From the outside, Steve Rotermund checked all the Christian boxes. He’d gone from a powerful Promise Keepers experience to volunteering, sensing a call to ministry, and eventually stepping into pastoral leadership. He served as a children’s pastor over 150 kids, directed Awana and Celebrate Recovery, planted a church, and even hosted a radio ministry. But behind the scenes, a different story was unfolding: a marriage shaken by his wife’s secret addiction to pain medication, a home full of fear and shame, and a deep anger at God for not “fixing” her while Steve worked full-time for Him.In this episode, Steve goes back further—to the soil all of that grew out of. He describes a childhood dominated by abandonment and trauma: a mother who left when he was four and disappeared until he was eighteen, a father who cycled in and out of alcoholism and told him he’d never amount to anything, and sexual abuse at age six that he carried in silence into his forties. Those early wounds left him convinced he was fundamentally unworthy, even as he “sold Jesus” to others from the pulpit. Ministry became a stage where codependency thrived: needing to be needed, feeling important, and trying desperately to control what was broken at home.When his wife began passing out on the front row of church, the shame and exhaustion finally broke him. Steve handed his congregation to another pastor, walked away from ministry, and walked away from God. The next two years were, as he puts it, “hell”—a codependent husband trying to fix an addict he couldn’t control. A trusted friend finally pushed him to see a Christian counselor. Within fifteen minutes of their first session, the counselor told him, “You’re part of the problem.” That blunt diagnosis of codependency—and the later challenge to move from “adopted son tolerated by God” to full sonship in Christ—became the turning point.Steve describes how, through years of counseling and a fresh encounter with John 14:20 (“I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you”), his identity shifted from shame and performance to union with Jesus. The journey wasn’t neat: he still had to make the painful decision to divorce in order to protect his kids, rebuild his own life, and slowly reengage with church. But out of that wreckage came a renewed call to ministry and the birth of Walk Right Ministries—a Christ-centered 12-step recovery community where he now walks with others through trauma, addiction, and codependency. His book, God’s Imperfect Plan—Is Perfect, invites readers to see that God can weave purpose even through what feels like failure.For anyone carrying hidden wounds, trapped in someone else’s addiction, or burned out on a version of faith built on performance and control, this conversation offers both honesty and real hope. Steve’s story is a living reminder that God doesn’t just rescue us from our circumstances; He meets us in them, heals the heart beneath the behavior, and invites us into a freedom where our worth is no longer on trial.

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