After seeing what addiction did to her family and then battling addiction issues of her own, Lacy Fawley finally found freedom at a church offering a Celebrate Recovery program.
“I had heard about Celebrate Recovery and then one day I was at an Easter Sunday service. I had brought a girl with me, and she was medicated, and that’s when it hit me,” Fawley said. “Not everybody gets to go home to a place of Jesus and stability, and that was me growing up. I wanted that when I was growing up, but I’d go home to a mom that was passed out or a dad that was in drunken rampage.
“Celebrate Recovery is a safe place where people can come and share their hurts, habits or hangups by working through the eight recovery principles found in the Bible’s Beatitudes. So after I learned about it I went to my pastor’s wife and said this is what God is calling me to do.”
Fawley is a member of the Common Ground Community Church that in late August started holding Celebrate Recovery meetings every Friday at its 7406 Mad River Road, Hillsboro, location. There is a meal at 6:30 p.m. then the program starts at 7 p.m. It’s free and open to anyone that wants to take part.
Lacy Fawley and her husband Matt are the ministry leaders. Patty Middleton, the pastor’s wife, is the encouraging coach, and Clinton Becker, Dottie Parsons and Carole Baker also help.
So far they haven’t had much of turnout, and they’re not a full-fledged Celebrate Recovery location just yet, but they’re working on it. Lacy Fawley hopes publicity and testimony she will give at Saturday evening’s Take Back Our County Hope For Highland 5K Glow Run in uptown Hillsboro will help.
She said it usually takes about a year of studying material, working through a leadership guide, and attending other rewquired Celebrate Recovery meetings before a beginning program takes off.
Growing up, Fawley said her late parents were loving people who did their best to raise a family. But she said her mother was addicted to medicine, her father was alcoholic and she had another family member that fought addiction problems. Then as she became older her mother got sick to the point that someone had to administer her medicine. Because she was the only one around, the job fell to Fawley.
“Hospice put me in charge of the medicine. I started taking an anxiety pill when I’d take mom to chemo treatments once a week and that’s how I got started,” Fawley said. “It can take hold of anybody. For so long we’ve hid people with addiction from society, but I want people to know there’s freedom from addiction in Christ Jesus. He loves every one of us. He wants to break the chains of addiction.”
Fawley said she was addicted for two to three years. She said she went to AA meetings for a while, then to an inpatient program, and it was there that she saw people that had committed felonies, lost their families, and really messed up lives, had found happiness again.
“That touched me. I didn’t understand how they were happy again,” Fawley said. “Then I realized how God had got into their lives.”
Once Common Ground Church becomes a full-fledged Celebrate Recovery member, Fawley said it will be able to accept people who have been court-ordered into a recovery program.
Celebrate Recovery is a nationwide program. It’s website says it is a Christ-centered program with foundations firmly established in Biblical truth. Its 12 steps with accompanying Scriptures and eight principles based on the Beatitudes offer participants a clear path of salvation and discipleship; bringing hope, freedom, sobriety, healing, and the opportunity to give back one day at a time, the website says.
“We are like a Jesus AA,” Fawley said.
For more information call 937-402-7693.
Reach Jeff Gilliland at 937-402-2522 or on Twitter @13gillilandj.
