Spiritual Survival Guide
5: Complicated Stuff
I’ve learned that God can deliver me from anything, and that I can come to him the way I am and that he will change me. —Volney Well now the same thing (about my addiction) can be said about my faith in God: I can’t live without him. —Duncan God has allowed me (through Christ) to change my desire from pleasing myself to pleasing him. —Dennis I’m so happy that my addiction is with the Lord now. I can honestly say that all I crave now is the truth and knowledge of my heavenly Father. —James The first thing you learn in A.A. is that you cannot overcome your addiction without having a “higher power.” For me that higher power is God. When facing my addiction I needed to remain strong and not give in. Most importantly, faith in God gave me something to stay sober for! —Doaikah I asked God to take away my desire for alcohol and drugs, and since then I have felt free of my addictions. —Robert Through my faith in God (and much prayer) he has delivered me from returning to this destructive lifestyle. —Jacques It wasn’t until I started getting a new mindset and a new identity through my faith in Jesus that the addiction lifted. I no longer saw myself and identified myself as a gang banger or a drug addict. I’m God’s man now. —Melvin
tion? Do we truly want to be free for God and for others? Or do we still want to be free to pick and choose our addictions? The way to the true freedom is going to take honesty, responsibility, simplicity, and patience. It takes honesty, because so much of what we do is deceptive or hidden. It takes responsibility, because God delivers us from our addictions so that we can finally live responsibly before him. It takes simplicity, because in the end it all comes down to quit- ting. The simplicity to just refuse to do it and keep on not doing it. The simplicity of not complicating things by substituting some other addiction. Finally, it’s going to take patience. Not infinite patience, but life-long patience. True freedom as an ongoing condition isn’t available to us in this life. For now, our brains, our minds and our spirits will keep on at- taching to inferior things. And yet God is always there, every step along the way, ready to help us detach—and giving us grace and power to reattach to him. Listen to how some addicted inmates talk about their addictions now.
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