A Reckoning in the Shadow of Darkness

There's a peculiar kind of darkness that comes with addiction, not the honest darkness of night that promises dawn, but a twilight world where shadows have substance and hope becomes a stranger. Cate Gubanov, a woman of 32 years from the small town of Antlers, Oklahoma, knew this darkness well. She lived in it, breathed it, let it seep into her bones until she could no longer recall the taste of clean air or the feel of sunlight on unmarked skin.

They say every addict's story starts somewhere else, in some other life where choices still stood like open doors instead of slammed shut windows. Cate's tale isn't unique in its beginnings—hard times breeding harder choices, each step down that twilight road seeming inevitable as gravity. Where the needle or the pipe or the pill rides shotgun and never gives up its seat.

They say every addict's story starts somewhere else, in some other life
where choices still stood like open doors instead of slammed shut windows.

But Cate's story takes a turn that some would call miracle and others might name stubborn grace. Eight years back, she did what those still in the darkness swear cannot be done. She climbed out. Not all at once—there's no Hollywood moment here, no sudden burst of light and angelic chorus. Instead, it was a slow crawl, every nerve in her body screaming betrayal, every synapse firing messages of want and need and mustmusthave. But she crawled anyway, one minute stacked on another until they became hours, became days, became weeks.

The thing about climbing out of a pit is you have to do something once you reach the top. Can't just sit there on the edge, legs dangling back toward the darkness. Cate knew this truth in her bones. She'd seen too many fall back, their sobriety measured in weeks or months before the darkness reached up with familiar arms and pulled them home.

So she's building something. Starting small, the way most important things do. A program for women fresh out of jail, their eyes still carrying that institutional flatness, and their minds still dancing with demons. Matthew 18 Ministries, she calls it, a Biblical chapter laced with lessons about grace. One year, her program will ask of them. One year to remember how to live in the world of light.

A program for women fresh out of jail, their eyes still carrying that
institutional flatness, and their minds still dancing with demons.

It isn't pretty work. Most times it's like trying to catch smoke with bare hands. The women come to her carrying more than just addiction—they bring histories written in scars, both seen and unseen. Some nights Cate sits alone in her little office, going over notes that read like horror stories, each page turning over another rock to reveal only God knows what.

She will lose more than she wins, that's just the blunt truth of it. For every woman who makes it through, too many will slip away, back into the twilight world where the drugs wait with open arms. But oh, those wins. When they come, they shine like new pennies in the sun. A woman standing straight-backed at her child's school play. Another celebrating two years clean, tears tracking down her face as she clutches her sobriety chip. These are moments Cate can collect like precious stones, keeping them close for the hard days.

Sometimes God speaks in whispers, they say, but for Cate, His voice cut through the clutter of her heart, through the emptied-out spaces of her soul where the drugs had carved her hollow. It wasn't the voice of childhood Sunday schools with their neat rows of chairs and construction paper crosses. This was the unabashed voice that spoke to Job, the burning bush that stopped Moses dead in his tracks—a voice that breaks things and makes them new.

She wasn't looking for God. That's important to understand. In the bottomed-out world of addiction, you stop looking for anything except the next fix, the next handful of hours when the screaming in your blood might quiet down some. But He found her anyway, the way He tends to find people when they've run out of everywhere else to run.

The miracle wasn't just in the hearing. Any junkie coming down hard might hear voices. The miracle was in the answer that rose up from some deep, unburned place inside her, a "yes" that surprised her more than the voice itself.

Now she walks the corridors of the county jail, her shoes clicking against concrete floors that have seen ten thousand desperate shuffles. The women here exist in a kind of limbo—some will make bail and stumble back to their old lives, some will face the judge and walk free with time served, but others are just marking days until the prison transport arrives like some gray-painted chariot of iron justice.

Her credentials were written in track marks, her theology
learned in the hardest kind of night school imaginable.

Cate didn't plan this ministry, didn't train for it in any seminary. Her credentials were written in track marks, her theology learned in the hardest kind of night school imaginable. But there's a power in that, in being able to look into an addict's eyes and see not just who they are, but who they were before, and more importantly, who they might become.

Some days she sits in the jail's concrete-block meeting room, listening to women tell stories that could be photocopies of her own. The details change—maybe it was meth instead of heroin, maybe it was a boyfriend's needle instead of a party gone wrong—but the core remains the same. These are stories of hunger, of an emptiness so vast it feels like it could swallow the world.

And Cate listens. That's her first ministry, maybe her most important one. She listens with the whole of herself, the way God listened to her when she was face-down in her own personal Nineveh. Then she speaks, not in platitudes or easy answers, but in the harsh poetry of one who's walked the road and found the way back.

For in the end, grace is grace precisely because it makes no sense, because it shows up in county jail meeting rooms and speaks through ex-addicts, because it transforms the most unlikely people in the most unexpected ways. Cate knows this now, knows it bone-deep and cell-sure. She is not just a carrier of this truth—she is the living proof of it.

She listens with the whole of herself, the way God listened
to her when she was face-down in her own personal Nineveh.

And so from these simple jail visits, her vision has blossomed, of a structured program that women coming out of jail can transition into, instead of just being poured back onto the street, to their old lives, their old habits, and hallow dreams. It's a holistic program that nourishes the soul as much as it bolsters the life skills needed to jetison old routines and rebuild.

There is housing under construction that can hold up to four women, a safe space to rebuild. The dream is to have a village of such residences. 

Now, Cate'll tell you straight out that she can't do this work alone. This is no one-person show, this calling of hers. No, she's got a whole congregation at her back, the kind you'd expect to find in a place like Antlers—the sort of church that at first glance seems more like a cowboy bunkhouse than your standard white-steepled, clapboard affair.

Jonathon Hooker, the pastor here, is a cowboy through and through, from the hat on his head right down to the scuffed boots on his feet. He looks like he could have stepped right out of Central Casting, the kind of guy the Marlboro Man himself might have called "partner." He's also Cate's mentor and pledges the full support of the congregation.

Cate's assembled a whole crew of volunteers from the congregation—men and women both—to lend their time and their expertise to her program. Folks who know how to teach practical skills and how to nurture wounded spirits. They'll come in week after week, these calloused-handed saints, rolling up their sleeves alongside the women Cate works with, teaching them everything from budgeting to how to change a tire and all the while serving their spiritual needs.

There's nothing fancy about it; this support network Cate's built. No financiers or gala fundraisers, just a stalwart bunch of believers who know the price of redemption; these people have paid it themselves in one way or another. And now they're ready to pass the collection plate, to pour out whatever they've got—time, talent, hard-earned wisdom—into the lives of women stumbling out of jail cells, women who've stared into the abyss and lived to tell the tale.

Cate carries the banner, makes the plans, and does the day-in, day-out slogging. But she'll be the first to tell you, she couldn't do it without the crew of saints and sinners who've answered the call, who've rolled up their sleeves and gotten their hands dirty in the work of grace. For when you're plucking souls out of the pit, you can't do it alone. You need a whole village, a whole congregation, a whole community willing to get its knees dirty and its heart invested.

Her story isn't unique, but perhaps that's what makes it so powerful. It echoes the struggles and triumphs of many, a chorus of voices that speak to the enduring capacity for change. Cate shows us that miracles are not always grand gestures from the heavens; sometimes, they are found in the quiet determination of a single person refusing to let the darkness win.