Flashback

I spent most of last Tuesday visiting a dear friend in the hospital. She went there through emergency and was waiting on several procedures that morning. She was in an incredible amount of pain, and she was terrified. She is also a drug addict and alcoholic who has been clean and sober for almost four years.

If you don’t have the problem, you may not understand the terror of pain for the addict who has found freedom from the addiction. As we walk through a new drug-free life, we come to know with certainty that as long as we do not put any drugs or alcohol into our system, we will not start the deadly reaction of craving, known simply to us as MORE, NOW.

If we want to stay clean, which most of us desperately do, then we must cling to this reality. We must know in the deepest, darkest, sickest, most hidden and malicious parts of our hearts that to try the drinking and drugging again would equal consequences too great to bear, would entail the end of our lives as we know them, and would be the first step on the road death of every kind, the first of which would be spiritual.  

At some point many of us come to accept this completely, and though we still have fleeting thoughts, we are freed from obsessing and toying with the idea. It is no longer a possible solution to ourselves or our lives. We live out our lives grateful for the way this certainty has planted itself in our hearts, and we are able to live, making mistakes, seeking, questioning, facing failures and successes alike, but knowing all the while that drugs and alcohol are simply not on the table.

Sometimes we get sick. We need surgery. We have medical emergencies. We break bones. We throw out our backs. We need major dental work. We are in PAIN. We can be martyrs to it for a long time, we will try to tolerate and manage ridiculous amounts of pain, and we usually do this well, but eventually a point comes where the pain wins out, something must be done. And so our feeling of total powerlessness against our addiction returns, as if lightning really can come right out of the clear blue sky and strike us drunk and high, no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

My friend was a noble soldier, but that morning she needed some pain relief. They offered her a “small” dose of a powerful opiate which she resigned to with trembling fear.

I held her hand and watched as the injection shocked her – it absolutely shocked her. She covered her face and began to cry. As a fellow addict, I saw the guilt and shame and terror which she had been free of for so many years return in mere seconds. She looked around with red eyes and tiny dilated pupils. “Oh my God I’m high, I’m high, I’m high,” she cried and cried. I reminded her that she was sick and in pain, and getting relief that her body desperately needed.

Eventually she came back down to earth and recovered. They would be taking her to surgery soon. She was loopy and we just chatted. She went home that night after surgery. She is on the mend and has not found it necessary to drug-seek after this experience. The flashback was more than enough for her.

It was more than enough for me, too. Our stories are different, but it has never been more clear to me than in that moment that my friend and I have shared the same pain. Different states, different drugs, different people and circumstances, but the same pain. The same isolating, powerless, desperate pain which comes with addiction and alcoholism. The same miserable self-hatred and restlessness.

It reminds me of just how amazing God really is. Because not only do we start from a basis of common pain and common problem, but we also share lives that have been pulled from that deep pit, we share freedom from the tyranny of drugs and alcohol. And self!

Everyone has their own personal snares set by the devil, those things in life which could totally take them down and out, drag them into the pits of hell, make them a slave, and worst of all separate them from God. Mine happen to be drugs and alcohol, but I know there are many others.

What I have found in my struggles is a great and powerful God who turns things upside down and brings great good out of the darkest bad. I was captured by the vortex of sin like an unsuspecting prey swallowed up in one bite by a lightening-fast cheetah on the run in the middle of the night. Snatched up, and suddenly it was so very dark. But once I reached the end of myself, God was there, ready to start something new.

It’s so like the devil to promise good things which only last for a little while and ultimately lead to hell – mentally, emotionally, literally. And it’s so like God to be right there ready to lift us up in our weakness once we’ve hit the bottom.

What’s that, child? You’re laying in the desert, burning in the hot sun, with no food or water, you can’t take another step, and the vultures are circling overhead? I know. I’ve watched the entire time, I’ve been calling out to you, and I’ve protected you from all kinds of predators and storms along the way. I’m glad you finally want to talk to me, and you’re willing to do things My Way. Now just rest, stay close to me, and you’ll be fine, because I will take care of you in every way.

And in my life, I lay there in amazement while the desert became a rich forest of soft greens, pools of fresh water appeared around me, and the vultures were replaced by doves that were singing praise to Jesus who came to earth for us to undo the work of the evil one. Just like the old Gaither Song -

All I had to offer him

Was brokenness and strife

But He made something beautiful of my life…

Remember this week– EVERY person you know in your life who is recovering from drug addiction or alcoholism is a MIRACLE from God!!