Something Bigger

Your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
-Colossians 3:3 

I have a friend who is a major St. Louis Cardinals fan.  When I say “fan,” keep in mind that it is shortened for “fanatic,” as in whoa, that dude is a fanatic or have you ever met someone as fanatical as he?  That’s the level of “fan” I’m talking about here.  He’s a devotee, a follower, an admirer of the Cardinals.

Apparently, he has difficulty functioning when baseball season comes around.  He goes to work and all that, but is constantly obsessed with the games and scores and players.  He’s told me about times when he couldn’t listen to the radio in the car because the day before the Cardinals lost and he couldn’t bear to hear the repeat of their failure over the airwaves.  Or how he meant to study for one of his classes but couldn’t because a game was on.  The other night I road with him for an hour in the car and counted 8 times that he checked the current game’s score on his phone.

One of the things about his fanaticism that I love is the way he identifies himself with the team.  He uses words like “we” and “our” and “us” when talking about them, like we played a good ball game last night or our manager in an interview said…   He connects with them so much that he talks as if he is a part of their team. 

I thought this was the strangest thing in the world, so I asked him about this once.  His reply was something along the lines of, Yeah, it’s my team.  We’re in it together.  He spoke of how at games, the entire stadium would stand as one when a good play was made, and he would be giving high-five’s to complete strangers sitting around him.  Everyone joined as one for this, their team, either celebrating or grieving depending upon their performance, rising and falling with the ins and the outs of the games and the lives of their players.  

So, in a sense, this friend “owns” the team and everything about it — not as a possession, but as a way of identifying himself with them.  Whatever they do, they do together, even with their greatest fanat –er, fans. He marks himself with the Cardinals team, connects himself with them, tags himself as a fan, labels himself, names himself, recognizes himself as the team does.  They win, he wins.  They lose, he loses.  They get injured, he feels the pain.  

We could talk about existential things like transcendence and how my friend is attaching himself to something bigger than him and about perhaps the society in which we live that has lost so much of the sacred that we used to be able to associate ourselves with.  But I think the most instructive thing in all of it is the nature of identifying with something.  There’s something sacred in it still.

It may be a sports team, a band, a business or professional organization, a school, a church, a religion, a whiskey bottle, a brand name, a family, a group of friends — all kinds of things.  The point in it is that we are made to live a life bigger than just us.

Maybe that’s what Rich Mullins meant when he said, “If I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, whom I claim to be my Savior and Lord…”  (This Jesus who is the greatest and most transcendent thing we can attach ourselves to.)  Then the best way to do that is to throw yourself into His life the way this man does the Cardinals’ life.  Fully.  Completely.  Immersed.  Associated with, labeled, named, tagged, linked, connected.  Adoring with the whole self, “in secret, between the shadow and the soul,” as Pablo Neruda had it:

“So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”

 

The Voice

One of my favorite places to go when I want to study is a coffee shop in a local town. It’s all about the atmosphere for me. First off, there are a host of large benches, where I can spread out my books and still have room for my laptop. And there are corner benches, so that I am isolated enough with my back to a wall that I can get work done, but still some part of the calm activity going on around me. I like it because I turn on my iPod and focus intently on what I want to learn or pray or write, yet distractions abound when I want them. There are interesting people to watch and conversations to overhear and pastries to sample. There is life going on around me, yet often faded and overshadowed by the life I find through the conversation with God that companionship with Him offers and that I usually enter into when I’m in this cafe.

I am here now, by the way, but today things are a bit different. I found a bench. My Bible and journal and computer are spread around on the table before me. I’ve entered into some good dialogue already with the Lord God. But, for some reason, this place is hopping today. People are flooding into it; the line at the registers have, at times, nearly gone out the door. And the group of ladies behind me are pretty excitable and definitely chatty in their enthusiasm. It’s as if there is a family reunion going on in the two sets of seats behind me. I’ve had to turn up the volume on my music so as to not feel like I’m eavesdropping, and so that I can concentrate on the book I’m reading. In short, there are too many distractions around me.

In all of this, I find the perfectly fitting analogy of our life with God. In fact, this is exactly what I am reading about, listening to the “still small voice” of God, and I wonder if He is not illustrating it the conflict between the inner hunger of my heart for communion with Him and the hustle and bustle around me. There is a still and quiet motion in the midst of the activity. A center point around which everything seems to be revolving and next to all else seems to be out of focus. Jeffrey Satinover describes this well, in speaking of the still small voice of God:

“I have often wondered why the voice of God is so quiet and so still. Perhaps He is trying to train us to listen. Just as by his very quiet the gentleman in a room of shouting oafs eventually compels attention, perhaps God draws us to His voice not by out-shouting our inner babble, but by the whispered truths that reveal His character.”

