From Blackout to Blessing

[Upbeat Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome, everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction, brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance Use Disorder Coalition. I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: One of the phrases I've used forever is that growing up in a family where alcoholism is ever present is that everything is predictable.

Mike: Predictably chaotic. There isn't a script that turns that chaos into peace and serenity, and to me, it always seems like a miracle when somebody turns that life around. My guest today is one of those people. Melissa Huray is a former radio and television broadcaster, an addiction counselor, and author of a just fabulous memoir, Blackout to Blessing.

Mike: Let me hold it up. There we go. For those of you watching on YouTube. That chronicles her path towards sobriety and salvation. Melissa is currently the executive director of the Lindell Recovery Network and the host of The Hope Report, a daily internet television show the links to which are attached to the podcast's blurb.

Mike: She's also written a brand new book, a daily devotional called Radical Freedom. Welcome, Melissa, and thanks for being here.

Melissa: Mike, it's great to be with you. I just, I always feel like these are divine appointments and I'm so glad you reached out to me and we were able to make this happen.

Mike: Yeah, it's great.

Mike: Now, you know how this goes being a more expert at this than I, right? However, I want to go backwards for a minute. I want to start your, about your story and your book, Blackout to Blessing. I know it's been a long time, you've been in recovery for a long time, but I want you to talk a little bit about blackouts, because for most people, they're really scary, and one and done is, I think, the experience for most people, but not you.

Melissa: No. You know, Mike, I think blackouts were the defining feature of my drinking and what made it so horrific. And I didn't know what it was at first, I was 15 years old the first time I drank, I went out with some kids who partied and we got a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. And you read the story, you know, went in a Ford pickup truck and we drank that case of beer.

Melissa: And I remember forgetting. I mean, I recall that there were chunks of the night I didn't remember that first time I drank, but after that, my drinking just grew more compulsive and more reckless. And it was like, I had no off switch. I would start drinking and I would just pound whatever was available, beer, wine coolers, whiskey, whatever anybody had.

Melissa: And I would drink so fast that I would blackout. And sometimes people confuse blacking out and passing out. And that's a common thing. I think people think.... You know, when you pass out, you drink a lot and then you fall asleep on the couch or you know, you're kind of unconscious. But when you're blacked out, you're actually awake, you're conscious, you're walking, talking, doing things that you are forming no memory of. Because you drink so fast that your blood alcohol rises rapidly and it inhibits memory storage.

Melissa: So basically, you know, you're never going to get that memory back. It's gone forever because your brain never converted it from short term memory to long term memory. So it's like you're walking around where every moment is new. You're able to keep information for like one minute. So if you were to sit down next to me at a bar, start talking to me, introduce yourself, say your name is Mike, and I talk to you and we get in a conversation, you leave, go to the bathroom, come back five minutes later, I'm not going to remember anything that you said.

Melissa: It's all going to be new. So you think of how reckless a person is in this state of mind, where you're acting on impulse from moment to moment. So typically what would happen is that I'd start drinking, and I never planned to do this. I never planned a blackout. Actually, I found it really scary, even as a teenager, coming to, say, waking up in my bed and scrambling to remember what was the last thing I was doing.

Melissa: And it would be like, oh, I remember being at that gravel pit party, and I remember talking to Jimmy in, you know, at the tailgate of the truck. That's the last thing I remember, and it's like the curtain just closes. And then my next memory is coming to in my bed and that was just a recurring thing and it was something I had a lot of shame about. Because I knew on some level this didn't happen to normal people. My friends remembered stuff. They would say oh you were you know what you were doing last night you were and I would be horrified I would have so much shame even as a young person, but I was compelled to repeat this just over and over as you read in my book from 15 to 30 this is what I did. Because I would always think I'd find a way to not blackout, or I'd be able to control it in a way that I would avoid the blackouts.

Mike: I like the part in your book where you know, your parents become aware of it. And of course, those of you who don't grow up in the Midwest, you began life, not at 15, drinking, but you got sips. Right? You were allowed to drink around your parents at a much earlier age. That's the Wisconsin/Minnesota way, right?

Melissa: Right.

Mike: But your dad said to your mom, I'll take care of this. (chuckle) And your dad, who's the alcoholic, decided to have the talk with you.

Melissa: I know. It was kind of comical. I remember that really well. And when you look back, it's a little bit humorous when you read about it, but it was really a horrifying event.

