The Lifeline Spring 2024

Renee, now 45, is celebrating four years of sobriety of sobriety and a new life – a college degree, a good job, reunion with her family. She is a case manager at Ohio River Health Corp. in Bowling Green and spends her spare time in jail ministry and church evangelism. She is one of a small percentage of Lifeline graduates from outside the Purchase area, having lived in Scottsville most of her adult life, following a childhood in Ohio. Lifeline executive director Ashley Miller said the center accepts clients from other regions when space is available.

‘TANGLED AND MANGLED’

Renee McKnight says ‘God doesn’t waste anything’

During 25 tangled and mangled years of addiction, homelessness, abuse, lost parents, lost custody, abortions, eight rehab centers and many jail sentences, Renee McKnight’s story has so many sad twists and turns that even she can’t remember them all. When all was said and done, she weighed barely 100 pounds and was covered in needle marks.

She doesn’t want your pity, however.

“God doesn’t waste anything,” she said. “He can use all that to help other people.”

Renee, now 45, is celebrating four years of sobriety of sobriety and a new life – a college degree, a good job, reunion with her family. She is a case manager at Ohio River Health Corp. in Bowling Green and spends her spare time in jail ministry and church evangelism. She is one of a small percentage of Lifeline graduates from outside the Purchase area, having lived in Scottsville most of her adult life, following a childhood in Ohio. Lifeline executive director Ashley Miller said the center accepts clients from other regions when space is available.

“We are proud to serve anyone,” Miller said, “because addiction doesn’t have any boundaries.”

Ashley and Renee became fast friends in 2015 after Ashley had graduated from Lifeline and met the new client with many similarities to her own story –watching loved ones die of overdose, losing children during addiction, and still, somehow, finding the strength to survive, with the help of Lifeline’s faith-based, long-term residential recovery program.

Lifeline was Renee’s 8th rehab facility, a string which had included long- and short-term secular programs. The difference in Lifeline’s long-term residential treatment was the focus on Christ.

“I felt like I was at home,” Renee said. “God began to finish the work he’d started on me. I began to get grounded. I bonded with so many of the staff, who went the extra mile for me.”

Lifeline also offered support through a variety of classes that she’d never encountered, such as how to survive trauma, budgeting and after-care. “It is a full spectrum of everything one needs to be successful,” Renee said.

And she realized she was finally in the right place to turn her life around.

“I was on the run and facing more jail time,” she recalls, “but I heard that small, still voice of God saying, ‘if you’ll turn yourself in, I’ll have your back.’ I did, and God literally picked me up and put me where I was supposed to be, at Lifeline.”