Breaking the Chains: How Recovery Led Me to the One Who Sets Us Free

When I walked into my first Al-Anon meeting with my sister in Golden, Colorado, in 1995, I did not walk in looking for Jesus.

I wasn't even looking for God.

I walked in hurting.

What kept me coming back was something much more immediate: the people.

They were talking about things I thought nobody talked about.

They were sharing openly about what had happened to them growing up around alcoholism and dysfunction. They talked about fear, neglect, abuse, control, shame, anger, abandonment, and the strange ways those experiences continued affecting them long after childhood was over.

Then I heard people describe something that astonished me.

They had grown up, left their families—and somehow married or formed relationships with people who recreated many of the same dynamics they had grown up with.

I knew something about that.

But I wasn't talking about it.

I was hiding so many things that were tormenting me on the inside.

I thought I was alone.

I thought everyone else knew how to live and I was somehow DOING IT ALL WRONG.

And then I walked into a room where people started telling the truth.

There Was Something Holy About Telling the Truth

Looking back now as a Christ follower and believer, I recognize something biblical was happening in those rooms long before I recognized the Bible behind it.

People were confessing.

They were bringing things out of darkness and into the light.

They were telling other human beings what had happened to them, what they had done, what they were afraid of, where they had failed, and what they were discovering about themselves.

And other people listened.

They didn't run away.

They didn't gasp.

They didn't condemn them.

They said, in one form or another:

Me too.

I wasn't alone.

There were other people who had been frightened, neglected, abused, controlled, abandoned, shamed and emotionally crippled in many of the same ways I had been.

And some of them were getting better.

They had peace I didn't have.

They had freedom I didn't have.

They had relationships I wanted.

They had something else, too:

A Power greater than themselves.

James 5:16 says:

"Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed."

I didn't know that Scripture then.

But I was experiencing something remarkably similar.

Confession. Fellowship. Prayer. Healing.

God was already getting my attention.

I Could See Something in the People Who Surrendered

Many of the people in those meetings were Christ followers and believers.

Others, like me, wanted absolutely nothing to do with God.

Some of us came from families where religion had been present but Jesus seemed absent.

Some had experienced rigid religiosity rather than grace.

Some had suffered terrible church hurt.

Some had even experienced abuse at the hands of people who claimed to represent God.

And when human beings who claimed God's name caused pain, something tragic could happen:

God got blamed for what people had done.

And, from the Christian perspective I have today, I can see another possibility I couldn't see then.

God was getting blamed for destruction He didn't create.

I had no framework for understanding spiritual warfare. I didn't understand the biblical description of Satan as liar, deceiver, accuser and destroyer.

So God became someone to fear, resent, reject—or simply ignore.

Yet there I was in Al-Anon, being drawn toward people whose lives were changing because they had admitted something fundamental:

I cannot do this alone.

They worked the Twelve Steps.

They asked for help.

They surrendered.

They made amends.

They served other people.

They stopped trying to control everyone around them.

And there was something incredibly attractive about them.

They weren't perfect.

They were free in a way I wasn't.

God Was in Those Rooms Before I Knew His Name

Looking back, I believe God was in that first meeting.

I believe Jesus was there.

I believe the Holy Spirit was working through people whose kindness, honesty, vulnerability and wisdom kept drawing me back.

I just didn't know it yet.

So much happened in my life after walking into that little Al-Anon meeting in 1995.

Miracles happened.

Relationships changed.

I changed.

I learned to surrender.

I learned to inventory my behavior.

I learned to admit when I was wrong.

I learned to make amends.

I learned that secrets become less powerful when we bring them into the light.

I learned that helping another suffering person could somehow help heal me.

I learned that I desperately needed a Power greater than myself.

And for a long time, the God of my understanding was enough to move me forward.

I am profoundly grateful for that.

But eventually I discovered something that changed everything:

God was greater than my understanding of Him.

What If "The God of My Understanding" Is the Door, Not the Destination?

The openness of Twelve Step recovery gave someone like me room to approach God.

That mattered.

If someone had demanded in 1995 that I understand Christ before I could receive help, I might have walked straight back out the door.

Instead, recovery essentially said:

Start where you are.

Believe that perhaps there is something greater than you.

Become willing.

Ask for help.

For someone as resistant to God as I was, that was an enormous beginning.

But I now believe there can also be a danger.

The Higher Power of our understanding can become the end of the search instead of the beginning.

My understanding is limited.

It is shaped by my childhood.

My wounds.

My fears.

My culture.

My experiences.

My resentments.

My intellect.

And, according to Scripture, I also live in a world where deception is real.

Eventually I had to become willing to ask a completely different question.

Not:

"Who do I understand God to be?"

But:

"God, who are YOU?"

That question changed my life.

I Had to Go Back to the Beginning

After I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ in August 2025, I began seeing Scripture differently.

And eventually I had to go all the way back to Genesis.

God.

Creation.

Man.

Woman.

The serpent.

The lie.

The choice.

The hiding.

The shame.

And God coming after His children.

That pattern suddenly looked incredibly familiar to me.

The serpent's strategy in Genesis wasn't to drag Adam and Eve kicking and screaming away from God.

It was subtler.

Did God really say...?

A question.

A distortion.

A lie.

A suggestion that God might be withholding something good.

Then came disobedience.

Then shame.

Then hiding.

Then blame.

And thousands of years later, human beings are still hiding.

We hide our addictions.

We hide our childhood wounds.

We hide our rage.

We hide our fear.

We hide our shame.

We hide our secrets.

