Chapter 3: The Woman whoe Loved me Back to Jesus

Chapter 3

Jill

a.k.a

“The woman who loved me back to Jesus”

    I’ve heard it said that one should be able to look back at their life and it read like an amazing novel with twist and turns that could have happened a million different ways.  This is no different.  I had moved to Pennsylvania because my brother lived there with his new-ish wife and it seemed a better option than living with my parents.  So I met Jill at my first meeting out of rehab in northern Bucks County and without that first, quite simple, acquaintanceship my purpose for life and god and living would not have found me the way it did.  A million things had to happen exactly the way it did in order for that moment to happen.  

Jill was my first sponsor in the 12-step program I participate in. She is not a likely woman to end up as a close friend to a girl like me. 14 years my senior, married, a career and a child… when I met her I was unemployed, unable to drive due to a suspended license, single and crazy.  But there it is.  She became my sponsor and stayed that way for only a few months.  “Breaking up” with her as my sponsor was probably the best idea I ever had.  It allowed a friendship to grow that she and I both needed.  

    She was never the kind of woman who would push her faith on someone—it isn’t her way but she is a churchgoer.  Jill is incredibly talented at loving people (or at least loving me) exactly where they stand and never seems to judge.  That love is incredibly attractive and I often wondered where she got it from- I am not the easiest person to love.  Regardless, not having a license myself gave us a chance to get to know each other better.  Jill routinely picked me up every Friday for our meeting and we’d talk all the way there and all the way back.  It was what we did.  Those conversations are really what allowed us to become so close.  We talked about my current boys and insanity and she talked about her husband and raising her kid.  We were in two very different parts of our personal journey and yet we both lived vicariously in the other person’s shoes.  

    The friendship was kind and soft and gentle.  It never swayed from that.  It was consistent.  While other women and friendships and relationships and boys were coming in and out of my life like hurricanes in the ocean, Jill was the island.  She was the safe space that never moved.  Occasionally tides might change her a bit… but she was always the same consistent island in the storms of my early recovery.  This was pivotal.  Without that place of safety I realize now that I could not have held on to my sobriety like I did.  

The relationship was different for me because I never needed Jill.  This lack of a need meant that the serious codependency issues that I was still fighting never really entered the relationship to any significant level.  We could go weeks without speaking and we’d meet up again and it would be as if I’d never left.  She gave me the freedom to be myself and just liked me the way I was.  There was no whirlwind of emotional connection, instead it was full of gentle transitions.  She is the woman I trust most, who’s opinion I hold most dear and she is the woman, when things go bad, that I call first.  It has been that way from my earliest days clean until now.  An inconsistent consistency has always been the best part of this relationship.

The love that Jill had and embraced me with was something that I wanted.  I was attracted to it. I had never had it before and despite her inclination to fight depression or frustration with child rearing she always had an underlying love.  Despite her fears of change, occasional fights with her husband and a past that could still sometimes haunt her that love was always present. I wanted it. I didn’t understand where it came from but I knew that whatever she had was something good and true and I enjoyed every bit of it.

Understand that Jill knew me more than anybody at that point.  She didn’t know all my secrets or even my past but she did know me and she knew what drove me.  She knew where I was in my step work and she knew where and what I wanted to be someday.  Sometime around a year and a half clean I started a third step.  A third step states that “we turned our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him” and this was something I struggled with.

I grew up the daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher.  Religion, is and was, the very back bone of my childhood.  God was a very black and white being. If you believed that Jesus was your lord and savior then you could be forgiven and you could go to heaven.  If you didn’t believe in Jesus then you would go to hell.  Period.  In a third step I realized that I didn’t believe this anymore but, despite the fact that I didn’t believe it, I still had a very hard time letting this concept go.  I was raised with it and it was ingrained in my psyche from the time I was a small child.  But, the thing was, is, that I didn’t want to believe it anymore.  I didn’t want a God that was so small… but regardless of where my addiction had taken me I still really loved Jesus.  

I just couldn’t believe that some of the friends who saved me time and time and time again since being clean could go to hell just because they didn’t pray to Jesus.  It didn’t make sense to me. So there I was in a third step trying to find the God I knew and loved and rationalize my faith in this Jesus I adored with the literal readings of scripture from my past.  And there was Jill.  Jill was a woman who had been to the depths of addiction just like me and as different as we were the similarities were striking.  After all, we went to the same rehab (though owned by different companies) 14 years apart in Houston Texas—this is just one example of “coincidences”.  

One day, after a rough patch in life, Jill picked me up from work and took me to the park and we just enjoyed the day together.  We were very close on an emotional level and Jill asked me if she could share her testimony with me that she had written for a Christian 12-step group she and a few people at her church were starting up.  I obliged and sitting there listening to this woman pour out her heart, her wrongs, her pain and her anguish all at the feet of Jesus was something I hadn’t experienced in years.  I didn’t just feel Jesus’ presence in that moment—I knew the presence.  I hadn’t experienced it years and years and my walls and my heart and all the questions about God and how He or She really was all just evaporated.  They didn’t matter.  God was there, Jesus was there, and Jill and I were there.  It was all so very real.

