A New Heart

As long as I can remember, I have battled with many health complications, so I went from doctor to doctor to find a quick fix. When one doctor diagnosed me with fibromyalgia, pain medication became a part of my life and soon became an addiction. This addiction was a way of numbing the pain I had been hanging on to all my life.

After years of this lifestyle, I woke up one morning in the hospital because of a drug overdose. I was numb. My world was dark, and I felt alone and lost. This was not the way I wanted my life to go.

My adult son told me I needed help, and I started to listen. I was lucky to find an amazing therapist who was familiar with the Addiction Recovery Program. She said I should try it out because if I didn’t get help for my addictions, I was going to die.

I walked into my first meeting feeling numb and lost, thinking nothing was going to help. However, I decided to keep going and began working through the principles taught in the program. I soon learned the importance of what I needed to know right in step one: I, myself, am powerless without God. I could not do this on my own, and no doctor could fix the emotional pain I was dealing with.

With each step, I began a life-changing process. I stopped relying on the arm of man and began to rely on my Savior Jesus Christ, the only physician who could heal me. I turned my will and my life over to the care of God and His Son. I began to understand the Lord’s invitation, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

As I continued in the program, I could feel myself change. The dark cloud in my soul lifted, and I began to see things more clearly. The principles in step six teach, “Through the prophet Ezekiel, the Lord declared, ‘A new heart … will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh’” (Ezekiel 36:26). I cried when I read those words, so excited to feel again. I felt the Spirit strongly testify to me that Christ and His Atonement are real, and that He had already suffered for me so that I wouldn’t have to. My stony heart began to beat a new beat that day.

I am now almost two years clean from my addictions, active in my ward, and serving in a calling. I am a wife and a mother of five beautiful children, two of whom are serving full-time missions. I am changed physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and I finally have that peace I have been searching for as I have learned to forgive myself and others. I thank my loving Heavenly Father daily for the life he has given me.