We hide behind perfectionism, achievement, control, alcohol, drugs, relationships, food, work, sex, religion, money—or whatever else helps us avoid the pain inside.

And still God calls to us.

Where are you?

Genesis says the LORD God came walking in the garden and called for Adam after Adam and Eve hid themselves.

As a Christian, I now understand the whole Bible as pointing toward Christ, and I believe the God who pursued humanity after the Fall is the same God ultimately revealed to us through Jesus.

God did not abandon humanity in its shame.

He came looking.

The Blast Radius of Addiction

Few things have shown me the destructive power of sin and dysfunction more vividly than addiction and alcoholism.

The person drinking or using isn't the only person affected.

There is a blast radius.

Spouses.

Children.

Parents.

Siblings.

Friends.

Employees.

Employers.

Grandchildren.

And then those wounded children grow up.

They marry.

They become parents.

They become employers and employees.

They enter churches and friendships and communities carrying wounds they may not even recognize.

And another generation begins.

The waves of dysfunction keep moving outward until something interrupts them.

That is why Twelve Step recovery can be so extraordinarily powerful.

It interrupts the pattern.

It tells the truth.

It exposes the lie.

It teaches responsibility.

It asks us to repair what we have damaged.

It teaches us to surrender control.

It gives suffering people a fellowship where they discover:

You are not alone.

The Four Horsemen

The AA Big Book gives a haunting description of where alcoholism can take a human being, naming four companions:

"Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration, Despair."

Those words have always struck me.

Because they describe more than drinking.

They describe torment.

And they describe what I have seen ripple through entire families affected by addiction and dysfunction.

Terror.

Bewilderment.

Frustration.

Despair.

From my Christian perspective today, those are not the fruits of God.

Jesus tells us that the thief comes to steal, kill and destroy, while He came that we might have life.

That contrast has become impossible for me to ignore.

Destruction versus life.

Bondage versus freedom.

Lies versus truth.

Hiding versus confession.

Shame versus grace.

Death versus resurrection.

I couldn't see that battle clearly when I entered recovery.

I can see it now.

Christianity Was Closer to Recovery Than I Realized

There is an important piece of AA history that I never understood when I first entered recovery.

Early AA did not develop in a spiritual vacuum. Its founders were influenced by the Oxford Group and Christian spiritual practices involving surrender, confession, restitution, prayer, honesty and service.

Dr. Bob identified three portions of Scripture as especially important to early members: the Book of James, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, and 1 Corinthians 13.

Think about that.

James tells believers to confess to one another and pray for one another so that they may be healed.

The Sermon on the Mount teaches humility, forgiveness, reconciliation, mercy, purity of heart and dependence upon God.

First Corinthians 13 teaches us what love actually looks like.

I had encountered echoes of these principles for decades through recovery before I understood their biblical roots.

That realization doesn't make me want to throw away the Twelve Steps.

It makes me treasure them even more.

But it also makes me want to ask:

What happens when we follow those principles all the way back to their Source?

For me, they eventually led to Jesus.

Recovery Taught Me How to Surrender. Jesus Taught Me Who I Was Surrendering To.

I made it a very long way with the God of my understanding.

Thank God I did.

I believe Jesus met me exactly where I was—even when I didn't know it was Him.

Every honest inventory.

Every amends.

Every confession.

Every desperate prayer.

Every meeting.

Every time I admitted I was powerless.

Every time I stopped controlling and surrendered.

Every person who loved me when I couldn't love myself.

Every little step toward the light.

Looking backward, I can see Him.

I was walking toward Jesus without knowing that Jesus was also coming after me.

But something changed when I finally knew His name and surrendered my life to Him.

Recovery gave me tools for living.

Jesus gave me my Savior.

Recovery helped me recognize my bondage.

Jesus showed me the One who sets captives free.

Recovery taught me that I needed a Higher Power.

Jesus showed me that the Power greater than myself wasn't an idea I needed to construct.

He was a Person who already loved me.

He restores.

He redeems.

He forgives.

He heals.

He exposes lies.

He gives purpose to suffering.

He breaks chains.

And He defeated the thing every human being ultimately remains powerless over:

death.

Maybe the Door Knob Was Never Supposed to Be the Destination

People sometimes joke in recovery that your Higher Power can begin as a door knob, a tree, a cloud, the group—or simply something greater than yourself.

I understand why.

Sometimes a wounded person needs permission simply to crack the door open.

I certainly did.

But what if Jesus is standing on the other side of that door?

What if the point isn't to ridicule the door knob?

What if the point is to keep seeking?

What if the tree makes you wonder about its Creator?

What if the cloud makes you look toward heaven?

What if the love you experience in a meeting makes you wonder where that kind of love comes from?

What if your Higher Power is patiently inviting you to ask:

Who are You?

I will never condemn the path that helped keep me alive long enough to find Jesus.

I am grateful for every meeting.

Every sponsor.

Every fellow traveler.

Every Step.

Every hard truth.

Every surrender.

Every person who confessed something that gave me courage to tell the truth about myself.

Every person whose recovery showed me that another way of living was possible.

Every single step mattered.

But today I believe those steps were taking me somewhere.

They were teaching me how to surrender before I knew Who I was surrendering to.

And this is why my heart is so deeply drawn toward people in recovery.

I don't want to take recovery away from anyone.

I want to stand beside the person who has begun believing in a Power greater than themselves and gently ask:

Would you be willing to keep looking?

Because maybe the Higher Power of your understanding is not the end of your spiritual journey.

Maybe it is where Jesus has graciously allowed the journey to begin.

It certainly was for me.