Tricia!
When I would let my mind go to all the possibilities--
Tricia!
--I was absolutely terrified of where
a 15-year-old girl could be.
Tricia!
My youngest sister was missing.
She had been lured out of my parents'
house in the early morning.
Exactly how, we still don't know.
We'll probably never know.
They arrested the man who did it.
The investigators--the police--found some of her
remains buried 19 feet deep.
The trial was, by all means, the worst part
of the entire situation.
I was left with all of these horrific images,
reliving the nightmare.
During that time, my father was also struggling with cancer.
He passed away not knowing where she was.
Several years after, my mom passed away as well.
I was in my mid-30s, and I felt like an orphan.
And I felt so betrayed.
I felt that God withdrew, that God let it happen.
It was about that time that I gave up
trying to control my drug use.
It was too much.
It was time to get some deeper help.
I had been sober for well over a year
and had been through all 12 steps
to the best of my ability.
But I was still struggling.
I couldn't understand why, if I had gone through these steps,
why was I feeling like this.
I sat down and just started reading
what each of the 12 steps were, because I knew that there
had to have been some place that I didn't do everything
I could do.
And I got to step 6, and I couldn't recall truly
asking God to remove my character defects.
I decided I was going to do it.
And I didn't know what I was expecting to happen.
So I just thought to myself, "If He was here
in front of me right now, what would I want Him to say?"
And I thought, "Well, I'd want Him to just take it and say,
'Thanks, I got this.'" Instead, at that moment,
I heard a question.
And it--and it was, "Will you let me take this?"
I realized that I had done all of this work
to be relieved of this misery.
And that question--"Will you let me take this?"--completely
changed the trajectory of my recovery and my life.
I had a good friend recently tell
me of an African proverb that says,
"If there's no demon within, the demon
outside can do us no harm."
And that's where I live.
I've conquered those interior demons.
Nothing on the outside matters.