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Rannie’s Story
What has made me passionate about helping people find Recovery is shared pain and suffering? I have a saying: “you are not ready until you have suffered enough”; I finally came to a point in my life where I had suffered enough and thank God for bringing people into my life at just the ‘right time’. Since I began this journey November 30, 1988; I have been blessed with numerous ‘role models’ in Recovery (sponsors/mentors); Bob Kennington, Doug Parker, Gene Cleckler and several ‘role models’ in my spiritual journey; Bob Miller, John Halford; just to name a few.
I said all that to say this……I can look back now and see how God has brought many, many broken people into my life and I have been blessed to be ‘role models’ for them. I am passionate about helping people because I have come to believe this is what life is all about; helping one another as Christ would have us to do.
My hope for all Recovering folks is that they will come to the place where they realize that that are ‘whole/complete’ and measure up in God’s eyes. That they will come to ‘know’ God not just about Him.
My favorite spiritual principle is summed up in two Bible verses:
John 14:20 (NIV)
20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.
Acts 17:28 (NIV)
28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’[a] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’[b]
Why? Because that day is ‘NOW’ and our very existence depends on God.
This relates to my personal recovery in that on this wonderful journey I have come to understand that we can live life without drugs/alcohol and all types of deviate behaviors but, we cannot live life as it is meant to lived without a relationship with God.
I have lived a very eventful life and I know now that it has been, is now and will be into the future determined by my participation with Jesus Christ. I would like to share something I wrote some years back as I sat in my new office at the CED Fellowship (back in 2006) and we had just moved into a brand new facility. It is called “Paces.”
Paces
The prisoner paces his cell, back and forth… back and forth… two, maybe three steps maximum. His thoughts begin to wander, thoughts from childhood, thoughts of home….and he remembers.
Questions come fast and furious; questions to himself How, why did I end up in this terrifying place? He thinks… it was all in fun; just having a “good time”. Where is this God I have heard about all my life? How could He allow this to happen to me? How could He allow the evil I witness in this place?
The days, weeks, months, and the years seem to slip by at an agonizingly slow pace. The questions persist in his mind…until one lonely night in that dark, dreary cell, the prisoner finally addresses a question to this God he had heard of all his life. He asks, “God, if you are real like momma said you are, please give me a better life; if this is all I have to look forward to, please do not let me wake up in the morning”.
The prisoner paces his cell, back and forth, back and forth… two, maybe three steps maximum. His thoughts begin to wander, “Why do I continue to wake up each morning”? He begins to ponder this “God thing”, and he thinks, “this God is not real for I continue to wake up in the mornings, or maybe He continues to allow me to wake up each morning because something better awaits.”
The Executive Director paces his office, back and forth, back and forth, ten, maybe twelve steps minimum. His thoughts begin to wander, thoughts of his days in prison, thoughts of God and he remembers…. questions come fast and furious, questions to himself, “how did I end up in this wonderful place?” “I asked God to kill me and He gave me life instead?” “Where is this God momma said exists?” He is in my heart. God is in the beautiful sky, in the flowers… God was in that cell where the lonely prisoner paced.