Content Disclaimer: This post includes references to trauma and abuse (including sexual abuse and domestic violence), addiction and overdose, and incarceration. Some details are intense and may be difficult for some readers. If you need immediate support, contact local emergency services or a trusted crisis resource in your area.
I wasn’t seeking God when He found me.
I wasn’t praying when He spoke to me.
I wasn’t holy when He loved me.
I wasn’t steady when He stayed.
I was Gomer.
Restless.
Reaching.
Running toward anything that might quiet the ache.
Breaking my own heart in small, familiar ways.
Piecing myself away for the promise of a feeling that never lasted.
My existence was in ignorance of a Love already given.
A kind of love that never shies from my mess.
A love that never wavers, never wanes, never worries.
A love that pays full price for a heart that was never true.
This is not a story about my failures.
This is a story about His faithfulness.
About a God who came after me when I couldn’t find myself.
A God who whispered in the wilderness.
Who rebuilt what I had ruined.
Who renamed what shame had claimed.
This is the story of how God loved me back to life.
How He called me Beloved, before I ever knew how to belong.
The story of Hosea tells of a transformative, transcendent type of love – a love that chooses to stay, a love that knows no end. I first read this story sitting in a jail cell, feeling anything but loved. I had only ever viewed God through a lens of fear and shame – but in this Old Testament story, I came to find the God who had been coming after me, time and time again.
My life up to that point had been spent chasing things that could never love me back, drifting into places of promised escape that would never dull my pain. As I looked back, I began to see with clarity, to see the evidence of God moving in my life. I was overcome by the beauty of this perfect love – steady, patient, and pursuing me to the ends of the earth, knowing me better than I know myself.
This is the story of how God held my hand through the midst of my shadows and led me to trust Him.
I never planned to run away from God, but the foundation of my life was shaken before I ever saw it coming. I had a beautiful family – parents who loved each other very much and did everything they could to provide their children with the life they never had. But that’s the thing with good intentions – they mean well, but are blind to the thief in the night, the evil lying in wait. My stepgrandfather was just that – a prowling lion looking for someone to devour. He placed a twistedness in my innocent mind that changed how I viewed the world, how I perceived myself, how I understood sex, how I trusted family – he tainted everything. Secrets became a way of life for me – I learned that truth could expose the shame I felt, so I became a master of deception. Telling the truth felt like showing the trembling inside of me, inviting judgment, waiting for someone to see the wrongness I knew lived in me. So, I learned to keep everything locked inside because silence was safer – but silence breeds uncertainty. These early wounds taught me that I had to protect myself, find my own escape routes, and trust no one.
As I got older, those wounds remained a constant reminder of my worthlessness – a source of chronic pain that I couldn’t cope with. This led me to go in search of anything that could give me respite from the voice in my head. Pain had taught me that feeling nothing was easier than feeling everything. I didn’t realize it then, but shame was teaching me how to run. I grew up with a belief that something in me was already wrong, already stained – and that dread became my companion. Like Gomer, I slipped further away, thinking freedom was found in anything other than God.
As a kid, I had constant night terrors – waking up shaking, convinced Jesus had returned and I had been left behind. That fear followed me into adulthood like a shadow that never quite let go. I truly believed I had already been judged by God, sentenced before I even spoke a word. In my mind, I was irredeemable. I spent years living at the edges of myself, in the recesses where light couldn’t reach. I felt watched, examined, scrutinized – as if every thought was being tallied against me. I felt trapped inside the weight of His disappointment. The only relief I could imagine was escape – from myself, from my memories, from the God I thought was set to punish me. So I ran. I ran toward anything that could numb me, quiet me, erase me. Alcohol became my coping mechanism, my confidant. Oblivion became the only place that offered peace, and I chased it with purpose.
At twenty-six, I divorced my husband – a man as broken as I was, someone I never should have yoked my life to. We weren’t partners; we were just two drowning people clinging to each other. When it ended, I felt a strange kind of relief. Like maybe I had been given a new beginning. I felt lighter, even hopeful – as if God had quietly given me a second chance to start over. But almost as soon as that hope appeared, it felt like something sensed it – and moved in. A storm I didn’t see coming, a darkness I didn’t create this time, began to gather around me. And everything I thought I had escaped was just about to begin again in a new, deeper way.
