From Basement to Sanctuary: Finding Healing and Transformation Through Surrender

By Holly Christine Hayes and John Ortberg

Sometimes it takes a step. When we find ourselves at our lowest, struggling with addiction and broken lives, sometimes it takes one step, and one moment, to begin a journey to recovery. But how do we take that step when we are trapped in a pit of despair and surrounded by a lie, seemingly unable to change, unable to live, and unable to cry out for help?

From Basement to Sanctuary is a radical story of conversion and transformation that speaks to how God’s strength truly can be made perfect though our weaknesses. Author Holly Christine Hayes spent her teen and young-adult life mired in alcoholism and drug addiction, and she was in the grips of a downward spiral that led to a life of trauma, shame, and eventual homelessness. After an encounter with God in a public bathroom in 2001, her life was forever changed. God miraculously healed her and delivered her from her addiction—but it took years for her to find out who the God was that saved her.

Through the telling of her story, Holly takes us on a journey through the surrender of the recovery meetings that gather in church basements, to the wholeness and healing she found in the sanctuary of the church. All the while, she shares lessons she learned in the basement about who God really is and the miraculous ways he wants to heal our hurts, habits, sins, and setbacks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Sep 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512798883

Holly Christine Hayes

Holly Christine Hayes is an award-winning author, a world-renowned recovery ministry expert, and the founder and CEO of Sanctuary Project, a community of advocates bringing hope and healing to survivors of trafficking, violence, and addiction. After working in worship and recovery ministry for Menlo Church in California and the American Church in Paris, Holly married her husband, Jeff, in 2016; they now reside in Austin, Texas. Holly is a speaker and worship leader in safe houses, churches, conferences, and recovery communities all over the world, and she was recently chosen as a new voice for Women of Faith. For more information about Holly and her ministry, please visit www.HollyChristineHayes.com.

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Copyright © 2017 Holly Christine Hayes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

WestBow Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-9886-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-9887-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-9888-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017912521

WestBow Press rev. date: 02/07/2018

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1   The Basement

Reflection: Surrender

Chapter 2   The Steps Up

Reflection: Hope

Chapter 3   Outside the Church

Reflection: Submission

Chapter 4   The Door

Reflection: Honesty

Chapter 5   The Narthex

Reflection: Repentance

Chapter 6   The Pews

Reflection: Willingness

Chapter 7   The Altar

Reflection: The Cross

Chapter 8   The Inner Room

Reflection: Search My Heart

Chapter 9   Fellowship Hall

Reflection: Forgiveness

Chapter 10   The Confessional

Reflection: Disciplines

Chapter 11   The Choir Loft

Reflection: Worship

Chapter 12    Sanctuary

Reflection: Transformation

Acknowledgments

I owe a great deal of thanks to all my friends and family for their encouragement, prayers, influence, and wisdom that helped create this book, specifically those in my recovery community and my church families at Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California, the American Church in Paris, and Expression Church in Austin, Texas. I especially acknowledge the following people:

Women of Faith staff and voices, for believing in me and in this book. Thank you for honoring me with the platform to share this message of hope and healing.

Monte Fisher, director of Care and Recovery at Menlo Church, for endless talks, encouragement, feedback, and love. No one has believed in this cause—or in me—more than you have. Your name should be on the cover as coauthor.

Tiffany Bundra for saving my life, my soul, and my voice in this project. I love you more than words, my Martha. Also, parakeet teeth.

My dear first pastor, John Ortberg, for your support, encouragement, and incredible gift of words in this book’s foreword. Thank you for believing in this cause and this move of the Holy Spirit. You have forever shaped my faith and future through the wonderful ways you pastored me in my early years in Christ.

My congregation and colleagues at the American Church in Paris. Working and serving with you was a dream come true and filled my soul to the brim. Thank you for the inspiration and for the opportunity to join the great authors who wrote in Paris.

Pastors Karl and Debbie Malouff for reminding me who this book is about and for guiding me with wisdom and strength. We love you guys.

Pastors Ryan and Dana Malouff for caring for my soul in ways I never knew I needed and for inspiring me to make Jesus famous. Dana, your quiet wisdom influenced this work greatly and softened its rough edges. Ryan, your constant passion for God’s kingdom encouraged me to push through and get this out there. We are unbelievably grateful for you guys and the family God has given us in Austin.

The Rev. Odette Lockwood-Stewart for, in one wonderful afternoon of conversation, the clarity I needed to persevere and finish this project.

Jim and Marta Hobbs for your endless support and for giving me a home and family in Paris. I could never have done this without you and your unbelievable generosity.

Linda Lu, Louisa Pillot, Martha Frazier, Anna Sargeant, Beth Seabolt, and Katie Cloos for defining moments of inspiration and reminders about why I wrote this book.

My amazing editor Kelly White. You are a gift from God, and I am so grateful. Readers might never guess I am a high school dropout, based on your eloquent touch in this book.

WestBow Press staffers who worked with such care on this project. Thank you for your support and for giving me a voice.

All those dear friends and acquaintances, our brothers and sisters the world has lost to addiction and alcoholism. And those who still struggle and wait on God to release them from the bondage of addiction. You move me daily to share the strength I have found, and you are the primary inspiration for this book.