Melissa: I was in 9th or 10th grade, I think it was the summer after 9th grade, decided to start drinking after school. You know, what a great idea, go home and raid the liquor cabinets. Remember it very well. And when you're an addict and you're impulsive and you're a teenager, you're just, you're doing what seems good in the moment.

Melissa: Like, hey, here's a bottle of Amaretto that hasn't been touched for a few years. Let's have a few drinks. So my boyfriend, my first boyfriend, the guy I got into all of this with, he was just an innocent bystander. He would go along with whatever I thought was a good idea. So we started drinking and very quickly I blacked out, came to in my bed.

Melissa: I had thrown up on myself. You read it in the story. All the gory details are in there in Blackout to Blessing. But I remember the ceiling coming into view, and that particle board ceiling, and the naked bulb glaring down, and my mom screaming at me and trying to make sense of, why are you like comatose in your bed at 6 in the afternoon and I can't wake you up?

Melissa: And then she realizes I'm drunk and I've thrown up on myself. She loses it. And then my dad starts down the stairs. He says, Sue, it's all right. Let me handle it. You know, you go upstairs, get in your robe and just go watch your TV shows. She had a lazy boy chair. She sat in and she smoked Winston's and she watched TV shows at night.

Melissa: Okay. This is what we did in the eighties. We ate TV dinners and we watched TV shows. But my dad had a little talk with me. Very conflict avoidant. That was the theme in my family was we don't talk about what's really happening. We know dad's a raging alcoholic and dad is barely hanging on to a job. We got junk cars in the driveway and disconnect notices coming in our mailbox.

Melissa: But dad says, you know, Meliss, he's like, just stay off the stuff. Hangovers are no fun. And I know that was kind of the the culmination of our talk.

Mike: And there you go, right?

Melissa: Yeah. And I learned just don't get caught. Okay. You need to like fly under the radar. And if, as long as you're not blowing anything up and you're not flunking out of school, then you can basically do whatever you want.

Melissa: And that's what I learned in my family. That we don't ask, don't tell. We don't talk about what's really going on with people, and that's how it is in an addicted family.

Mike: Well, yeah, and your mom was the classic don't rock the boat at all, right?

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, I learned a lot of that, and that was what I had to unlearn even after becoming sober.

Melissa: That was so much of a stronghold in my life. The people pleasing and what I learned and really she was just trying to exist. I look back with so much compassion on her now with what she dealt with, with my father for so many years. And she was 17 when she married him. I mean, she got pregnant with my brother.

Melissa: She stayed with him to his death. She was strong in a lot of ways, but the family modeled a lot of really dysfunctional behavior.

Mike: You know, you touched on it. Ford trucks, gravel pits, low standards sounds like a bad country song. But you kept drinking because it had the effect you were looking for.

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah, well, you know very early on I was looking for a way to escape this shame I had that has become very clear to me and just that the Lord and the Holy Spirit has revealed to me that I was in this house of shame and secrets and I knew on some level that things were not right. And I was looking for ways to escape my reality. And really I think addiction is just a symptom of trying to escape emotional pain or numb ourselves or to not be in the reality that we're in.

Melissa: You know, it's just like, there's a deep root and the addiction is like leaves on the tree. It might be shopping. It might be gambling. It might be porn. It might be people pleasing. For me, it started with binge eating and television. I mean, that was how I soothed myself after school when I was alone and I was scared because it was getting dark at 4:30 in December.

Melissa: My parents weren't home. I don't know if they're coming home. My big brother was off playing sports, but I soothed myself with TV and binge eating, but the enemy had begun priming me. Like you said, when I was three years old, I have a Polaroid picture of clutching this plastic cup of glass beer. And my dad, they thought it was so cute, you know, and Melissa likes beer.

Melissa: And I've got like the frost on my upper lip or the foam from the beer. But so it was very normalized in my home. And early on, the enemy would highlight alcohol to me and he began priming me and showing me that's going to do something for you. That's going to help you. You see what happens to these adults.

Melissa: And for some reason, I didn't really think I'd ever turn out like my dad, and people often ask me about that. But I knew it would do something for me, and I had anxiety and panic because of the instability in the home. So when I got to be 15, that's when alcohol just moved into the forefront, and I started to look for ways to seek that relief I knew that alcohol would give me, and it did at first. And a lot of people who become addicted, you know, it works for a while. It really helped that anxiety, like slamming a couple of beers and I was super human on top of the world. But then it turns on you and it starts to create the problems you think it's treating.

