By Dan Sherven
On the road to Jubilee Year 2025, which is themed “Pilgrims of Hope,” we think of our shared journey in Christ. Pope Francis has invited the Church to engage in prayerful preparation, such as noticing how we are all Pilgrims of Hope—longing for God’s Kingdom; and staying committed to charity. As Pope Francis says, these themes resonate deeply with his pontificate. These themes remind us of how prayer can sustain our hope in challenging times.
Caitlin MacFarlane is a former emergency medical services (EMS) worker. She speaks about the nature of faith, addiction, and her return to the Catholic Church. “I kind of fell away from God in my late teens, early twenties. I had started working EMS in Regina, as a paramedic. I thought it was going great. I thought it was the most rewarding job in the world. And it was. There [were] great things about it. But I really started to fall away from God during that time. I stopped going to church. I stopped praying. I became a really terrible person. I was really selfish.
“I only cared about what was in it for me—how I could use other people to get what I wanted—it didn’t matter if I hurt other people. I started drinking a lot and from there, that turned into drugs. In 2018, I had three or four bad calls at work involving kids—where we tried to save them and we couldn’t. And I lost a close partner that I worked with quite a bit, to suicide.” MacFarlane was diagnosed with PTSD after that series of emergency calls. Her EMS partner who passed away was Robert (Robbie) Curtis.
For MacFarlane the road to recovery and faith has been long. “[I] went to rehab, and when I left rehab—all of a sudden—I had learned all these tools in rehab, but I’d also met all of these people with connections to the drug world. And it was right at the same time that I was getting cut off from WCB [Workers’ Compensation Board]. So I found myself very quickly back on drugs. I lost my house, my car, my job, my daughter, my friends, my family. I lost everything. And that was really hard. But I guess that led me to—I guess I call it the decision that changed my life … to turn it all over, back to God.”
She recalls, from the summer of 2020: “one of my last times using drugs. I was on the floor, crying, begging for God to save me. I hadn’t even talked to God in so long—didn’t even know if I still believed in God—but just begging that if He could hear me, to save me. And He did. I don’t know what happened. It was like a [switch flipped] and all of a sudden I could fight the compulsion, a little bit. I did use a couple [of] more times after that, but something was different.”
She says that she reached out to God, from “a feeling of utter despair. I was just at my end. I couldn’t, I couldn’t—in my head it was either get high or die. There [were] no other choices anymore. I think God was waiting for me to be on my knees, asking Him to help me. It didn’t matter how many people were praying for me. [That] was working in the background, but God—I needed to do it.”
“I didn’t know it at the time, but I was pregnant,” MacFarlane says. “Looking back on it, I can see how God had been using the previous couple [of] months before that to get me out of the situation I’d got myself in. And away from all the people involved in that lifestyle. So that when I did find out I was pregnant, I was able to totally stop using drugs and alcohol and get clean. I got clean and sober; summer 2020. But I was still really worried that it was too late. Because I was already eight to 10 weeks pregnant when I found out. So I was worried that I had hurt my baby. And that was a really hard time too. A really dark time.
“But I love that about God. I feel like He always finds people in dark times. Throughout the Old Testament there’s countless examples of it. And it was like that for me. He found me when I was in the darkest place, and really changed my life. I remember that I was really scared because I couldn’t feel my son kicking or moving around, like I had with my daughter. So I just knew there was something wrong with him. Lots of nights spent crying and lots of nights just really hopeless. I remember I was crying and praying one night and just like ‘God save me.’
“I was begging Him to save my baby. And I remember [my son] just started kicking so hard that night and moving around so much. It was—all of a sudden, tears of relief instead of tears of pain.”
MacFarlane now has two healthy children. She co-leads Children’s Liturgy at Holy Rosary Cathedral. And this fall, she’s beginning the bachelor of social work program at the University of Regina; in order to help people who are in similar situations to what she once experienced.
“You have to treat the underlying trauma at the same time as the addiction,” MacFarlane says. “If you just try to treat the addiction it’s not going to work. There’s always a mental health problem, or an underlying trauma underneath that you need to treat first. The most relief that I [had] from that, was when I turned all that over to God. I still struggle. I still have PTSD symptoms; nightmares and flashbacks. But they’re manageable, when I just turn them over to Jesus every single day.”
Dan Sherven is the author of four books, including the number one bestseller Classified: Off the Beat ‘N Path and Uncreated Light. Sherven is also an award-winning journalist, writing for several publications. Find Sherven’s work.
