Smashing the Upside Down World of Addiction

“When you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t.”

— LUKE DAVIES

I used to prefer the term ‘dependence’ to ‘addiction’, perhaps because to admit I had an addiction was to admit a shameful weakness. Surely dependence was a more dignifying way of describing my pattern of alcohol usage. I have been ‘dependent’ on other things as well, but it was alcohol that took me into this upside down reality most poignantly.

You know you’re addicted when you face times when you can stop but you don’t want to or when you want to stop but you can’t.

What a horrible reality it is that there are times when we have the motivation but not the wherewithal or times when we have the resources to do something yet not the motivation.

Until something desperate happens we rarely take the step we need to; as it occurs in addiction.

What we need most of all is something that will shake us to our core.

We need something that will turn our upside down addicted reality upside down. There is nothing better than the kingdom of God to provide this reverse upside down reality.

God uses rock bottom experiences in convicting us there is no other way but over and through the present weakness that has taken us to this very rock bottom.

And conviction (the Holy Spirit’s conviction) is the thing we need—to be convicted that there is no other way but to take the hardest road to the best possible vision of a new life beyond this entrapping weakness that controls our lives.

If we are one who lives with an addicted person—no matter their addiction—because the manifestation of all addictions is similar—we have gotten used to feelings of the forlorn. We have given up so many times on the distant hope that our partners would get better. They promised again and again and again, and again and again and again they failed. If they were kicked in the guts we were stabbed in the guts.

The best thing for the upside down world of addiction is the upside down role of the truth that smashes the upside down world into a billion pieces. Truth sets free, but truth requires strength and a world of faith to thrive when pitted against addiction.

The worst thing can become the best thing, but only if we surrender wholeheartedly to the God of our creation. And truth must be the form of our surrender; that we are, indeed, honest against ourselves when we need to be.

***

Addiction is an upside down reality, where we don’t want what we can’t stop but we can’t live without it. We need two things to overcome it: 1) for God, by our circumstances, to institute a rock bottom experience; and 2) for the sheer will to be wholeheartedly honest in tackling the truth so as to overcome this nemesis one day at a time by faith.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.