Four Years

The people walking in the darkness have seen a great light, on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned –Isaiah 9:2

Four years ago I woke up in the morning to the sight of a trashed apartment. Furniture was flipped over, the TV was on the floor, and there was a gigantic hole in the wall. My blurry vision came to focus in on that hole, and I remembered with clarity the large fist that narrowly missed my head and went through that wall instead of smashing my face the night before.

I don’t know what it was about that particular time that made me decide I had had enough. Worse things had happened, and worse nights had been lived through. There was no loud crashing sound as if it all fell down. It was more like some tiny part of me inside just took its last breath, sighed its last sigh, and finally died of sheer exhaustion.

I remember the sun beating down on me, torturous when combined with my headache and dehydration. I drove as if someone else were driving, propelled by something larger than me, to a place where I knew recovery was actually possible because I had seen it with my own eyes. I had not showered nor brushed my teeth and I reeked of the kind of hangover that makes you sweat whiskey right out of your pores. I couldn’t look at anything but the floor, but I went inside and I asked for help, because I was at the end of myself and there wasn’t anything else to do anymore. And people gave me hope and made me cry, and real life began.

Today by God’s grace I celebrate four years of sobriety, four years of total freedom from drug and alcohol addiction. And when I say “by God’s grace,” I really mean it. As you can see from pieces of my story, I did not start the journey because of some great virtue on my part. I started it because I was beat up, tired and sick, spiritually bankrupt. I hated life, I hate you, and me, and everyone and everything everywhere.

The greatest gift in the world is to be at the place where you are at the end of yourself, and at the end of all the things which you thought, at some point, might really make you happy. In this place there is misery abundant, there is the nearness of despair. Here you stand on the edge of the abyss of hell itself and look down into the inevitable, and you know it won’t think twice about consuming you entirely. Here is the terror thought of knowing you have to change, and here it is crashing into the thought that you know you can’t change. Here all your pretty illusions of money and security and romance and relationships and laughter and control crumble into dirt, because that’s all they are – illusions.

So there you are, and it’s you and God, and the only question is, are you going to keep giving him the finger, too? Just like you have to everyone else? And you look up, and you look back down at that slimy pit of hell, and you look back up….and something breaks again inside. The reality of your options is never clearer – this is the gift of reality when all else is stripped away.  

And that gift of reality, which was the result of incredible self-inflicted pain, was the best thing that ever could have happened to me, because it put me in the position to change. But not only that, it made totally clear how essential to my survival it really was to find God as the priority in my life, because clearly nothing else was right.

It’s been a gift, and it’s also been work. To clean up years of wrong living takes time and effort and perseverance and showers upon showers of God’s grace. I would like to say that my part has been to cooperate 100% with the changes God has wanted to make in my life, but that would be a lie. I still fought things for a long time. I still fight sometimes. But He led me along, sometimes skipping with joy, sometimes kicking and screaming. He led me in that way that only He can, right to where I needed to be, right to where I am today.

The most important thing He did was make it clear who He was. I prayed for this, desperately. I wanted to know I was safe in the arms of God and not just resting on some other new delusion or creation I had thought up in my scheming mind. And I really, really didn’t want to be a Christian. To be a Christian meant….work. Commitment. Change. Sacrifice. Riddance of self. Asking for help. All things counter intuitive to my nature.

 Even worse, to be a Christian meant (gasp!) to live outside of the culture I was so submerged in, and to (gasp!) take a stand on truth, and to (gasp!) probably make people around me uncomfortable sometimes. Anything but that! But God pointed me to the Cross and to Christ crucified for me. And the Word began to take on life and meaning to my deadened ears. And I learned that the power of the gospel is just so much bigger than my petty objections.

God designed me to seek Him and to have Him reign unchallenged in my heart. I know it because His Word says so, but I know it from my experience too. I’m just not right without Him. God also wired me, for whatever reason, to be passionate – to follow hard after what I’m going after. So I followed hard after sin, and that hurt. Now I follow hard after Him, and that seems much better. I am ever the adult-child, learning these very simple lessons and trying to be aware of my own need for time-outs. I need a lot of help.

I consider my old life to be in remission. I say that because I know I could make the decision to take it back on any crazy day. I could turn my face from God, and I could leave my green pastures to roam in fields of garbage and slime and filth. Sounds delightful, like the dog who returns to its own vomit, right? (see Proverbs 26:11). I think I’ll pass. For today, I seek Him for one more day, I thank Him for his provision of one more day, and I try not to look too far ahead. My mental projections into the future can be scary like horror movies, so it’s best if I just stay here for today with a grateful heart.

So it’s one more day of God speaking the same message into my life – that He brings good news in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead, that He scatters the darkness and brings life to death and wholeness to brokenness and health to sickness. He is infinitely good and patient with us beyond anything we can imagine, He leads us along and loves us and works on us, flaws and all. It is good to be a child of the king today!

If He can use me, then He can use you, too!