It was the moment that I realized that regardless of the rules and regulations on Heaven and Hell that I very much loved Jesus.  I loved the idea that my God was the knight in shining armor I had always dreamed of.  I loved the fact that this particular concept of God had brought my friend and I together and on such an emotionally intimate level.  Whatever way this God sorted out the afterlife was Her business… I was content with the moment I had and the love and joy I felt for the first time in so very long.  In that one pivotal moment Jill had loved me back into the warm embrace of Jesus that I had so desperately longed for.  The concept and understanding of Jesus was very different than that of my childhood but regardless that moment gave me purpose for the rest of my life. The concept and understanding of Jesus would change again in the future, but for that point and purpose in my life, it was what I needed.

Within a few months of that pivotal moment I began really exploring who God was in my life.  I started talking with God and God with me and it was in those earliest days that I remember my faith being pure and genuine.  If God said go… I went.  It was then, when I still wasn’t exactly sure what I believed, that I realized God was calling me to Thailand.  It’s a funny thing knowing that the God of the universe is calling you to be of service to another country around the world when you have no idea what you believe about that God except that he’s pretty rad and he likes you and you like him back.  But there it was.  I trusted the pull and the power and Jill sat back and watched it happen—often thinking I was crazy but enjoying the show regardless.

A lot of people thought my conversations and directions from God were crazy.  Only two people seemed to understand or (at least) hide their real thoughts: my mother and Jill.  They just let me find my way… and find my way I did.  Jill was there so many times when I was going through broken and breaking relationships, through moving to school (and further from her) and finally getting my license and she was there through money problems, physical problems and family problems.  Even though she was often physically far from me at this point in my life she was always close by.  When all else had failed Jill was ever present.

I spent holidays with Jill.  One Thanksgiving and a Christmas.  Her daughter was my favorite kid and her husband never ceased to get on my nerves and point me in the right direction.  Their family was often the peace and escape I needed to gain perspective—and whenever I stayed with them we were in Church on Sunday.  Jill, and her family, provided the example I needed to see what God was in very simple terms.  God was all about consistency.  Jill was all about consistency.  I wanted to be all about consistency.  God was also all about gratitude and God was all about the presence and the power and the belief that regardless of our own understanding of doctrine we could worship together.

After a few years I began seriously searching for my own understanding of God.  I was desperately afraid of my parent’s disapproval on my own interpretation of scripture and my own development… but then there was Jill. She loved me and accepted me whether I liked Jesus or was a pagan; I was safe no matter what.  I never feared disappointment from Jill and having that support gave me the freedom to find God exactly as I understood him… even when it didn’t agree with our church’s theology or even when it didn’t agree with my parent’s theology.  And this was pivotal.  I realized that the greatest love I needed was the love in that freedom.

In this freedom I developed an understanding of God that was deeper and more awesome than I thought possible.  I dwelled with the Creator.  I learned Hebrew and Greek and I read scriptures.  I worshipped in Buddhist monasteries, mosques, sweat lodges, various churches and kirtans.  I put aside my fear of my parent’s judgment and relied on the freedom in Jill’s love and acceptance to fully explore the amazingness of God’s love.  I hung out with Jesus, Buddha, Allah and the Divine Mother.  I learned how to pray and meditate and to fully understand obedience.  I found out who I wanted Hannah to be.  I wanted Hannah to be simple and something amazing.  I lost everything for the shit in the bottom of a bag once; I would gladly sacrifice what I had for the sake of something better.  I decided my service was to God first—and if that meant living a life of service to the people around me then that is what I would do.

So I went to Thailand.. and then I went again and then a third time.  I finished college with a degree in religion and found that my God was ever present throughout it.  So was Jill.  In school, I called Jill or went to her house when I couldn’t handle the stress of school anymore.  In Thailand, I called Jill from overseas to get perspective and to find balance.  Perhaps it’s this balance that allowed me to find hope and understanding— regardless of what was going on around me.  I had peace and freedom and love.  Then one day, that peace, freedom, and love weren’t just coming from Jill… they were coming from me.  Whatever Jill had had, she gave to me and now, I had the ability to give them to myself.  For the first time in as long as I can remember I could look in the mirror and just like myself.  I liked me.  I loved me.

This woman who had so tenderly and softly loved me back to Jesus and given me the gift to love myself.  Because she had consistently loved me for so long, I could believe that I was worth loving.  She showed me that I was worth the effort to love.  I felt beautiful on my own for the first time in my entire life.  No one had to tell me, no one had to validate me and I didn’t need some physical imitation of love to corroborate what I already knew was true.  I was free.  Jill gave me this sense of freedom in my own life.  We are still friends and probably always will.  I joke often that Jill is the woman who loved me back to Jesus, but she didn’t just love me back to a God that I could understand… she loved me until I was able to fully love myself.  Gratitude doesn’t begin to express the realities that I am present in today.