I found this quote in the book I came here to read, and it is dead-on in illustrating the struggle. I picture being in a bar (why a bar, I’m not sure, but that’s what came to mind), and there’s a lot of activity going on around me: conversations and a game of darts and spilled beer and the juke box playing a loud rendition of Garth Brook’s “Friends in Low Places” while a half dozen sing karaoke-style off key. In walks this Gentleman, this Character, this Person, and few recognize Him. Maybe no one does — no one pays attention. But my eyes catch Him. Somehow, He demands attention by His easy movements, by the way in which He seems to move in a different speed than the rest, as if He doesn’t quite belong in the same timeframe as the rest, or maybe the rest doesn’t belong with Him. His motions are intentional, and His eyes lock on mine the moment He enters the door. He whispers something, and I know it is meant for my ears. I am compelled to draw nearer Him so as to hear better. This Voice is that of my God’s, and I recognize it immediately, because I have heard it before. All the other distractions of my heart quiet down, fade, even disappear, and I am left with only this One before me. Now I can hear and even participate in this conversation, where I am instructed in truth and life.

This is the experience of all who want to hear the voice of God. “This,” says Leanne Payne, “is what we understand as we reason together with God: ‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord’ (Isaiah 1:18, KJV).”

Looking up, the lines have dwindled. The ladies behind me finished their coffee and boisterous conversation. The song through my mp3 player has shifted to a soft and poignant symphony from the soundtrack to “August Rush.”  And my heart is resting a bit more.  I’m entering into that place of centered, practical fellowship with the Creator of the universe that is both my birthright and the source of my life (John 17:3).  This is the place in which I am to abide throughout the day, a continual dialogue of praise, petition, intercession, healing, listening, reasoning, rest, intimacy… of union (1 Thess. 5:17).

As Thomas A. Smail has said, “The central secret of the Christian life is that we are adopted into this relationship as children of this Father.”  We are made for this kind of communal life with God.

 

The Soul Dissed-Satisfied

Every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved — whatever may come my way.
-St. Patrick

I wonder about our willingness to endure “whatever may come our way” for the sake of something greater than ourselves. I wonder about how we in the “West” handle suffering and pain and what we do with it. (I speak of “West” here not as a geographical description but as an ideological designation.) The church in the West has adapted itself to the overriding culture of the day, one that pours every ounce of energy into avoiding pain — through diversion, entertainment, shallow relationships, easy investments, psychobabble, and the religion of popular talk show hosts.

Suffering is the pain caused by the division between desire and satisfaction, and we try our best to bring satisfaction up to the level of our desires.

It never works, or not permanently at least. At some point it fails. Always. Every time. What we do with that failure marks our movement toward either an authentic growth in godliness and transformation or a slinking away from it, a creeping toward (as the only alternative) death.

The Buddhists are familiar with the issue of suffering. The entire religion is built, in fact, upon the evasion of suffering through the eightfold path. The ultimate goal of Nirvana is really a state of complete detachment and desirelessness. It is the absolute absolution of desire. They try to bring desire down to the level of their satisfaction. This also does not work. Desire cannot be completely killed, nor can it be permanently locked away.

What Christ has done is to bridge the gap between our desire and satisfaction. He transforms even our understanding of suffering — remember, this comes from the gap between desire and satisfaction — by daring us not to desire less, but to desire more. And then he dares us to believe that we can actually have what we really want (that is faith). Of course, our desire has to be increased dramatically, maybe infinitely, and He usually does not give us satisfaction of our small desires. We are made for more than those. New cars, fancy clothes, even our version of peace and prosperity — these things would trick us into thinking they are what we are really after. No, He takes us into deeper places of hope, requiring greater levels of faith.

All of this I say this today because I have recently experienced a very personal and painful betrayal, one that has brought me poignantly face-to-face with suffering, and I wonder again its purpose. What is God up to in it? Why does He choose to use it more, sometimes, than any other thing, to bring His redemption and restoration? “To reconcile both of them [Jews and Gentiles] to God through the cross,” as Paul put it in Ephesians 2:16, the cross being the breaking and shattering point of all human suffering, the singularity at which the distance between desire and satisfaction was at the greatest and was born under by one man, Jesus. Whatever else is said of the suffering our Lover-God experienced there, surely by way of it he “put to death” hostility among men and between men and God. This is peace, and this is what we are to desire. Since Christ is the only fulfillment of that desire, we cannot allow it to be filled by any lesser thing if we want it to draw us to the Lord. As Kenneth Boa said, “We must grow in the realization that no earth-bound felicity can fully satisfy the deepest God-given longings of our hearts.”

At the point in Patrick’s life when he uttered these words quoted above, he had long been used to the pains and pangs of human life. He had been naked and hungry as a young man kidnapped by Irish and forced into slavery. He had known what it was to be alone and frightened, broken of body and of heart. But in the midst of those looming shadows, he encountered something greater than his own pain, a secret he held to and sought after, a secret that sustained him throughout his ordeal then and his calling when he later returned to Ireland as a bishop, a secret that kept the fire in his belly burning when all others were snuffed out on the damp and windy hills of that pagan isle. It was a secret that allowed him to embrace suffering, not as an end in itself as a Stoic would, but as a means to something else.

