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Stepping Out held their Rise Up Higher Gala at Captive Free Ministries in Morristown on Thursday where volunteers, supporters and participants celebrated achievements of emotional, physical and spiritual growth.

Stepping Out was founded in 1992 and helps individuals change through programs that include life-skills training, recovery support, employment preparation, parenting classes and emotional health education. The goal is to break negative generational cycles and provide people with a pathway to stability.

“I’m so glad that so many of y’all are here tonight to support this, and I can say without hesitation, lives are being changed because of the work,” special speaker and Hamblen County Mayor Chris Cutshaw said. “You are strengthening lives mostly, physically, and spiritually. You’re helping people create a positive life, a better love, and that is what Stepping Out is.”

Speakers throughout the night emphasized that change is possible for people, even at, especially at dark times in their lives. Sobriety, growth and hope were all celebrated as people gave testimonies.

Executive Director Laura Moore spoke about her 15 years of sobriety and journey from an impoverished, broken background to a place where she now gets to help others who lack healthy role models, stability and life-skills.

“I know brokenness and how it feels,” she told the audience, many of who have been on similar journeys. “I was raised in dysfunction, in poverty, surrounded by abandonment and rejection and abuse. I experienced loss of childhood innocence at a very young age. I experienced homelessness. Addictions, domestic violence, all of those things. Wounds that created deep pain and lasting trauma. And for a long time, it left me questioning if there was ever hope for my future.

“(But) God is faithful. And he specializes in redeeming what has been broken. Turning pain into purpose and restoring hope where it once felt impossible. That redemption becomes a reality. When people are taught and supported and given practical tools to live differently, and there’s many of you in this room that have been a part of a program that can testify to that.

“We teach law skills because wisdom, must be lived out. We teach work skills because scripture tells us that work brings dignity and focus. And we offer recovery support because Jesus came to set the captive free.”

Stepping Out Board Member Steve Amos was a program speaker who figuratively stumbled into volunteering in 2009 when he helped the group find a meeting space, and didn’t really know what they did. But he said he’s now seen how Stepping Out changes lives and redeems families.

“I’ve learned that we have given people the opportunity to break generational curses,” he said. “I think the first thing that really sold me on Stepping Out was hearing a father tell a story. He had come through the programs at Stepping Out, and had cleaned up his life.

“He had really made this 180 degree transformation in his lifestyle, and he had his daughters back. He was a single dad, and had his daughters, and I remember a daughter saying, you know, Daddy loves us.

“That, you know, Daddy feeds us. He cares about us. And I just realized that if you can change the parents, you can change the generations. You can change the children and the children’s children. It really breaks that curse that families seem to have upon them.”

Cutshaw spoke next about his life, from growing up with lessons his father taught him, and working hard and early, how he met his first wife and how things didn’t work out the way he had planned.

“Life was devastating,” he said. “I’m telling (you) the mental and physical toll that it took on me… I never married to divorce.”

He spoke about how hard it was to see the mother of his child leave and struggle with issues that a place like Stepping Out could help. Cutshaw said God and his faith were the things that held him together as he raised his daughter alone, and as he saw his ex re-marry and struggle with addiction.

“(She was) beautiful vibrant woman, and (things) spiraled out of control.”

He said they had prayed for the daughter God had given them, and it was hard to watch her walk a path that eventually led to her life ending in an accidental overdose.

He spoke about how he raised his daughter and learned some hard parenting lessons, and some better ones.

“I learned to braid hair,” he said as he remembered one of the ways he’d help get his daughter ready for school.

But out of tragedy, redemption and hope spring, and with work and time, healing began and his story changed.

“I have to give God thanks for his grace and mercy,” Cutshaw said. “I want you to know that God sustained me through it all.”

Today, his daughter is now a Pharmacist in Asheville and his wife of 15 years Jackie was smiling at him as he spoke.

“I was a single parent for nine years — washing clothes, cleaning house, taking her everywhere she needed to go,” he said. “When Jackie and I first met, I said ‘Babe,’ talking to my little girl, ‘I’m gonna go on a date tonight. She said, ‘Dad, you need to.’”

Cutshaw expressed gratitude for how things have turned out and how he knows how God can redeem terrible situations.

He has a wife he loves, a larger family with “three beautiful daughters” and, after 40 years working for Morristown Utilities, a passion and drive for serving as a local government leader.

“My hope in sharing this story is simple, that someone here will leave knowing this: no matter how difficult the journey, no matter how heavy the burden, no matter how far life may take them off course, there’s always a way forward,” Cutshaw said. “Because God is still in the business of restoring lives.”