God Was There All Along
*Content Warning: This written feature and accompanying video mention drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, and suicide.
“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). At the most crucial turning point in Niki Schlottman’s life, these words rang true. She had lived through childhood trauma, decades of drug and alcohol abuse, and the nagging feeling of never being enough. And she was done.
“I was beyond desperate,” Niki recalled. “When you get that desperate, you commit suicide.” What kept her from taking her own life was the thought of leaving her three children with that anguish—something she had dealt with ever since her father committed suicide when she was a child.
Niki grew up going to church and learning about God. But when her childhood started to unravel, she couldn’t make sense of a good God who would allow awful things to happen. Her parents went through a divorce. Her dad was a closet alcoholic. Once when he was drunk, he sexually abused her. When he couldn’t live with the guilt, he shot himself in the living room.
“I knew there was a God,” Niki explained. “I just didn’t know how to reconcile who people said God was with what was happening in my life.”
Gripped by anxiety, Niki was prescribed Xanax and Vicodin at 16 years old. The medication numbed the emotional pain, but it took more and more pills to keep silencing the voices in her head. This led to years of drug abuse and desperate measures to ensure she had the fix she needed.
It took several rehabs before Niki was able to get clean from all the illegal drugs she was taking. Niki said, “I always knew I shouldn’t drink because my dad was an alcoholic, but once they took all the pills away, I had nowhere to turn, so I turned to alcohol.”
Eventually, the alcohol abuse caught up with her too. Three separate times she nearly died from alcohol poisoning. She got cirrhosis. She even woke up on a ventilator in the hospital because her heart stopped working. Niki was still clinging to the fact that she knew there was a God and considered herself a Christian, but she couldn’t see a way to be freed from what she was experiencing.
One day as she sat on her porch, she reached the breaking point. She had regularly been begging God to let her die. Niki couldn’t justify suicide in her mind, but she didn’t know how to live with the weight of the emotional pain she’d been stuffing down for decades.
“So, I finally surrendered and just cried out, ‘Lord, I know you’re the answer, but I don’t know how you’re the answer,’” Niki confessed. At that moment, everything changed. The Holy Spirit nudged her with the verse from Jeremiah . . . seek and you will find. And suddenly, God—Abba Father—became very personal to her.
“I realized that I never truly knew God,” Niki said. After her encounter on the porch, she eagerly began reading the Scriptures to understand who God said He was. She found a loving Father who had been with her all along and who revealed Himself in the pages of her Bible. He also led her to a team of Christian doctors and counselors who were able to provide her with the tools she needed to get healthy mentally and spiritually.
“God can redeem you no matter where you’ve been. There is hope for everyone.”
“I realized that what was holding me back was me not being able to forgive myself and not being able to forgive my dad,” Niki said. Once she fully understood how Jesus extended grace to her, she could extend grace to her father. “I wish now that my dad could have forgiven himself. He was in Vietnam, and it did awful things to him. I wish he could have met the God I met through the struggle.”
Once God freed Niki from her emotional burdens, He also removed her desire to drink and smoke and replaced those crutches with a hunger for Scripture. “The Bible isn’t just a book. God opens the eyes of your heart, and the Bible becomes real,” Niki said. “Jesus is who He says He is. It’s nothing that I did. Jesus changed something in me, and He made me a new creation.”
Just a few weeks after Niki’s encounter, God opened the door for her to work at Our Daily Bread Ministries. “God planted me here,” Niki said with a huge smile. “It’s an amazing place to work. Since I’ve been here, I’ve read devotional after devotional. I’ve been consuming a lot more of the Word of God.”
As Niki nurtures her faith, she is truly experiencing the comforting peace that God gives her. He has proven Himself trustworthy, and Niki explained, “I’m trying to learn to be obedient to Christ. I’m trying to model for my kids what following God is. God can redeem you no matter where you’ve been. There is hope for everyone.”
Hear more from Niki about how Scripture transformed her life in the video below.