Melissa: So where I thought it was helping with anxiety, it was making me more anxious. It was making me isolated. It was making me... increasing the shame. And in the beginning it helped to numb that shame. And. But then I started creating more shame. You know, there was the shame in my household, and then there was the shame I was creating with my own alcohol binges.

Mike: Well, and you know when you're that's the danger right of beginning to use at a young age is you don't project forward. So when your dad shows up drunk at a softball game, you know, you never think oh, that's gonna be me in ten years.

Melissa: No, no, I think about that I have so much compassion and empathy for that little girl for that child who wanted her dad to see her play softball. And I know my story I mean there are people with much worse trauma than I had and terrible, terrible things that happened to them.

Melissa: And over 21 years of sobriety, I've been able to put it more into perspective that Yeah, things happened that were tough and difficult, but there were good things also. And my parents did provide for me in the way that they were able to. So I've been able to reframe a lot of that that's been helpful. But that softball game is a painful memory.

Melissa: And thinking back of, I was always so embarrassed of my dad, because the way he would be in public. And not only was he an alcoholic, but he just was peculiar. Even when stone cold sober, he had this dry wit, and he would say inappropriate things to people. He wasn't a cool dad. And I started looking around at the dads of my friends or the sitcom dads, like on Growing Pains and Family Ties and these shows in the eighties.

Melissa: And I thought, I want a dad like that. So TV and books and writing and journaling and all of that gave me an escape from that family and let me create this other reality, but when I got into drinking, all of that stopped and I stopped, you know, really pursuing the creative aspects that were helping me.

Melissa: But that softball game is a painful memory and my dad continued to do things like that throughout his drinking as it escalated. Mine was kind of going in tandem with his, but the focus was on him. The focus was on his medical problems because he started to have liver failure and esophageal varices and seizures and all of these really serious problems related to alcohol.

Mike: And of course when you're using the way you were using, that is not conducive to really healthy relationships and so from 15 to 30 there's a trail of fairly unhealthy relationships. I want to use a quote that you use in the book, if that's okay. You said, I had not taught Rick how to treat me or to demand the respect that I deserved.

Melissa: Rick, Rick, Rick. Wonder what he's doing now. He was a weatherman. He was actually, I think I changed the name of the city in the book, but we'll just say he was in Wisconsin. But yeah, it began at 15 and it really was this abandonment wound and this brokenness that I had, you know, if you don't learn your identity in Christ, And I had met Jesus as a young child when I was nine.

Melissa: My parents brought us to the Presbyterian Church. My uncle was a Presbyterian minister. He also had a serious drinking problem, would move around from small country church to small country church. My dad's brother. They were real close, but, you know, I had that knowing that drinking was going to be my ruin, and I felt like I was getting highlights from the Holy Spirit about that, but I continued to pursue the bad boys.

Melissa: I really had no interest in anybody stable, anybody healthy, anybody seeking God. Even when I completed confirmation class, I wrote in the book about that. And I actually am friends with this person on Facebook. He's come to the Lord and he's a great guy, but I remember completing confirmation class. I got my certificate.

Melissa: Yeah! I memorized the apostle's creed. And then I went out in the hall, got on the phone and called my friends. And this guy picked me up in his. It was a trans am or Camero. Picks me up, and then we pick up some people and go to a gravel pit and get drunk. I mean, so, my church exposure was not discipleship.

Melissa: It didn't teach me how to have a relationship with the Lord. It just taught me behaviors. So I went from one relationship to the next, trying to find attachment, really. I was trying to attach myself to somebody who would never leave me. And we know the only one who's going to do that for you is Jesus.

Melissa: But I kept going to broken men. with alcoholism or just who didn't want to commit. And I would try to take on my mom's caretaking and convince them to love me. And it really, it was just a sad cycle that went with my alcoholism, was this desire to get a man to submit to me. And that if only I could do that in my mind I had this vision of the Family Ties family or the Growing Pains family.

Melissa: I'm going to create this perfect family. It's gonna be nothing like my family. I think I even wrote about Family Feud in the book how I think about the family I bring on is not going to be my family, it's going to be this other family that I made up in my head. So I had this dream world of having a marriage, having children, but my addiction would never allow that to happen.

Melissa: So again and again, I'd get into the wrong relationships. I got married when I was 21. That was outside God's will. Again, same story. Our foundation was built on drinking and infatuation. I got pregnant. We got married. We were divorced three years later. And so I was 24 with a toddler and divorced.

Mike: Well, and before you found salvation (chuckle) no offense, Melissa, but I think you're the only person I've ever met who called the Psychic Friends Network for advice.

