I love Jesus, I cuss a little, and I built a business out of my worst year.

I didn't start any of this with a five-year plan, a vision board, or a very inspiring TED Talk moment. I started it with a really bad year and a promise I fully intended to keep.

Two weeks sober and still drowning in shame and self-hatred. And honestly, life-hatred, I sat in a hotel room in my hometown and wrote a goodbye letter to my husband and kids. That's not a metaphor. That's the actual bottom.

If you've ever hit a bottom like that, the kind you don't caption for Instagram, I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because somebody has to go first, and it might as well be someone who's already been where you are.

Grace, it turns out, had other plans. And a great sense of comedic timing. My best friend showed up, refused to take no for an answer, and took me out for frozen yogurt like that was going to fix anything. (It kind of did.) My mentor showed up too, with her daughters, a pizza, and one sentence that rearranged my whole life: "You have too much to offer this world to quit now."

That night I made God a deal: "help me find peace, and I'll spend the rest of my life helping other people find theirs." I wasn't trying to build a brand or business. I was trying to survive a Tuesday and my life. But that promise turned into over a decade of keeping it. One gloriously messy client, one honest podcast episode, one hard conversation at a time.

Here's the part that still makes me laugh: I once seriously considered becoming a priest. Turns out that particular collar wasn't in the cards for me. So instead I became the person people call instead of their priest, at midnight, when they finally admit the thing they've been carrying alone. My uncle, who helped raise me, used to tell me I had "the it factor" long before he died. Some days this whole career feels less like a job and more like carrying his light and the best of him, forward.

I didn't learn how to do any of this in a classroom. I learned it the "hard knocks" way, AKA: sobriety, a marriage I've had to actually work at, kids who keep me honest, and a faith that stopped being about performing and started being about actually showing up. Somewhere in there it turned into a real, multi-six-figure coaching business, which still makes me laugh, because a decade ago I could barely keep a houseplant alive, let alone a business. (Honestly? I still struggle with the houseplants.)

None of it came from a course, a certification, a seminary study of grace, or a guru with a whiteboard. It came from lived experience. If your own healing hasn't come from any of those either, that's not a disqualifier. That's the whole point.

The past doesn't disqualify you. It qualifies you.

Now I host A Holy Mess — a podcast ranked in the top 1% worldwide, which still blows my mind, and I'm so grateful for every single person who hits play. I coach women and men, one-on-one and in groups, through shame, regret, grief, anxiety, and everything in the messy in-between. And I built the Messy Life Transformation Certification around the exact framework I wish someone had handed me in that hotel room, so the next person who feels that same pull doesn't have to figure it out alone.

So if you're the one your friends call at midnight. If you've had some version of that whisper for years — you should be doing something with this — I see you, because I was you. The alternative is staying exactly where you are: capable, exhausted, and still waiting for permission nobody's coming to hand you. God doesn't waste a single ounce of what you've survived. And neither will I.