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“Hi, I’m Gary. I’m an addict seeking an agent.”
Every Tuesday around 8 o’clock someone hears me say this. It varies, what I say, but that is the gist of it. I can and have been addicted to several ‘agents.’ Among them are alcohol, pornography, work, nicotine, just to name a few. Each has wrapped their tentacles in and around my life.
The only word sufficient to describe my state was ‘bondage.’ Sin has a way of getting in and overtaking ones life. The Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death. At some point, this principle must get off the paper in into our hearts.
Twice, while being held secure by my ‘agent’, my listless passion considered how to dispatch my life. There was nothing I could see on the horizon but more chains. The mental anguish and frustration produced a near-sightedness which glasses do not correct. My hopeless shame nourished itself on my inability to stop. The most accurate description for my life in those times was ‘death.’
Attending a 12 step recovery group and actually working the steps was fine. It helped me to systematically rebuild, or maybe build, my life. That was great for as far as it goes. I still could not say ‘life’ was found. I began living without the use of my ‘agent’ but ‘the god as we understood him’ didn’t quench my thirst.
I have been around the tables for a few twenty-four-hours and have seen many addicts not using but also not recovering. Most of the old patterns of relating remain. They are involved with the non-bar crowd but live a bar crowd life. I suppose, staying with the life and death metaphor, one could say they are in a walking coma.
Here is the inside skinny: Life is spiritual. Just as the death mentioned in the Bible is spiritual with physical and emotional affects, so the life we read about in the Bible is spiritual, with physical and emotional affects.
When I came to the God of the Bible, I began to observe signs of life. My vision began to clear and I noticed others around me. I didn’t simply recognize they were there. I noticed that they were nice and sort of fun to be with. Spending time with others who were also coming to the God of the Bible melted my frozen heart and brought a smile on my face.
When I came to Jesus, the God of the Bible’s Son, hope ignited. That was a very different and extremely exciting feeling. Life was resurrected within me. My future no longer looked redundant. Interesting pathways showed up. Beauty could be seen, in living color, all around and even within me. This was an echo of a distant memory, when I was a child; before all the ‘agents’ which anchored my life. This could only be described by the word ‘life.’
“The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23 NAS). The life Paul mentions is a quality of life known as “eternal.” This life is connected to and reflective of the God of the Bible’s nature. His nature is clearly appreciated in Jesus. When one comes to Jesus and participates in His death, burial, and resurrection, symbolized in baptism, He shares that nature in the person of the Spirit. Now life, the eternal sort of life, lives through me and anyone desiring it.
Life is spiritual. It infiltrates every resistant stronghold seeking to establish death. It restores our innocence. It raises us from the dead. Joy breaks out through times of peace. Love for self and others shock our senses. A surprising desire to be good finds us. We even like that idea. And, one of the greatest things for an addict, self-control establishes itself. All these, and a multitude of others, are symptoms of life.
In my experience, only those who come to Jesus find recovery; i.e. life. Only He ‘breathes’ spiritual life into us. Only those with that “Breath” of life within experience what it is to be alive.
Addiction is a death problem; a spiritual problem. Recovery is all about life; spiritual life. The sort of life celebrated daily in wonderful relationships with the breathing, living people of God.
I continue to attend the meetings. Life is contagious. Maybe I can infect others and they can live too.
Gary F Schloemer is the minister at the Rhinelander Church of Christ in Rhinelander Wisconsin. He and several other former 'drunks' founded the Serenity Group in 1989. After five years of sobriety his thinking cleared up enough to realize the difference between life and death. "Life is much more fun."
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