Melissa: I know, and it was so sad that I even got them to discharge that bill, because I think I called back and I argued I was in mental distress, and they you know, they weren't forthcoming with how much it actually cost. Yeah, I was on the line so long that the "psychic" (air quotes) hung up on me because it probably exceeded 30 minutes or whatever was the length of the call supposed to be.

Mike: (laugh)

Melissa: Yeah, that was a real low point.

Mike: You talk about Jesus sending you consistent lifelines throughout your life. In the opening chapter, not to, you know, steal thunder, read the book, it's just great. In the opening chapter of Blackout to Blessing, you're sitting in the diviest of dive bars in the smallest of Wisconsin small river towns, and in the bar, a dive bar, a guy starts talking to you about his dad and 12 step groups.

Mike: Have you looked back and said, Oh my God (chuckle), Jesus was sitting next to me, and I didn't even recognize Him?

Melissa: Well, I really believe he absolutely works through people and even the most broken people who aren't seeking him. He will use whatever we're interested in to get our attention and it was a foreshadowing.

Melissa: I mean, I put that in the beginning of the book because I wanted to illustrate the level of the blackouts. I mean, I was 25 at that point and I would do, as you read, extremely dangerous things, go out to bars by myself, meet up with random people, not know what happened. I could kind of piece together.

Melissa: I think this happened or may or may not have happened, but I think I wrote in there and I have a phenomenal memory too, which is something that can be a blessing and a curse, but I remember details, I remember such specifics and that can really be tormenting when you're creating a lot of bad experiences for yourself.

Melissa: But I remember saying that I could have started a colony on Venus and I wouldn't have known because I remembered him buying me a shot of tequila. Maybe it was the sun was setting. And then the next thing I was coming to on the floor of my apartment, wondering what had happened. But I put that in there too, because it's the first entrance of my husband, Mike.

Melissa: Who we've been married for 20 years now, but Mike was an acquaintance of my roommate and God put him in my path one time when I was 25, but Mike was a stable guy. Mike was a handy guy. He was not the type of guy I would go for deep in my addiction, but it was a foreshadowing. So I included that, but there was no way God was going to bring me that, that stable man in that family I wanted, unless I would give up the alcohol. And I believe he gives us a measure of free will. He allows us to come to the end of ourselves. And he was saying to me, Melissa are you done yet? And again and again, I kept going into these dangerous situations. And then at 26, I had the 2 drunk driving crashes you read about.

Melissa: And that did stop my drinking for 18 months. But sometimes I'm amazed that he spared my life through all that. And I just want to, you know, I tell the story because it, it couldn't be anything other than God that would have brought me out of that, that highway to hell I was on.

Mike: Yeah. Well fast forward then August 22nd, 2003, the last blackout. You know, talk, no cravings after that. So talk about that transformation. It's pretty significant 180.

Melissa: Yeah. It's the story that I love to tell. But when you look back, the lead up to it was four years of going back and forth. It was four years of wrestling with, I know I need to stop, but I don't want to.

Melissa: You know, one foot in the world and one foot in, ah, yeah, maybe I'll do a little of this Bible thing, church thing, because after the drunk driving arrest, I was scared straight for 18 months. And I went to AA, I did all the things dutifully as a good Minnesota girl would, you know, cause I could really turn it on when necessary and really turn it on for people like confirmation class or at the times when I needed to show them how dutiful I am.

Melissa: I actually quit the bartending job. I got a job at a TV station. As a production assistant, eventually worked my way up to reporter and weekend anchor. Amazing how your life turns around when you stop the chaos of addiction. I had started this new life, everything was going well, I was taking my daughter to church, but then the enemy started to tell me, you're not really like those people you see in AA, those like messed up people.

Melissa: I mean, you're smarter than that. You can outwit this. You've never really tried to control it. So I went back into it for two more years, and that's when my father died. And I want to just stop there just for a moment before we get to the August 22nd, 2003, because my father died on December 12th, 2002. He was 54.

Melissa: He was only two years older than I am now. And people have been throwing him lifelines through his whole life saying, Dan, you're going to die if you don't quit, your liver is giving out. You have the lowest hemoglobin level we've ever seen. And we can't believe you made it. You're not going to get another chance.

Melissa: He would go into the hospital, get blood transfusions, sometimes go to treatment, come back out and start drinking again. The longest I had ever seen him sober was one week. After he died on December 12th. I looked at him and in his hospital bed, and I said to myself. You can't ever drink again. There's no way you're drinking again.

