James C Taylor

A woman addicted to painkillers for nine years said the only reason she ever opened a Bible was because a court-ordered rehab program required "spiritual reading time" as part of the schedule, and she needed to fill out the form either way. She started reading just to check a box. Genesis, then nothing for weeks, then she picked it back up almost by accident during a sleepless night in detox. Somewhere in the Psalms, something shifted. She stopped reading to satisfy the program and started reading because the words about despair sounded exactly like her own mind at 3 AM. By the time she reached the Gospels, she said it felt less like a book and more like someone sitting next to her in the dark. She's been clean for seven years now. Today she volunteers in hospice care, sitting with dying patients who have no one else — the same kind of presence she says she needed most and almost never had. She says God didn't wait for her to get clean first. He met her in detox.