Most important, my sweet, amazing husband Jeff, who builds me up, strengthens me, and reminds me how Jesus sees me…every day. I am beyond blessed.

Foreword

There is an old saying in twelve-step communities that people in pastoral professions find very humbling. Twelve-step groups often meet in church basements, and something about the power of the program, the desperation of knowing life-or-death choices are at hand, and being utterly helpless and dependent leads to remarkable transparency and intensity. And it is there that grace is found. It is precisely there that strength is made perfect in weakness. So here’s the saying: You can come downstairs and change, or go upstairs and stay the same.

Holly’s story is a gripping journey of the soul for any reader who’s simply interested in the human condition. Her account of how a heart can be vulnerable, what addiction can do and feel like from the inside, and where both pain and hope can be found is an enormous grip for anyone who wrestles with addiction or loves someone who does. But this is about far more than addiction as commonly understood; it’s about far more than a resource for recovery for a subset of the human race.

Somehow in the discovery of the Twelve Steps, the Way of Jesus was recovered as a source of power for human beings who were overwhelmed by the dynamics of life apart from God. The Twelve Steps were born out of an attempt to recapture Christian discipleship in modern times, through the group originally called A First Century Christian Fellowship.

For my part, I have been dissatisfied with my own—and the church’s—attempts to help make discipleship a concrete and life-transforming option in our time. I started attending open Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and working through the steps on a thorough level. A friend of mine who has been in AA for decades told me, I predict that before too long you will be envious that you are not an alcoholic.

I have come to understand what he meant. AA is an infrastructure of transparency and eagerness for help. It is a community, which by the very dynamics that form it, set up to counter attitudes of entitlement or performance. There we see once again that God’s grace truly is sufficient and his strength really does require weakness to be displayed. This is what Holly’s book is about. It’s a courageous and compelling telling of her story. But she is part of what may be a movement of God in our day—helping to bring the basement upstairs, giving back to the church what was given to the AA community through the church so many decades ago.

I am deeply grateful for this book. I hope it inspires a turning point in your life. May God use it to guide his church into a new season of openness and transparency and power and transformation and love.

—John Ortberg, senior pastor at Menlo Church and

author of All the Places to Go

Introduction

No one sets out to have the kind of life that turns out to be a transformational tale of coming from death to life—from lost to found. But I count myself blessed to have been gifted with a story of God’s faithfulness, His pursuit of each and every one of us, and mostly His incredible power to heal, redeem, and restore. I thank God that He makes all things new. I thank God that He has made me new.

Although this book tells my story, my hope is that it would be much more than that. Because truly this is not my story at all—this is God’s story. Each of us has a story. Were we to have crafted it, it might have been very different. Perhaps more glamorous, ideally less humiliating. Maybe you are in the midst of a heartbreaking story right now and still waiting on your breakthrough chapter. May the words you find here strengthen and encourage each of you as you live out your own story. With great gratitude in my heart, I can finally say that mine, though humiliating at times, brought me to the point of willingness to look to a higher power for help. And only through the leveling of my pride has God been able to use this story for His glory and to show that, through Him, all things are possible.

It is my hope in this book to point to three things: One, the work within us of the incredibly faithful and good love of God. Two, the vast and highly effective recovery movement that is sweeping the world, and what the church can learn from it. And three, the rich depth of life in Christ through His church, and what the recovery movement can glean from that.

My greatest desire is that those in recovery will, through this story, come to see the good and loving God who rescues us from the pit of self-destruction, where so much of our lives was spent trapped. I hope also that those in the church will have their eyes opened to this movement of God, which is saving millions through a biblical twelve-step program—a program of surrender, repentance, desperate obedience, and service that can come only when we truly acknowledge that our lives, our souls, and God’s story are at stake.

Perhaps you have picked up this book because you are currently in the grips of an addiction or struggle you hope to overcome. You may or may not have a current faith or relationship with God, and that’s okay. Throughout this book I will do my best to speak directly to those of you who are still skeptics about faith in God. Maybe you have picked up this book because you are a professing Christian still in the throes of a struggle for which you are seeking healing. I hope to speak to you directly as well and encourage you to see that God is bigger and more powerful than you ever could have imagined. I believe you will find the inspiration you need here to continue striving toward freedom and the tools that have helped me—and millions of others—do so. Or perhaps you are one of my dearly beloved friends in recovery who, like me, have found much healing in the twelve-step recovery program but are desperate to develop a deeper relationship with and understanding of the God who saved you. This book is especially for you! Those of us in recovery have beautiful and powerful stories to share of God’s redemptive power. When we know who we are, how deeply we are loved, and how incredible the God is who saved us, we have an unstoppable message of hope to bring to the world. May you find the strength to spread that hope through the words you read here.

I decided to share this story and message by using the architecture of a church building as metaphor for many reasons. Each chapter shares a piece of my literal journey from the basement rooms of the church to the sanctuary. But more important, each architectural element represents a figurative part of that journey. In college I had the opportunity to play a role in a musical version of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Something about that show and its main character Quasimodo has always stuck with me. His cry of Sanctuary! once he reaches the interior of the cathedral—signaling that he is safe, protected, untouchable, and outside the physical laws of man and nature—moves me. Man’s laws would have had him put to death for his so-called crimes. But this mangled man found his peace and Sanctuary! in that place. Here I share how I came