thoughts about recovery

I wonder about what recovery really is and I don’t know the answer. I didn’t think this was something important to consider while “in treatment”. I didn’t even stop to think about what being “in treatment” really even meant for my future. I thought it was obvious that recovery and being “in treatment” meant I had been really fucked-up for a long time, and now, I just wasn’t going to get fuck-up again once I got home, simple really. I remember about two weeks in, I wanted to go home. I was sure I was going home. They had an intervention with three other people. One being a woman who’d been a pastor, I guess still was, but one who’d lost their congregation due to her second relapse. I’d been feeling bad about making an idiot of myself in seminary, so she made me appreciate my situation of being in rehab about 33 years before her (I was lucky). I told them, no offense, but I wasn’t listening to anything they were saying. Not to be rude, or because I’m a bitch, but because my mind was already made-up and it wasn’t going to change, no matter what. Period. Being my first, and I still pray to God my last visit to rehab, I told the three interventions “I got this”. All being recovering addicts, and multiple visitors of various rehabs in their pasts, they all got offended. “You got this?” one woman said in a pissy tone, “Then, fine, go if you’ve got this.” Now I totally understand why that remark is offensive to a recovering addict, because sometimes I do not even know what this is. Or why whatever this is—is. I will probably never, ever “get this”. Some will come closer to figuring it out than others, but I don’t think any of will ever completely get “it”. When I thought of recovery while in treatment peaceful things like meadows, babbling brooks, butterflies and unicorns came to my mind. In the company of mostly well intentioned, kind, like minded people and professionals who cared about our well being and healing—I think, I must have thought the experience, the rite of passage of the rehab experience in itself was going to somehow make me a different person. I didn’t have the sense to fear that somehow I was going to be the one to make this change of self happen. Now, recover seems much more like war than the peace times I’d envisioned. It’s disappointing in a way because I often times, again, I feel ways I’d naively thought and hoped and prayed I’d never feel again. I still have thoughts and desires I despise being attached to. So first what recovery has become is disappointment in having to feeling everything I tried to drug into oblivion, but never successfully did. Recovery is living with those feelings and not being fucked-up, of course it’s war. Yet in this recovery sometimes there is somehow peace in the midst of war. Like a rainbow that shines through in the middle of a bad thunderstorm.

Ah, the lessons we learn.

Today I'm reminded that God can be found in all places and sometimes works in the most unlikely ways, through the most unlikely people. I've been fighting God, trying to push Him out of my heart for most of my life, but I've never been able to completely do that. It's been way to scary to simply let Him in. It's even scarier to think about being used by God, for His glory. Even though all us Christians say we want this, do we really? I think so, but I also think a lot of us are scared of it too, even if we do really want it. We don't want it to be uncomfortable or work or hard or scary and it's going to probaby end up being all of these things. In running from God I saw so many broken hearts, that didn't know they were even broken at the time, nor did I know the depts of the wounds of my own heart. I saw bad, devastating things happen to really good-hearted people who were making bad choices. I've learned that good-hearted people can do bad things and hurt other people, but that does not make that person, simply a bad person. I don't believe that there are simply bad people. However, there are LOTS of scared, hurting, and sad people out there. Through mistakes I've made, in a way, I've been healed. I have come to a point of deeper understanding, and deeper forgiveness for people who have hurt me in the past. The forgiveness which has replaced such deep hurt and resentment in my heart, has been healing... though very, very slowly, with many set backs. Still, I have a lot more patience and understanding for people than I use to. I want to know more fully and I want everyone to know of the kind of healing which only God offers. From what I know of living in darkness, to "survive" there you have to make yourself numb to the painful, disgraceful parts: the parts which alert you to the facts of your wrong doings. In making yourself numb to sin, for as long as you can, unfortunately you end up numb to the fact that there is something better out there too. You end up numbed to real love and forgiveness. Until everything crashes down. And then you're first faced with all this overwhemling ugliness both inside self and out. When this happens, and preferably before, I want people to know that no matter who they are, where they are, or what they are doing: they are loved. They're already forgiven and loved even before they seek this from God and once they seek, they can be made new. They are no less of a person, than anyone else. There is nothing which someone can do, to become unlovable to God. I know, I think... I've pretty much done it all which falls under the heading of sinful, disgusting, disgracefil and unlovable. I've lost loved ones along the way, but I'm still well loved by those whose presence in my life God bless me with and always, I'm loved by Him. And so are you.