Religion Unplugged believes in a diversity of well-reasoned and well-researched opinions. This piece reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily represent those of Religion Unplugged, its staff and contributors.

(OPINION) I love a good story about grace. And if the story of Stephanie M. Raglin is about anything, it’s surely about grace.

Raglin, 59, is senior pastor of Historic St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Lexington, Kentucky, a post she’s held since October 2023. She’s the first woman to have that job. Earlier, she also served as the first woman pastor at Embry Chapel A.M.E. in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

Her vita would make anybody’s eyes pop: 18 years in the clergy; more than 20 years in various positions at Lexington’s Hope Center, which she left early last year; her own counseling center in Versailles, Kentucky, Serenitee (cq) At Its Best; five college and seminary degrees, including a doctorate in ministry; and memberships on multiple boards, such as the board of directors at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, and Lexington’s Opioid Abatement Commission, which she chairs.

She’s married to the love of her life, Mark Raglin, and is a mother of three, a 32-year-old and 18-year-old twins.

She might strike you as the poster child for some elite circle of saints who made the right choices and excelled at them all.

But talk to her and you’ll quickly encounter another section of her vita, which she embraces with the same smiling candor as she does her accomplishments.

She’ll tell you about being sexually assaulted as a teen. About the years she spent trying to relieve that trauma with cocaine, which led her into addiction and despair. About her multiple marriages, including the unusual fact that this is the third time she and Mark have been married to each other. Both have also married and divorced other people.

“I’ve had a lot of storms in my life, been down and out, been places that I never thought I’d be, and was actually ready to give up on life,” Raglin said.

This section of her life— the messy part — is the section I like best, because the messiness illustrates things I believe deeply: that it’s never over until it’s over, and that, sometimes unknown to us, God has greater plans for us than we’d imagine for ourselves.

Raglin grew up in Simpsonville in Shelby County, Kentucky, in a middle-class family that divided its churchgoing between Baptist and Pentecostal churches. She was actively involved.

Then came the sexual assault. She kept that to herself. She’d been taught not to talk publicly about her problems. She tried to forge on.

It didn’t work. The sequence of events here is complicated, and I’m not sure I’ve got the details just so. But she met and married Mark, and they had a daughter, Melanie. Somewhere along the way, Raglin began using drugs to alleviate the pain of her trauma.

Eventually her marriage fell apart amid the chaos of her addiction. She and Mark divorced. They remarried, only to divorce again. Raglin lost custody of Melanie.

It wasn’t the life she was raised to lead. It wasn’t the life she’d expected.

She’d rail at God: “Why did you allow this to happen? If you’re as powerful as you are, then how could this happen to me?”

Then, in 2000, something wondrous occurred, as it sometimes does. Perhaps something had to happen or she might have lost the battle altogether.

“There came a point of time in my life when I called out to God and said, ‘I need help.’ I heard him speak to me and say, ‘I got you. I got you.’ … Ever since that day, my life has turned around drastically.”

She entered treatment programs, sought counseling to help her deal with the sexual assault.

“I got clean,” Raglin said. “I’ve been clean ever since. Let me say I got delivered.”

About a year-and-a-half into sobriety, she landed a night-shift job with the Hope Center, which, as its website says, provides comprehensive “services that promote healing from substance use disorder, mental health disorders, and homelessness.”

For Raglin, working there turned into a calling to help suffering people. Over time, she became a licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor, and is now a certified clinical supervisor.

“Once I was able to get through the demons, and knew that God had a plan and purpose for my life, based on what he told me when I got myself together in 2000, there was no turning back,” she said.

She also returned to church. She felt led to preach, but had always heard preaching wasn’t a woman’s role. Instead, she volunteered in the music.

Finally, at an A.M.E. church service in 2006, she surrendered to the preaching call, too.

Afterward, she said, “I was on a high that I’d never experienced before.” Which is to say the spiritual high from accepting her vocation was more intoxicating than drugs once were.

By 2015, she and Mark had wed for the third time. This time, it took.

One thing that struck me about Raglin is that she tells her story with surprising equanimity. No bragging, but no shame. She tries to be, in her word, “transparent.”

The core of her approach to ministry is love, she said.

She remembers railing at God years ago in despair: Why me?

“But I don’t ask those questions today.”

For her today, the pain seems to have served a higher purpose. When she sees people acting in counterproductive ways, she sees a version of herself. She knows the aches of assault, addiction and broken relationships. She knows that every human, even the most troubled, can be a vessel of God.

“I use it,” she said of her past. “I say that everything I’ve gone through has just prepared me for the next thing that’s about to happen in my life. And I have been able to minister to the needs of so many men and women who have been broken, and bring, through the unction of the Spirit, a sense of healing and wholeness. That’s why I love people.”

Yes, that’s the message of grace. Grace says we’re all fouled up, every last one of us. But, despite our failures, we’re also God’s own children. Grace says God loves us regardless, and is always willing to pick us up from the gob pile, wipe us off and carry us toward safety.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.