Carly Peek grew up in a close, working-class family in East London. When she was 13, her mum's cousin, a woman who had been like a second mother to her, took her own life. Carly had no way to carry that kind of grief. She shut down emotionally, and within a couple of years she had found something that numbed the pain: at 15 she drank most of a bottle of whisky and blacked out for the first time. Weed and ecstasy followed while she was still at school. Once she left and started earning money in London's West End, cocaine took over. She held down jobs, just barely, because she needed the wages to fund the addiction, while the rest of her life spiralled.
At 21, Carly gave her life to Jesus at a Christian event. But for the next decade she lived two lives, in church some weeks, on drug binges in others, and the addiction kept its grip.
The breaking point came at 32. Carly woke up on a friend's bathroom floor, covered in bruises after a cocaine binge, and finally ran out of her own strength. She prayed: "Look, if you're real, and you're as big as everyone says, then please help me, because I'm scared." She told God she was sorry and that she could not do it anymore.
She has not touched drugs or alcohol since that moment, more than eleven years ago. God answered a desperate prayer on a bathroom floor and broke in an instant what Carly could not break in nearly twenty years.
The freedom held, and then it deepened. Back in church, Carly joined Celebrate Recovery, a twelve-step programme with Jesus as the higher power. After six months of Scripture steadily working on her heart, she went on to help run the programme for others walking out of the same darkness. Looking back, she says, "Jesus wanted to heal me from the inside out."
Carly's story began with a loss no 13-year-old should have to carry. It turned on a single honest cry to God. If He heard her from a bathroom floor at the lowest point of her life, He can hear anyone, anywhere, starting exactly where they are.