Melissa: But it was kind of like a vow I made to myself, you know, by my own will. And then a week later I was drunk and I started to get really scared. I started to think, you can't stop this. You thought you could when you wanted it bad enough or when things got serious enough, you'd stop. But I had six more relapses after that, but something supernatural changed when he died.

Melissa: I think I received some measure of deliverance in his death that where the Lord stepped up his pursuit to me. And this brought us, you know, I had six disastrous relapses all punctuated at the end of the book that could have killed me. The one at the week of San Diego where I didn't, people tried for 20 minutes to wake me up out of drunken stupor.

Melissa: And then they said, well, is she dead? And I drank until August 22nd, I had had 49 days of sobriety and I was white knuckling it. That's what never worked for me because myself will, would run out. So I decided to go to the Minnesota State Fair. I'll tell the story quickly. Friend of mine, old guy acquaintance, some affable guy who had just come along.

Melissa: Came with me. We drove down to the fair from Duluth, where I used to live. And on the way down, I just started to think, maybe I could drink one more time. Just one more time. I can do it here at the fair. Nobody will know. I'm with him. He's just a innocent, you know, he's not going to tell me I can't. So, I started drinking at the fair and I was, as I said in the book, pounding beers like they were water, cups of water at a marathon checkpoint.

Melissa: I mean, that's what it was like, just slamming beers like you know, I had no off switch. I came to 12 hours. I was in a 12 hour blackout. I came to an estranged motel room. I remember this morning. You know, it was muddy and vague, but it was also vivid where I was just clamoring to make sense of what had happened.

Melissa: I was in this cheap motel, this marigold bedspread. Like it was just a horrific scene. I didn't know how I had gotten there. And this guy was leaning over me going, we have to go. I think your car was towed. And I've never been so sick, full of shame, just miserable and broken. And in Psalm 34:18, it says that God is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

Melissa: And I've never been so crushed as I was that morning. I was just at the end of myself and I did a couple of things. I made a decision. I think every addict needs to make a decision. And even in my withdrawal and my panic, I was having a panic attack. I said to myself, I'm never drinking again. And then I... I've repented.

Melissa: I didn't really know what that meant at the time, but I agreed with God. I finally came into agreement with what He'd been showing me for so long. That you're not going to live. You're not going to have anything. You're not going to survive if you keep drinking. It needs to be no alcohol. There's no middle ground for you.

Melissa: I'd been trying to take alcohol and blend it with a functional life and it was never going to work. So I repented and I asked God. I just said a very simple prayer. I said, please don't ever let me drink again. And I wanted it with everything I had. I haven't, this is the part I want to say, I've never, I haven't had a craving.

Melissa: I haven't had a day where I thought. Hey, maybe I'm normal now. I can have a couple of drinks. It was like, it was lifted off me in that moment. That part was miraculous, no more craving, no more mental preoccupation, or obsession. I still had a lot to learn about. My other character defects, that's pretty much what this is.

Mike: (laugh)

Melissa: But what the mental and physical part was gone.

Melissa: It was like, I had no desire to drink and I haven't for over 21 years.

Mike: Well, that's a moment, a walking, talking third step of Alcoholics Anonymous. Turn your will and life over to God. Maybe that's what you say in the book, that your favorite Bible verse is John 16:33, right?

Melissa: I don't know. You know, it's hard to pick a favorite.

Melissa: But John 16:33, when he says, Take heart, I have overcome the world.

Mike: Yeah.

Melissa: I do believe surrender is such a huge thing. Like I said about the free will. You know, God has revealed more to me about this because that moment I didn't know what all I was doing. I just knew I was broken and miserable and that I could never take a drink again. And I knew nothing I had tried to do had worked because I could stop but I couldn't stay stopped I would always pick it up again So I think you know programs can help us and all that stuff can be helpful. But unless we're doing it with a posture of submission, you know we're seeking the lord first and we're letting him lead us into the things we need, then we're running on our own self will.

Melissa: We're trying to do it in our own power. And that's what I had always done, just looking outside myself for the thing that's going to fix me, instead of letting him run that and trusting him that he would and he has he's faithfully led me into every single thing I have needed since that day.

Mike: Well, we could spend another four podcasts talking about your wonderful husband, but talk about your work with the recovery network and your YouTube show The Hope Project which by the way is also the name of your daughter.

Melissa: Her name is Haley, but I called her Hope in the book. When I started writing...

Mike: Oh, funny, funny, funny.

