About Melissa Huray

Television news reporter by day, blackout drunk by night – no one suspected that capable and competent Melissa Huray needed alcohol to survive. In spite of her public persona, the squeaky clean girl from small-town Minnesota spent years carousing seedy bars – shockingly drunk with no hope of remembering anything the next day.

Booze, men, and attention seemed the only remedies for the painful abandonment wound she’d battled since childhood. Instability and anxiety were constant companions, and though Melissa had met Jesus as a child, pleasing the world soon became her counterfeit god.

Dutiful, pleasant, and Minnesota Nice, she longed for an 80’s sit-com family, but reality screamed the truth – her dad was a drunk.  With a people-pleasing mother too distracted to be emotionally available and golden-boy brother serving as family hero, the baby of the family felt forgotten. Television and junk food offered relief for a time – but by fifteen, frequent panic attacks and excruciating insecurity demanded stronger medication.

Booze caused instant blackouts – opening an awful, insidious portal and gaping hole for the enemy. The first innocent sip just spiraled into more. Everyone else made it home by curfew, but Melissa was blacked out and roaming a gravel pit, or speeding down the highway with strangers seeking the next party – a zombie riding shotgun on autopilot. She wasn’t like the other drinkers, not by a long shot. And she knew it.

Unrestricted drinking and drunk driving made alcohol induced amnesia and shame the highlight of every weekend, with Monday a distant and irrelevant nag from the future. From fifteen to thirty, Melissa danced with the devil – catapulting from one near-death experience to the next. The need for alcohol was fervent and compulsive, the “off switch” non-existent – more was never enough, and waking up in strange places became just another price she paid. Alcohol seemed the only outlet to bury the suffocating shame and panic that followed each drunk.

As the years spiraled on, the deadly cost of gambling on one more night of relief brought multiple arrests, harrowing car crashes, and pathetic attempts to quit – but her pledges always ended with another drunk and paralyzing shame. Melissa faced a deep knowing that an accident or overdose would soon kill her. Something had to change, but how? Each new low brought increasing revelation – an external thing wasn’t the answer. She needed to find an eternal Who.

With surprising candor and raw emotion, Blackout to Blessing – How the Perfect love of Jesus Saved Me From the Highway to Hell invites the reader into Melissa’s journey through childhood dysfunction, the fleeting relief of alcohol and empty relationships, and the dreadful daily grind familiar to the functional addict. As the enemy stepped up his pursuits, Melissa’s overwhelming and frantic quest to break the stronghold of addiction rocketed her toward a horrifying convergence point and the mother of all lost nights. But the God of her youth was in hot pursuit – ready to offer the exquisite and beautiful power that could save her from herself.