Desire, Addiction and Grace

Ache, think, breathe
A junkie no longer defined
Confronting the lie, denying the fix
Choosing faith to stand this fight

Spin around dizzyingly, hesitant to step
A landscape littered with scars and snares
Of a walk beyond God, despite God
Choosing grace to repent this friendship

Pieces of true scattered in offering
Wholeness of truth revealed before God
Trying again to walk friendship
Choosing hope to learn this love

My latest forays into God, self, and growth (I don't know what it is about patterns of three, but I use them so much that the rhythm of a sentence feels unnatural without them) have taken me into the topics of desire, attachment, addiction, idolatry and sin. Just a little light contemplation you might say.

In my life, God is in the habit of allowing me to stumble into some emotional and raw places prior to bringing me some revelation of where I am and why I am. So this time around I was cycling through stuff I figured should already be dead and buried, but it was doing a pretty good zombie imitation. I had gone from a place of calm to one where I was pissed at God for bringing someone into my life just to show me how messed up I was, and then ripping them away. I let Him know that I thought that was a pretty crappy move on His part, and He might consider a person's feelings next time before getting so high handed with the pawns on the chess board. Thankfully, God is way bigger than any of my childish temper tantrums.

I next found myself talking to Him about that desire in me, that I couldn't seem to get filled, for that one person always there, always loving you, always listening to you, always laughing with you and believing in you; that person you could hand over the sword to and know that you were still safe; that person who would never leave you. I told Him I really did get it that He was to be that person and to be the only one, but I couldn't help asking, "When?" And what was I supposed to do with this miserable ache in the meantime? I surprised myself in my raw honesty with Him as I said, I can understand Esau. I can understand how being able to see, smell, taste and immediately receive a bowl of stew could outweigh the promise of a birthright you couldn't fully grasp the extent or significance of.

How many of us truly understand what heaven is or what it means to be one with God. How many of us really feel, in the midst of our daily emptiness or pain (not the soul crashing stuff but the sneaky little ebb and flow), able to wait 50 or 60 years for something we don't fully even grasp. It is like telling a 5 year-old to put his very first ever birthday money into a Roth IRA rather than going to the dime store for a toy and candy. Out of obedience he may do it, but he doesn't grasp it and in not grasping it there will come a time when he will just say, "enough with somewhere down the road, I'm buing something for me now."

So deep into that place of "me now," I picked up John Eldredge's book, "Journey of Desire" and Gerald May's book, "Addiction and Grace." We are created with an aching desire to be complete in our union with God, a desire so strong that it drives our soul. Our problem comes in however, because in this fallen world, that desire for completeness with God can never be fully realized. We have to wait for Christ's coming. But the desire is still there and that leaves us with some hard choices: do we deny the desire and stuff it away so deeply that it no longer draws breath in us; do we grasp in desperation the first person, mindset, drug, activity, etc. that temporarily masks the ache; or do we chose to wait in our desire for God Himself?

When we deny the desire we kill any chance in this world of intimately experiencing God, of knowing His joy and love. We walk an arid wasteland not even realizing we are dying of thirst. When we grasp things, people or ideas we attach to them, and they become addictions in our life. As addictions they become idols supplanting God as our hope for fullfillment. That is sin. Loving us as He does, God must remove these things from our life. In the process we go through anger, grief, even withdrawal. And none of it feels good.

Then there is the choice to wait. The Bible tells us that Noah waited on God, as he sat in the ark surveying the destruction God had wrought. That Hebrew word for wait is, "yachal." It is translated as to hope, trust and patiently expect. We are to trust in God's promises to us, in the midst of the apparent absence in our life with just such waiting. I had Jason Upton's song, "I will wait," going through my head at some point in all of this. And in repentance, love and need I prayed, "I will wait for you, Jesus." But then the last line of the song caught me. "I will wait another day." And like an alcoholic in AA, I realized and admitted to God that I am an addict here on earth, and my choice of God versus "Me Now" will have to be made one day at a time, sometimes even one hour at a time. And thank God that when I fall off that wagon there will be Grace to lead me home.