This is Hopeless…..Or is It?
The Nightly News, Meteorites, and BFF’s
I watch the news and wonder, how have so many people gotten so mad, so quickly….about everything? Don’t answer that! I don’t want anyone getting themselves in a tizzy on my account. It’s funny though, as soon as technology allowed the entire world to have a voice, everybody forgot how to listen. Senators in the Roman Empire were likely thinking the same thing, right before the fall. Maybe they call it breaking news because it puts the brakes on joy. And if your not careful, it can send you tumbling down a anxiety laden rabbit hole that no amount of self help will get you out of.
The nightly news screams at us that the world is hopeless, but a Christian knows better. We know hope and He’s intoxicating. It’s always been my all-in-one-word description of what Christ has given me. Not religion, or traditions, or any system thought up by men. But a one-on-one, personal, give and take relationship with hope Himself. And it's not some pie in the sky rewards program but hope validated by practical daily help. I need that since I tend to conjure up a life altering, existential crisis every single day.
Recently, I read a story of a Christian guy struggling with alcohol addiction. He had been sober for a while but wondered if he could or even should, stay on the wagon. In his past he’d experienced some terrible financial and familial consequences and fear of repeating it was keeping him straight. But how long can you hold out with fear as your fuel? As a recovering alcoholic (sober 5 years) I can certainly identify with what he is going through. His story touched me because I can remember times of desperately wanting to get sober and not being able to. Or being white knuckle sober and mad at the world because of it. It’s a common belief in addiction circles that you have to hit rock bottom before you can begin recovery and that was certainly true with me.
As I’ve mentioned before, prison was the bottom for me. My life had disintegrated and I was terrified of what might come next. I lived in tension and any day expected to glance up and see a meteorite barreling down on me. Prison, and that meteorite thing, were enough to get me sober, but it’s hope that’s kept me sober. Hope that Jesus would do the heavy lifting and see me through, because I’d never been able to manage it.
As you can imagine, everybody in prison has abused drugs or alcohol at some point on their journey towards incarceration. Time slowly ticking away while hanging with one thousand of your BFF’s (not true at all), hardly encourages drug abstinence. And it was extraordinary the lengths people would go to get high in prison. Alcohol was difficult simply because it took up space and obviously couldn’t be smuggled because of its bulk, but drugs were another thing. The most common drug in prison was K2. Not to be confused with what the outside world calls K2, which is some sort of synthetic marajuana. In prison, it was a different animal altogether. I’ve heard all sorts of recipes for prison K2 but the most commonly accepted was that it was paper with Raid sprayed on it. I have no idea how they discovered that Raid would get you high but K2 was everywhere in prison. Primarily because people could simply spray Raid on a letter and mail it to an inmate, who promptly rolled and smoked that heartfelt letter from mom.
I know it sounds crazy and gets even crazier when you hear some of the side effects. One of the most comical was they would freeze up, commonly known as “getting stuck”. It didn’t matter when or where…..they simply froze up. I remember one guy got stuck halfway up a flight of stairs, in mid step. One hand on the rail and one foot in the air. Passing him on the stairs, I stopped to ask if he was alright and like a ventriloquist he murmured, “I stuck”. Stood there for hours before getting moving again. Next day he was so messed up he had to be led to work because he couldn’t stay on the sidewalk.
Prison really changed my thinking on drugs and alcohol because I didn’t meet a single inmate who believed they would be in prison if they’d never taken a drink or done a drug. I’m not talking about people in prison for selling drugs to make money, but all people in prison, regardless of their crime. Can you believe that? Not one person! According to my highly unscientific but terribly interesting survey, prisons would be practically empty if mind altering substances didn’t exist.
Don’t misunderstand, I’m no Prohibitionist and I believe people should get to make their own choices since they’re eventually going to be judged for them. It’s just dangerous! I speak from experience when I say it can anesthetize your conscience and cloud your reasoning until some truly crazy things seem completely reasonable. And in this divisive world you might find yourself facing horrific consequences for a bit of overindulgence. Scares me to death for my kids and coming grandkids. I do a lot of praying about it.
Back to that struggling Christian alcoholic………..he is me, before prison. Struggling to do it all under my own power and managing for a while, but always faltering in the end. My memory was a part of the problem. The fear of consequences would fade, I would forget exactly how bad things had been, and somehow convince myself that this time would be different. In short, my hope was in me.
Thankfully, God is long-suffering. I can’t begin to tell you how many opportunities God gave me to let Him in and end the madness. In truth, I had a really hard time giving up control and it’s still a daily touch-and-go kind of thing. But you simply cannot understand what the world really looks like until you see it with a changed heart. And you can’t get that without surrendering it all to Him. He will change you from the inside out but you’ve got to let Him run the show. Yea, it's hard but then most growth is.
Oh, and before you go feeling too sorry for the drug addicts and alcoholics, I’d like to point out that we are the lucky ones in one sense. We have an in-your-face kind of problem……that we can’t fix. For many, that unfixable problem pushes them to the only one who can fix it.
God definitely has a soft spot for the foolish ones of the world………And most of us have been foolish a time or two!
