20101005

Why?

I once asked God in prayer why can't He just make things all better for me.

I asked God why must I have to put up with all these seemingly persistent, never-ending frustrations and difficulties of my recovery.

Why can't He make things better for me?

For recovery takes hard work. It's not just about quitting drugs - that's really just the surface appearance of things...

To the newbie recovering addict or to the uninitiated, it might seem like a very simple thing to ask an addict to make the choice to quit or to just continue on using.

But recovery is deeper than it looks.

Recovery is initially all about making that big, life-defining choice to quit using. Because the first choice is the wrong choice and everything else is the choice of the addiction. This initial choice is almost always forced upon an addict when he or she "bottoms out".

But the real work of recovery begins after that initial choice to quit using. Because what constitutes the real work of recovery is about making those little everyday decisions that allow me to uproot bad behavior and strengthen good ones; choices that seem invisible to the rest of the world.

Recovery both implicitly as well as explicitly requires that necessary exercise of virtue and the art of its grace. Because the essence of recovery is really all about re-learning to live my life aright once again - slowly but surely - without the use of drugs or the inclination to seek the false "high" of drugs.

And this takes hard work indeed - vigilant, anonymous work.

So I asked God one day and He replied to me - "my dearest child, if I take away your choices, then you would cease to be you, and it is you that I love and nothing else but."

Recovery is all about freedom. If God takes away that freedom, what's the point?

And it's not like I have no help in my recovery -

I have the help of my brothers and sisters-in-recovery within the fellowship of NA and in the DDB-EU TRC institution. I have family, and friends.

Above all, I have God, my dearest LORD, Who loves me more than I can ever love myself.

I just have to remain vigilant in my heart of hearts. I just have to know what and who I must love above all. And trust that that's no longer drugs.

As long as I am certain of this, I know by the grace of God, I shall continue on recovering.

Recovery is an ascent to freedom.

=^.^=