Melissa: Yeah. When I started writing it, she was a minor. You know, she's 30 now. Sure, sure. I was trying to protect her identity. And then at one point I asked her, hey, do you want me to put your real name in here? And she's like, no, you can just leave it like that.

Melissa: And I thought it was kind of neat how I called her Hope.

Mike: It is neat. Yeah.

Melissa: Because she, you know, God, she was a surprise. I mean, we didn't plan her, but God really... She kept me alive. I mean, she gave me a reason to live. She did much more than that. But in those years of my bartending days, you know, I had to be functional for her and I really tried to keep that life separate from her.

Melissa: I wouldn't say I always succeeded with that, but she was so much a source of inspiration and hope to me, and she's such an old soul. But I did get married one year after that. Some AA people might have discouraged that, but Mike came back into my life three weeks after I quit drinking. He and I ended up at this event.

Melissa: We didn't know we'd been working across the street from each other. I was at the TV station and he worked across the street. We had never crossed paths. And I went over there to do a story, just a quick little sound bite. I didn't even want to go to the story. And, but it was the story of my life because Mike was there and then we reconnected and he said, Hey, you want to go out for lunch?

Melissa: And we kind of took it slow for a few months, but we ended up getting married a year after we met. And it was great. We had a really awesome, idyllic courtship, whirlwind courtship. We had two more daughters in 2008 and 2010, but I wouldn't say our road has been perfectly seamless because Mike came from an addicted family.

Melissa: He wasn't an addict himself, which was what was most important to me then. But we know what happens in addicted families. And even though you're not the addict he picked up a lot of those traits of perfectionism, workaholism. So all of these things, the Lord has used to refine us in our marriage.

Melissa: Because early on, I made him an idol and I put him before God and I had to be stripped of that. So we went through a dark time. It was 13 years ago, but we came through, we've been married for 20 years this past September and he's a huge blessing. He is absolutely the man that God chose for me. I tried to circumvent it and go some other roads first, but he's an amazing father, amazing man, and we've grown a lot together in the Lord.

Melissa: We had to make Christ the foundation of our marriage though, which we didn't do at first. And I don't know how people stay married without that.

Mike: It is amazing how two people who come from really dysfunctional families think that they can magically become the Keatons from Family Ties, right?

Melissa: Oh, I know.

Melissa: You're so right. And I thought everything was just going to be phenomenal because I had quit drinking. I had the obsession lifted. I went into counseling, you know, I worked at the TV station for, I think, two more years and then it closed. And people were moving all over the country doing market jumps. But I went back to school and became an addiction counselor.

Melissa: I did that for 12 years and worked in intensive outpatient treatment. I saw about 55 people a week at the height of it. And toward the end, I was getting some burnout, some compassion fatigue, and that's when I met Mike Lindell, and he wanted to launch this website to help people with addiction. So he brought me on in 2018, and we have the LindellRecoveryNetwork.org. It's a directory of Churches, Christian treatment centers, free resources for addicts. It's just all free. Mike is a former crack addict. So we had a lot in common and we don't believe in the disease model. We believe Jesus is the healer and the answer. So everything on that site points people to Jesus.

Melissa: And then four years ago, we started the Hope Report. And when I met Mike, he would walk around saying, one of these days, I'm going to have a show. It's only going to be good news. I'm going to call it the Hope Report. Well, I didn't know I'd have any part of that. But the Lord brought the broadcasting thing back around again.

Melissa: Only back then when I was in TV news, I was kind of doing it from a broken place. Although, you know, I love the storytelling. I loved a lot of the aspects of the job, but I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be validated. But now I get to do a broadcasting job for the Lord. I mean, everything I do is Bible or it's helping addicts by teaching them the truth and Jesus can set them free.

Melissa: And so it's an inspirational show every day at 1 p. m. Central, and it's on YouTube, Facebook, Frank Speech, and on Mike Lindell's other outlets.

Mike: Well, and of course, I said it to begin with, but there's a link to that attached to the blurb of the podcast. You know, I'll let you go, but you know, this has been terrific.

Mike: The story is so inspiring that you can walk those streets in those small little towns that are littered. You know, Melissa, you and I both know in this part of the world, there's a lot of stories just like ours, right? So the Hope Report goes through your whole life. There's a lot of hope through your whole life.

Mike: For those of you listening, we want to thank Melissa for her inspiration, faith, and hope. And if you are listening, I hope you find love and support wherever you are. Always thank you for listening. We want you to be safe and keep looking. It's right in front of you, or sitting beside you.