After my divorce I found myself right back in a relationship, a relationship I had left behind in college. I had deluded myself into believing that God had sent him back to me as recompense for the disappointment my marriage had become. But looking back, I see now he slipped into my life like a serpent in the garden – whispering promises of peace, while carrying a venom that sought to destroy me. Just like any deceiver, he came as a savior – someone I learned to need, someone I grew to depend on – until one day you wake up and find yourself somewhere you never meant to be. By the time I understood what he truly was, I was already trapped, isolated, replaying every warning I had brushed aside. I’ll never forget the first night he hit me. We had been arguing in the car one evening, and when we pulled up to the house, he opened my door – not with chivalry, but with cruelty in his eyes. He jerked me from the seat by my hair, dragged me across the yard to the porch, and there, with one blow, shattered every illusion I had in one fell swoop. In that instant, I knew something had died. I told myself I should walk away, grieve this loss, and never look back. But stubbornness and pride are powerful chains. I convinced myself it was a moment of weakness, a mistake, something we could mend. And the next day, I surrendered what felt like only a small part of me when I chose to stay – when I excused what had no excuse. I didn’t realize that single compromise was the beginning of a descent far steeper than I could imagine, the first slip on what would become a very slippery slope – a freefall into a kind of hell I thought only existed in other people’s stories.
He carried hatred like a birthright, his violence methodical, deliberate in his determination to keep me trembling in fear. I lived in a constant state of dread, just waiting for each moment to erupt into a scene of brutality. I remember nights I was beaten until bones cracked, head split, blood soaked, body seizing – always ending with him staring down at me, eyes as black as the night. He’d fly into rages, everything becoming life or death – driven to the top of a mountain to watch him dig a grave for me or held by knife-point while he forced motor oil down my throat – always with threats of my murder, followed by his suicide. His evil perpetuated without end, until one day it did. He spent hours trying to break me, relentless in his attack – until my face was unrecognizable. Afterwards he fled, only to be arrested shortly after. I don’t know if I would have ever gotten out if it hadn’t ended that way. Terror had trained me to stay, obey, to believe that leaving meant certain death. I was so far from anyone who loved me, so stripped of identity and worth, that I believed he was the only person left who would claim me – even if claiming me meant destroying me.
During that time, my addiction tightened around me like a noose. I lived for the numbness, for the split seconds when reality flickered out. I had become a stranger to myself, floating through desolate rooms, abandoned houses, and filthy streets, surrounded by people who seemed just as hollow as I felt. One night, surrounded by strangers and chaos, I found a drug I didn’t recognize and without a moment’s pause I flooded my veins with death. Fentanyl. Like a flame, I was snuffed out – no struggle, no sound, no panic – just an absence of light. Then came tunnel vision, ringing in my ears, and questions I couldn’t answer – only to wake up and be told I had been left to die. I should have been terrified, but instead the edge of death felt familiar – almost like returning to a place I already knew. After you face death that closely, it stops being the thing you fear. It becomes a doorway, a way out. And so began my dance with death.
When I finally broke free from my abusive nightmare and stepped out on my own, I convinced myself I was free – but there is no freedom in futility. I was wayward – drifting like Gomer from place to place, searching for my food and drink, my wool and linen, desperate for anything that could quiet the roaring ache inside me. One after the other, I traded pieces of myself for men, drugs, and each depraved situation I allowed myself to be a part of. I was shameless in my pursuit of reprieve – a perpetually hopeless endeavor. I thought I was choosing freedom, but I was only feeding the hollow places, like a yawning black hole consuming everything and offering nothing in return.
I didn’t realize God had been hedging me in with thorns – guiding my aimless way, keeping certain paths blocked, certain doors sealed, certain plans ruined. Even in my excess – even when I dismissed His presence only to chase phantoms – He was faithful, already building the road that would bring me home. But I didn’t see any of that. All I saw was another booking photo and another cold cell.
After years of living like a ghost, I found myself in county again – not for the first time, but this time the revolving door stopped. I was forced to sit still, forced to sober up, forced to see myself clearly. It was an empty feeling: abandoned, hopeless, naked. I had always been able to see the light around me – the sun through barred windows, the humanity of the women next to me – but I could never see that same light within myself. I carried this dread that I was already condemned, that God had long ago charged, tried, and convicted me, and nothing in me was redeemable.
So I accepted my concrete surroundings, the brick walls, the metal bed. I told myself I would endure it and move on. But God was already moving, already whispering.
One day, women from a local church came to pray with anyone who wanted it. I had no interest in facing God. I was still choking on the shame of the overdose I had never emotionally survived. I was sitting in a cell, literally in the middle of getting a tattoo – a spider web on one side, with a brick wall sketched on the other to begin next. While the women prayed with people one by one through the main door, I passed on the offer every time.
Eventually I was persuaded to talk for just a moment, the last one left. So I walked up to the door, cracked barely enough to slip out my hand, and offered only my name. I only hoped they would finish quickly – I needed to get back to the tattoo I was hiding behind my back.
Then one of the women began to cry.
