Darkness can cling to a soul. This story isn't about the honest darkness of night that whispers promises of dawn. This is a murky twilight where shadows take on weight and hope becomes a stranger. In Antlers, Oklahoma, a woman named Cate Gubanov knows this particular darkness; she lived it.
Cate's story isn't unique in its beginnings—hard times breeding harder choices, each step down that shadowed road seeming as inevitable as the pull of gravity. The needle, the pipe, the pill—they all ride shotgun in her life and never relinquish their hold.
Cate's story isn't unique in its beginnings—hard times breeding harder choices, each step down that shadowed road seeming as inevitable as the pull of gravity.
But then Cate's path takes a turn that some might call miraculous, others perhaps a stubborn defiance of fate. Eight years prior, she accomplishes what many lost in the darkness swear cannot be done: she claws her way out. It isn't an abrupt escape—there is no grand epiphany, no sudden flood of celestial light. There is just anquish and waiting. The minutes become hours, days, and weeks pass.
Escaping the abyss isn't the whole story. You can't linger on the edge of the pit; more often than not, you will slide back into darkness. Cate understands this, her personal history a testament to failure many times over. So she resolves to find a way to stand in the gap, to offer a way out, to not look back with longing but forward, with hope.
She starts small, as most important endeavors do. A program for women fresh out of jail, their eyes still glazed with the emptiness of confinement, their minds haunted by persistent demons. She names it Matthew 18 Ministries, drawing from a chapter rich with lessons of grace and forgiveness. She asks for one year of their lives—a year to relearn how to exist in the world of light.
This isn't glamorous work. It's street-level creed. Success feels like trying to grab smoke. The women Cate deals with, they carry more than just the scars of drug abuse; their histories are etched in visible and invisible wounds.
The work is far from pretty. Most days, it feels like trying to grasp smoke with bare hands.
She'll lose more battles than she'll win. That's the brutal math of drug addiction and recovery. The losses will hurt, but the victories will ignite the soul with gratitude and hope. These successes are what Cate falls back on with the losses start stacking up.
They say God speaks in whispers. Cate tells a different story. His voice, she said, cut through the cacophony of her heart, filled the hollow spaces carved there by addiction. This was no gentle Sunday school voice; this is the commanding voice spoken to the chosen.
She hadn’t been searching for God; in the depths of addiction, one ceases to search for anything beyond the next fix. But He finds her nonetheless, as He often finds those who have nowhere left to run. The miracle isn't just that she hears Him. It's that from some unscathed place within her, a quiet "yes" emerges. This surprises her more than the divine call itself.
Today, she walks the corridors of the county jail. The women here exist in a state of limbo. Some will make bail and return to the lives that brought them here. Others await judgment; many are merely counting the days until they are transported to the grayer walls of prison.
Cate hasn't planned this path; she holds no degrees from esteemed seminaries. Her credentials are inked in faded track marks, her theology learned in the relentless night school of the streets. But there is power in that authenticity—in meeting an addict's gaze and seeing not just who they are, but who they were, and who they could become.
Her credentials were written in track marks, her theology
learned in the hardest kind of night school imaginable.
In the bare-bones meeting room of the jail, Cate listens as women unravel stories that could be mirror images of her own. The specifics vary—meth instead of heroin, a lover's influence instead of a misguided night—but the essence remains the same.
Listening becomes her first ministry, perhaps her most vital one. She listens wholly, the way one listens to the wind before a storm. The way God might have listened, she says, when she herself was lost. She speaks without pretense or sugar-coated truths.
It's out of these visits that her vision begins to take shape. She envisioned a structured program where women can transition after jail, giving them an option to the standard route of being cast back into street life and old habits. It'll be a holistic approach. It will nurture the soul and the spirit.
Construction has begun on housing that will shelter up to four women—a safe haven where they can begin anew. The dream stretches further: a village of such homes, a community where healing becomes a shared journey.
Cate is quick to acknowledge that she doesn't walk this path alone. Behind her stands a congregation, the Roundup Cowboy Church. It seems more like a rugged bunkhouse than a house of worship. You can tie your horse outside—and they do. Step into the sanctuary, and the pastor greets you with a warm "howdy" and a tip of his hat.
Pastor Jonathon Hooker, a man as steadfast as the oaks that dot the Oklahoma landscape, stands beside her. Straight from Central Casting, he is Cowboy through and through; from the brim of his hat to the worn leather of his boots, he offers not just spiritual guidance but the unwavering support of the church community.
That community comprises the core of volunteers that will teach practical skills, everything from balancing a check book to changing a flat tire, all while tending to the deeper wounds that need healing.
Matthew 18 Ministries isn't tidy. It's a rough gospel addressing rougher needs. It's streetwise and heartfelt. But in a town that bills itself the Deer Capital of the World, a woman named Cate Gubanov is proving that some trophies do not hang on walls—they walk out the front door, upright, undefeated, and carrying the light forward for the next soul still wandering in the dark.