Relapse after relapse sees us right back where we started – this time, again, our heads are spinning. It is the heart now that must restore the head, and for the head to continue the fight through this following day. We do not give up!
How do we meet and beat such a nemesis? It is one day and one moment at a time. There is no other way that works. But beneath that fact lays another one—there must be a bevy of strategy, and patience beneath that also is a key. We must be willing to slow down on our approach to life—for whole days will often feel like weeks.
Restoring the Mind
When the mind is defeated—facing its own temporary stupor—it’s the determination of the heart that addresses the situation. It awakens the mind gently by cleansing it of its sin and redressing it in the capability of fresh and clean clothes to subsist into the next minutes of regeneration.
The heart sees the lack of confidence resplendent of an empty and harrowing mind. It sees the destructiveness of it all. It needs to be empathetic. How much worse the situation is made when the heart castigates the mind in all manner of guilt-ridden and guilt-encroaching self-condemnation.
It is the role of the heart to support and not condemn.
We see now the importance of the heart to get us back on track mentally. To see the hope that the mind can’t possibly see right now.
Shoring Up Hope with Strategies
The mind is actually quickly restored. The thinking centre of our beings needs to be so it is powered to innovate and create strategies that will bring about the evidentiary confidence required to sustain us.
But still we must enjoy the spirit of the heart as it buoys our thinking, creating for us an undercurrent that tows us through the mess we find ourselves in.
We draw from the entire landscape of our known world to design immediate, mid-term and longer term strategies that will see us through our recovery to this problem. And at times we need external help—that’s good, to seek it out.
Strategies are deeply practical interventions that collude with each other in an overlapping sort of way to create for us a safety net; one toward the achievement of our objective(s).
Patience – for Another Journey That’s Now Only Just (Again) Begun
Honesty is crucial. We must be honest with ourselves, with trusted others and with God—brutally, but sympathetically, honest.
But perhaps as important as honesty is patience. On day one we can be over it already. We struggle for the patience required because what we see in front of us is work with no reward because the rewards are now a long way off.
We must repeal the vision of hopelessness and stay anesthetised from the moment and the dream. We try not to think too much.
Let us cherish peace in the mind, and therefore the heart, as reward itself. And patience gets us there. Patience also implies surrender; that we’re now in the lap of a merciful God who’ll see us through if we will just obey the Spirit’s gentle leading each minute.
The rewards for such expressed faith will and do come.
© 2010 S. J. Wickham.
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