With her eyes closed, she said, “Megan… I see you trying to get through a brick wall… wait, no – through cobwebs…”
My heart stopped.
How could she possibly know what I was having tattooed on my arm at that exact moment?
She continued, voice trembling –
“I see you coming out of the dirt. God is unburying you. He wants me to tell you He is not finished with you yet.”
In that moment, something inside me cracked. I knew God was speaking about my overdose – about the night I should have died but didn’t. Everyone else had left me there. But not Him. He remained. He watched. He shielded. He saved me when I had been trying to disappear. He kindled in me a flame of hope.
From that day on, I devoured the Bible. I read with new eyes. I realized maybe God wasn’t this terrifying judge keeping a tally of my failures. I learned instead that God is love – and nothing bad can come from love. In that cell, in my wilderness, He was speaking tenderly to me just as Hosea 2:14 promised, calling me back softly, without punishment, without hidden motives, without manipulation. Just love. Unfailing, undeserved love.
I realized I wasn’t being punished. I was being redeemed.
I felt a light begin to flicker inside me – small at first, then steady. I did Bible studies with women in the pod every day. For months I poured over everything I could get my hands on. And that’s when I found Hosea. That story shattered me. I knew what betrayal felt like – that stabbing pain in the chest when the one you love leaves you for another. I knew it intimately. And suddenly, I saw that I had been doing that to God my whole life. Yet He never once left me. He did not grow cold, or distant, or indifferent. He pursued me.
He fenced me in, whispered to me, bought me back with nothing but His love. Hosea bought Gomer from the market when she had sold herself into slavery – and God did the same for me. Even after all my wandering, He chased me all the more.
I fell in love with that love. A love I couldn’t comprehend – one that didn’t withdraw when I failed, one that did not abandon me to my own destruction. I told anyone who would listen, because if they could see what I saw, they would be undone too.
I spent almost two years locked up. Those were the two years I first tasted God’s presence in a way that felt real, steady, and impossibly kind. I reconciled with my family. I believed I was truly made anew.
But freedom is complicated.
When I was released, reality returned harsher than before. I was a felon. I couldn’t even get hired at a grocery store. Every door that closed felt like confirmation that I didn’t belong anywhere. Hopelessness crept back in, and I didn’t know how God could possibly help me overcome the weight of my past.
So I drank. Slowly, then heavily. And three months later, the needle called me back – I returned to the syringe like it was breath. I told myself I could control it, hide it, handle it, but that was just the lie that whispers in the recesses of your mind. Addiction is a cave where the light grows dim slowly at first, then all at once. Before I knew it, I was back in abandoned houses, seedy motels, surrounded by people who had lost the fight long ago.
Whether I absorbed the darkness or the darkness absorbed me, I’ll never know.
But this time was different.
This time I felt the shame.
Because now I understood the love I was running from.
And knowing its depth made running feel devastating.
So I did what I had always done: I hid.
I fed the vein again and again.
I used so much that I could taste death.
I became so reckless that I refused to use alone. I would give resuscitation instructions before every use, because reviving me had become routine. I can’t count how many times I was brought back with Narcan.
And somewhere inside the haze, God began to press through again. Even in overdose, I could sense Him at the edges of my awareness. The first time I heard Him, I had gone under, and when I came back, the memory of Him lingered like a voice under water. Another time, after a near-fatal overdose, I found myself standing in a meadow drenched in sunlight. I couldn’t see Him, but I could hear Him. He told me I didn’t have many more chances after this. I felt the warmth of the sun on skin that shouldn’t have been alive.
Then, as if from above, I saw my own body in the bathroom, collapsed against the mirror, while this ‘other me’ went to sit in another room. When my boyfriend dragged me out, revived me, and shook me awake, asking me where I’d been, he assumed I was confused from the drugs. But I knew better. That was the closest I had ever come to crossing over – to what death really feels like. It should have scared me straight, but it didn’t. I just returned to the rhythm: cop, run out, get money, cop again, feed the vein, rinse, repeat.
There was no room for God in the chaos –
and yet, still He found a way in.
And for the next two years, I yo-yoed between death and survival, living a half-life that barely qualified as living at all. I was a woman scraping at the edges of existence, still running, still hiding, still terrified to face a Love that large – because sometimes hope hurts more than despair.
But even then – especially then – God watched, waited, whispered. He fenced me in with thorns. He kept the road narrow. He slowed the descent. He found me again and again in the ashes of my own ruin – not to scold, but to call me home.
Just like Hosea.
Always like Hosea.
I had gone out in search of my other lovers – drugs to bring relief, sex masked as love, and a void I could exist in without pain. These are lies that I chased with a stubbornness to be rivaled. I had felt alone my entire life – I could not fathom a love that would truly want me back after seeing what I had become.
