Spiritual Survival Guide
5: Complicated Stuff
If all that weren’t bad enough, much of this is happening subconscious- ly, out of sight. Most of the time, we don’t even understand our own motivations. And even if we do, there’s no half-way step. Both God’s Word and bitter personal experience teach us that the more we try to moderate, to cut down or “manage,” the deeper we get attached to our addictions. That just starts a downward spiral: The worse we rebound when we inevitably fail, the more we lose hope, the more we beat our- selves up, the more defective and worthless and unclean we feel, and the stronger our demons get. One time Jesus talked about this terrible out-of-control spiral and about what happens when we try to clean our spiritual house ourselves and get free without God’s grace. He said we might clear out that unclean spirit for a while, but it’ll inevitably come back
This is life and death. For some of us, and for our friends and family, this is physical life and death. For others, this is psychological life and death. We feel tortured and depressed by endless mind games and shat- tered self-esteem. And for all of us, this is spiritual life and death. Our addictions are tearing us in two, robbing us of our freedom, and discon- necting us, on a fundamental level, from God and from everyone else. Addiction not only sucks the life out of us, it sucks the love out of us. No wonder St. Paul cried out in his letter, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). But then he imme- diately answers his own question. Who will? God will, through Jesus. We’re at the heart of the mystery of addiction and salvation. The mys- tery of the things we know and the things we don’t know. We know who (Jesus), but we don’t know how . We know that Jesus was, and is, able to meet people in the midst of their bondage and deliver them—set them on the way to freedom. What we don’t know is how those demons and addictions got broken. It takes both human faith and God’s grace, but exactly how those two intersect—how our tiny mustard seed of faith can help set us free—that we don’t know. What we do know is that Jesus healed where there was no human hope left. What we don’t know is how God can love us that much. Breaking the power of addiction always involves a painful process of detaching, of “un-nailing.” Have you ever struggled to pull a nail out of a piece of wood? There’s often a lot of resistance. It can leave some ugly scars. That’s what it can feel like to un-nail ourselves from our addiction. Other times it can feel as if we’re walking through a desert with a deep emptiness inside—hoping that God will somehow show up there with us. What we don’t always know is how to answer the awful underlying questions: What do we really want most? Do we want God for himself? Or do we want God only in order to get us out of our painful addic-
with a vengeance—bringing a whole bunch of even more evil spirits with it and leaving us worse off than when we started (Matthew 12:43-45). That’s exactly what we experience when we try to handle and control our way out of addiction. We get addicted in our bodies, and our very own cells conspire to keep us addicted. We get addicted in our minds,
and our very own minds play tricks on us. The apostle Paul talked about this internal agony and struggle: how we’ve lost our freedom; how we can’t do the good we want; how we do the very things we don’t want to do; how we’re at war with ourselves—quite literally killing ourselves (Romans 7:14-25). Like us, the people Jesus freed from addiction and demonic forces were people in desperation. They were on the edge, out of their right minds, at risk, alienated, alone, out of control.
92
93
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online