or too happy, then you won’t be let down as much.
After my first meeting, I made a decision. If they could stay clean, I could stay clean.
I was renewed. I had hope. I was hanging onto their garments and believing.
I was riding the pink cloud. I got a sponsor. I started working my steps. For the next fifteen years, no matter what came, she led me back to them.
My first higher power was the group. I was told it could be anything, it just had to be bigger than me. I’d been my own higher power my whole life, depending on yours truly. But there was real power in those rooms. I sensed it. I felt belonging. I wanted to be like them, so I leaned in.
I got clean young. Twenty-two, with a lot of life still ahead of me and a lot of darkness already behind me.
When I walked into my first meeting, my brother was fighting for his life. My first eighteen months clean were his last eighteen months alive.
He passed away. And despite the worst thing that had ever happened to me, I stayed. I found a home in those rooms. I found a community that walked me through the grief.
The panic attacks came a year after he passed.
I leaned on the rooms again, gripping my chair.
Breathe.
I went to therapy. I learned I was having a physical reaction to my emotions. I just didn’t want to cry anymore.
I was one Xanax away from ending the torment.
I didn’t get clean to feel like this...
I let myself cry. Raw, unabashed. Screaming into my pillow. Wailing at night.
There was freedom on the other side of that panic.
I persevered. I leaned on the ones who had lost before me. An unlikely friend became my grief partner. I white-knuckled through a dry desert of grief, and on the other side of it I found laughter again. I found a reason to smile. I started helping others who had lost someone. I was believing in myself for the first time.
I watched people in those rooms go back to school at 60 and walk out with law degrees. I was in my late 20s, asking myself the same question. What do I want to be when I grow up?
So I buckled down. I worked full-time and put myself through two years of junior college and two years of a university. I met my husband there, both of us in school, both in the program. In May 2016 I graduated. I started my big girl job that Monday. In August we were married. And on Black Friday that November, we found out we were pregnant.
2016 was a big year.
Life was beautiful.
Exhale.
Over the years my higher power evolved. Nature sometimes. Energy. I never had a concrete grasp of what it was. I just knew I needed to believe if I wanted to stay clean. I watched the ones who couldn’t believe in anything go back out. I didn’t want that to be my story.
In my later years I started seeking. The 11th step. Prayer and meditation. What was meditation? I’d never meditated in my life. Nobody in recovery was teaching it.
A gap.
My unlikely friend and I started an 11th step meeting with a few others, just to learn how to meditate. I went to Buddhist temples. I was learning how to sit still. I did yoga.
Trying to feel something I knew was missing.
Still empty.
A new chapter was settling in. Motherhood. Wife. New identities.
Then 2020 hit. The world shut down. I was stuck in a second-story condo with a two-year-old, no backyard, and the gripping panic starting to surface again.
I knew darkness. But this was different. The whole world was in it at the same time. It was heavy, and I couldn’t navigate it on my own.
I began seeking again. Praying fervently to something I still couldn’t name. There had to be something other than this darkness.
I took to Twitter. My algorithm kept leading me to Ephesians 6: The full armor of God. A fight that isn’t against flesh and blood. It’s against the powers of this dark world.
I didn’t know why it kept finding me. God knew what I needed before I did.
It resonated. It spoke. It was alive.
The darkness was real. I wasn’t crazy.
And there was a woman. A beacon of light on top of a hill. Every Thursday night at the women’s meeting, unfazed, grounded, she had inner peace. She was open about being a believer, in rooms where that gets you shunned.
I know, because I was one of the ones who shunned. For years, if someone said their God was Jesus Christ, I was one of the people who walked out or tuned out.
Ouch.
Now I couldn’t stop watching her.
We started talking and hanging out. I knew I needed her to be my sponsor. I wanted what she had.
Maybe this was the something that was missing.
She walked me into my very first church service.
I walked into another room, someone by my side again. I wasn’t alone. I felt like the girl from seventeen years ago, walking into her first NA meeting.
I had never opened a Bible. I didn’t understand what any of it was or meant, outside of Easter and Christmas. But once again I saw a group of people doing something I was craving. They looked happy. They were singing, smiling, shaking hands.
The pastor preached about current times. It spoke straight to my heart.
God knew the sermon I needed. He knew the church I needed. He knew the pastor I needed, for that time.
I didn’t know what stepping in that day would start. But I knew I wanted it.
Hope.
I kept coming back.
In August 2021, I was baptized. I turned my will and my life over to Jesus. The God of my understanding finally had a name.
We found a Christian private school for our son. My little man was finding a love for the Lord, and the Lord was using me to give him the foundational framework I never had.
That fall, I joined the Women’s Bible Study at my church. It was on Exodus.
I’d heard of Moses. I’d heard the Old Testament was hard to understand. But I thought it might be a good foundation, a way to learn what this whole thing was about anyway.
Once again, God knew what I needed before I did.
The study was Jen Wilkin’s, two-parts. Ten weeks in the fall, ten weeks in the spring. The first part was God’s character. Good. Faithful. Through all of it.
And week by week, a theme I couldn’t ignore. The steps were in the Bible. The spiritual principles I’d practiced in all my affairs. They were His Word. I’d been working it before I ever opened it.
But I was seeing God for the first time. Wilkin listed thirty-two attributes. I’d mostly been told three. Patient. Kind. Loving.
Now there were words I’d never thought to use for God. Omnipresent. Provider. Merciful. Faithful. Wrathful. Jealous.
Brand new concepts. I’d never understood.
I showed up every week. I asked the questions that might make me sound dumb. If recovery taught me anything, don’t be afraid to speak up. Ask the questions. Without the questions, there’s no understanding.
So I did. Why would God keep the Israelites in bondage as long as He did? What did Passover actually mean?
And as I learned God’s character, the theme Jen Wilkin kept exposing was undeniable. All roads lead to Jesus. Through Egypt. Through the wilderness. To the promised land. He’s there through the entire Bible.
Shocked.
I left that study more inspired to learn the Word of God than ever before. I’d built a community of women I felt safe asking questions with.
I brought into my new faith what recovery taught me early on. The meetings are where we get support, but the real work is in the steps and the literature. That’s where the change happens.
I kept showing up to my recovery and I kept opening the Bible. I was doing the real work now. Learning who God is. Who Jesus is. Who the Holy Spirit is.
Twenty weeks inside Israel’s story. The slavery. The rescue. The wandering. The grumbling. The golden calves. The provision.
I never once saw myself in it...
May 2026.
I’m a few weeks into writing on Substack. I’m dropping pieces of my life.
Before recovery, in recovery, and my newfound love for Jesus. What I’m struggling to reconcile is where and how seventeen years of recovery fits into this story.
How do I explain a God of my understanding who carried me that long?
I’m fired up about a piece I want to write. I’m discovering I’m the woman at the well, wanting to tell everybody. I’m working through it. I’m thinking about my life. Seventeen years of a higher power I couldn’t explain. But God was good through all of it.
And then He gives me the download.
Tears welling up.
How did I not see until now?
He gifted me Exodus first. The first study I ever sat in. Before I knew anything and four years later, I finally see it.
I was living my own.
The using. That was my Egypt.
Recovery. That was my rescue out of it.
The seventeen years with a higher power I couldn’t name. That was my wilderness and He was providing the whole way through it.
The something that was always missing.
It was Him. It was always Him.
He was teaching me my own story while I was still standing inside it. He was there before I knew Him.
I’m not wandering anymore. I’ve had the spiritual awakening.
I’m in the promised land.
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I really enjoyed reading this piece.
Praise God for his faithfulness and presence through your whole story! Thank you for sharing.