I had been mistaken in thinking I had already hit my rock bottom, because there is always a new low, waiting to envelop the lost and lonely. As my life began to spiral in new waves of chaos, I hit a wall that stopped me dead in my tracks. An officer, a warrant, a cold metal door slamming shut in my face. I should have seen it coming but my nature of endless escape and avoidance didn’t allow me to see it. But there was no escaping this – a four year sentence. It took months for me to come to terms with my fate, my consequences, and even longer for me to really see it for what it was. A blessing. A chance to live. I talked with God every night as I lay in the dark, in the uncertainty of what was to come. I wasn’t always grateful, I wasn’t always feeling blessed, but I was there, calling out to the Love that had bought me back. I felt redeemed, like I was being saved once again from the mess I had made, but for once I didn’t carry feelings of shame and worthlessness. I spent those years accepting God’s love into my heart, a heart that he had spent a lifetime mending. I spent those years learning to trust Him and give Him power over my life – praying that His will be done where mine had fallen short time after time. In my moments of anxiety, grief, anger and confusion, I found in surrendering that to Him, a sense of unburdening, a sense of relief where I thought none could be found. He was unburying me – taking the weight of all my sadness, my trauma, my sin.
I was in a desert of my own making – a place made so desolate by self-destruction. And even to that hollow place, to the ends of the earth, He followed me. In the midst of so much loss, I felt comforted, I felt revived. He opened my eyes to all of the good there was still to be found around me; I found something to be grateful for everyday. I didn’t succumb to despair, but rather found opportunities that otherwise would have been hidden to me. I was accepted into a small class that would take a year to complete – to become a certified web developer. I enrolled in college to complete my Bachelor’s degree. I found a church that I could call home. Nothing in prison happens quickly, but I didn’t need that – I needed slow and steady. I was given precious time to understand, appreciate and develop knowledge, relationship and community – aspects of a life that had become so foreign to me. He led me to still waters so that I may be restored. I began to build a life that was rooted in meaning and purpose. I found that, despite all that I had done, I was worthy of a good life, a future that was waiting for me.
I was released one year ago, almost to the day, and I have not been in want of His light – it is all around me. I’m surrounded by family, family once lost to me, now reconciled. I have found in church another family, who took me in, no questions asked. I have just completed an internship and am on track to earn my degree in computer science this year. I have clarity of mind, this year marking my first year of sobriety since I was sixteen years old. I now possess a life full of love, something I never thought I could achieve, something I never thought I deserved. But, through His relentless pursuit, I have been blessed beyond measure.
I spent the whole of my life losing myself because I was too afraid to trust, to let dawn break on the perpetual night that had consumed me. Instead I blundered in the darkness as I unconsciously sought relief from His absence. Every attempt was made in vain, my own misguidance inevitably leaving me a mess. My future became nothing short of bleak, pierced with the possibility of unending sadness and disappointment. At the end of my proverbial rope and figurative rock bottom, I had only reflection as my solace – only then was I able to see His infallible plan in place.
In hindsight I can see how Love had interfered along the way, always there, waiting for me to come to my senses. And somehow, without fault or judgement, he never stopped pursuing me. He is my protector, my partner, my perfect sacrifice. How unfathomable it is to truly know that YHWH has so flawlessly laid before all of time our redemption. I can do nothing but remain in infinite awe of Him. It has been only with the help of this Power greater than myself that I have the wisdom and courage to maintain pursuit, because lest I forget, there is always a darker, more sinister force laying in wait to find me at my weakest. But, in His power and unceasing mercy I am made strong and immovable, if only I can trust in Him and allow Love to permeate me. I hope to grow into this ability to be loved – we were never meant to lose this innate pillar of our being. I have yet again come into grace, as we all have this unique opportunity to quest for Him again, finding over and over that from everlasting to everlasting is where we belong; where we can be made whole once more as He so promises. He never ceases to woo us in the quiet and unending deserts of our days without apprehension but an overpouring of His incomprehensible mercy. We must learn to stand in our light as He seeks to uncover it. We all have this light – it’s the piece of Him, His spirit – our soul – intricately and purposefully placed within us. But these unseen forces do nothing but wage endless battles, looking for any foothold in our folly. They fight to overcome the light – they hate it with their very existence and seek to snuff it out. But do not fear, their fervor is fruitless as this war has already been won. Despite all perpetuations by evil, Love has already won – His goodness prevails. We can take comfort in this as we place our faith in our completeness with Him, by Him, where Love has conquered all. For it is His promise, to be with us always, even to the very end of the age.
