The most inspirational recovery accounts are not held by those who seemingly recovered overnight, but by those who recovered as a slow burn over the many months, years, even decades.
This may not seem much an encouragement to those who are in the ‘early going’ or for those who are only entering what seems the hell of truth.
The fact is, you’re not on a road to nowhere.
You’re on a road to somewhere called YOU—the real you.
Even though recovery seems like it’s a road to nowhere, it’s by faith that we realise that the hope we hope for is drawing us through all the way to a destination that has the paradoxical concept of journey about it.
If there’s anything that recovery teaches us, it’s that the whole of life is a journey, and we never reach the destination, and that is okay.
The key issue about repentance is that it is not an overnight process where we try to convince someone we’re serious about change.
Truly we cannot prove anything to anyone, least of all ourselves, through a promise to change. The only way to prove anything to anyone, most of all ourselves, is through the long slow and at times bitter grind of working it out in observable behaviour. That’s true repentance; as Langberg contends, not through words, tears, emotions.
Now, our heart will never choose for this, but it is the biggest blessing when the forces for change force us to continue with the change that’s necessary.
Nobody truly chooses the hard, excruciating path—God always leads us there, with our intrinsic reluctance in tow.
Again, it is the biggest blessing when the forces for change force us to continue with the change that’s necessary. Those forces for change convince us there’s only one way, and however painful, we can know it as “the good way” because we’re honouring truth.
What I mean by this is, when nobody rescues us, it feels especially hard, but when nobody rescues us, we keep trudging the way of our recovery, because in not being rescued there’s only one way to continued hope, and that is to keep stepping in faith, even if it’s the most painful thing.
Those forces for change are the very things that keep us going on our recovery journey, even as they keep sufficient pressure on us to maintain our bearing on that straight way. However arduous it is. See how, in not being rescued, in not being removed from the pain, our recovery is assured, more and more day by day.
We need these forces to keep us going on a different track to where we’ve been before.
It’s in this long journey along the long road of recovery that we BEGIN to live a life that resembles heart change—and truly this new life of recovery is the new life that will continue.
It needs to continue, ad infinitum.
We never reach the destination, for the destination is heart change, and the destination is lived out along the journey, but it is a perilous destination, because we can backslide out of that heart change without continued attention to our spirituality of being truthful with ourselves.
When we expect repentance to be exemplified through words and tears and emotions, we somehow know that it cannot and will not stick. This is again why I say that the forces for change that force us to continue on the narrow and painful way are a huge blessing in disguise.
The narrow and painful way heralds
the eternal way that keeps us honest and on track.
It’s way of the disciple of Christ.
We can have our fake repentance if we want. Whenever people accept the fauxnerability of a sincerity of words, tears, and emotions, they shortcut the process, and without even knowing it, they agree to let the person off the hook.
The words and tears and emotions all seem sincere, but repentance is a long slow and at times bitter grind without end, because repentance is a new way and that new way is lived out each and every henceforth day.
To those who are in a genuine recovery process, know that YOU are a rarity. God sees you. Hardly anybody commits themselves to the long slow and at times bitter grind to the better and possibly best version of ourselves.
Not many will get this, and not many will commit.
But if you are genuinely sincere, you will commit for the long haul, and that heart change stepped out day after day after day for many months, extending into the years, and into the decades, is the way life has now come to be. And you never return to that old life. The new has come—true salvation.
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