Thirty years ago, Ann Kiemel Anderson was a best-selling Christian author and speaker whose first book boldly declared, “I’m out to change my world.”
Today, after tragedies ranging from multiple miscarriages to drug addition, Anderson says she’s learned that Jesus is the source of true change.
Noting that many people looked at her early adult life and “thought I had just everything,” Anderson said, “It appeared that I really was a very together person.”
But “along the journey, I got lost,” she confessed. “It’s a powerful thing to me tonight to know that Jesus doesn’t put his hand on perfect people…. I ask your forgiveness for getting so lost.”
Mixing testimony and songs, Anderson recounted her journey from bold Christian witness and publishing notoriety to despair, addiction and self-loathing.
While she was “passionate about Jesus and wanted everybody to know him,” Anderson said she also “was passionate that you love me.”
Citing her experience as a marathon runner who qualified three times for the prestigious Boston Marathon, Anderson told the crowd, “If you’re not enough before best-selling books and standing ovations and marathons, you will never be enough with them. Externals will not make you whole.”
Deciding in her mid-30s that marriage was the next step toward success and fulfillment, she said she determined that Will Anderson was God’s choice for her. But conflict soon popped up in their marriage.
Explaining that one of her husband’s traits was to fix problems he encountered, Anderson said, “When Will married me, I became his next problem to fix.” Acknowledging her own “gaping, gaping insecurity,” she added, “When he set out to fix me, it made the hole in me bigger and bigger.”
Repeated miscarriages eventually led the Andersons to adopt four sons. Yet “babies and a handsome man and all my success never made me enough,” she said.
“I was an addict of performance and praise just waiting to be an addict of pills,” she added. After being given morphine to relieve the pain of a kidney infection, she soon became hooked on pain pills.
“I confess to you that there were major contradictions in my life,” Anderson said. While being honest in what she shared in her books and speaking engagements, “my lie was in what I didn’t tell you.”
With a growing addiction problem and declining health, Anderson suffered a pair of comas while separated from her husband.
“When I awakened from my second life-threatening coma, God finally had my attention,” she recalled. Entering a secular drug treatment center, she said the experience was “the hardest, most nightmarish journey of my life.”
Describing the severity of the treatment and confrontational group therapy sessions, Anderson added, “It took all of it to break through the thick, thick layers around my heart. For God to crack through down to the core of my soul, it took the toughest and the worst.”
Realizing it would take more than personal willpower and brains to gain physical, emotional and spiritual healing, she declared, “I wanted God and I wanted freedom more than anything else in my life…. There was only one thing that delivered me, and that was the blood of Jesus.”
As she pursued healing from her addiction, Anderson said God also was getting her husband’s attention.
After they reunited, “Will and I pledged to each other and to God that we were going to be the family God wanted us to be and we were going to love each other the way God wanted us to.”
A few years later, Anderson’s husband was diagnosed with cancer. He died two years ago.
Despite their earlier marital struggles, “I know what transformation is because Jesus did it for me and I saw God do it for Will,” she shared. “It was so precious.”
Reflecting on her spiritual pilgrimage, Anderson said, “I was lost, I was confused and Jesus pulled me together. Jesus did for me what I could not do for myself.
“I want you to know that life will never again be about me,” Anderson told the women. “When Jesus healed me, I never wanted any attention again.
“I don’t go around worrying about whether people like me,” she added. “Only God defines me.”
[Ann Kiemel Anderson died from cancer on March 1, 2014]
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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #15845]