His teacher Paul knew the same secret. Listen in closely to what he says in Philippians 3: “I want to know Christ and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings…” Good Lord. Really? Does he not know what it was that Christ suffered at that still point on the cross, the dividing historical event between the old and the new, between death and life? Why would he want to suffer with Christ? Because through it, he could “attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Because life was in the balance. And because of Christ, in the suffering there is life, because there is fellowship with Life Himself.

What hangs in the balance with the betrayal I am faced with is everything. What I do with it will determine whether or not my own desire — and possibly the desire of those who betrayed me and my friends — will deepen, and so approach more fully Christ’s own desire, or whether or not I will try to starve it. The first means that I will suffer, deeply, but it also means I will know Christ all the more. The latter is the easier, broader way, the more common route and the one that I could only enter into through some sort of denial or numbing. It is the way of death.

As the greatest contemporary theologian (in my opinion) Rich Mullins once said, “So go out and live real good and I promise you’ll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you’re dead, you’ll be rotted away anyway. It’s not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn’t live. And when you wash up on that other shore, even though you’ve been disfigured beyond and recognition, the angels are gonna see you there and they’ll go, ‘What is *that*? We’re not even sure if it’s human.’ But Jesus will say, ‘No, that’s human. I know that one.’”

Jesus will touch me or speak my name and I will rise. He will look me in the face and ask if in these moments — when all around is at a breathless standstill awaiting my response, while in the midst of the bitter pain of betrayal not unlike in kind but less in degree to that of Jesus — whether or not we knew each other. Because today is the day of salvation. It is here, in the dirt and grime of suffering, that we can experience the staggeringly intimate love of our God. In the words of George Herbert, “Here, in the dust and dirt, O here the lilies of His love appear.”

 

Time Wounds All Heels

There are some things that time can not mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold. -Frodo, The Return of the King

Frodo and Sam have come a long way on their journey. For months the two hobbits fought all that Mordor would bring against them in their quest to save the Shire — and the whole of Middle Earth — from ultimate destruction. “We set out to save the Shire, Sam,” Frodo told his faithful friend. Tears streamed down the loyal gardener’s face as Frodo’s words fell on his ears. Somehow, he knew that Frodo could never go back to his old life. He had seen too much. His heart had been burdened too heavily by the weight it was given to bear. Frodo finished his statement with a finality of such poignancy that Sam’s heart was wrenched from his chest, “And it has been saved. But not for me.” The fellowship that had for so long protected and sustained each of them had at last come to an end. Frodo was to board the last ship leaving for the Grey Havens, for Tolkien’s metaphor for heaven. His time on earth was over.

I hate the expression that “time heals all wounds.” It’s not true. Time heals nothing. In fact, the distance time creates is often an illusion, and can even crater a wound instead of healing it. “How do you pick up the threads of an old life?” Frodo asks himself. “How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?” There is a deep truth that Frodo, years after the fellowship had completed its mission and he had returned to the Shire, began to understand. Time had not healed his heart. It had not erased the pain of his body and mind. The weight of the ring had crippled him beyond the restoration that time could offer. He needed something greater to resurrect his life. He needed the “far green country under a swift sunrise,” as Gandalf had earlier described it, where ” the grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all change to silver glass…the white shores… and beyond.”

In Tokien’s world, the ring represents evil in its purest form, and the ring bearer is slowly taken beyond the border of life into the realm of death. Throughout the story, Frodo’s life is slowly but inevitably disintegrated and diminished, soon beyond any hope of repair available on earth. Such it is with all of us since the Fall. The sin that we inherited through disobedience weighs on all of us. Even the earth itself has been set against us: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17). All of us have been wounded and will be by the Evil One, as God said we would (v. 15). None of us escape it. And nothing the world can offer will be able to heal these wounds or resurrect our hearts that have been weighed down too heavily by the effects of separation on our souls, torn as they are from life toward diminishment, disintegration, and, ultimately, death.

If we are to be restored at all to the life we were made to live, it must come from beyond us and beyond our world, yet come into our world to reach us where we are. We are far too weak to even reach out beyond ourselves for it. It must come to us, and it must come all the way to us.

This is the promise of Jesus for us. It is why His coming is such good news, and why people for centuries have fallen into His provision with abandon. Because there is no other. Nothing else can restore us, including time itself. What Jesus offers us is a complete restoration, so whole and complete that the Scriptures refer to it as a resurrection, meaning that the life we live now is death in comparison to the life we get to live.

I am astounded at this offer. How can we refuse it, if we really knew what it was about? And the cost… it was everything for Him. He bore the weight of it, taking it from us and transferring it to His own shoulders. Apparently, He could not stand the thought of our dying, being lost to Him forever. And so He came, wild with desire and hope and joy He came. My friends, this is the offer. How can we refuse Him? How could we turn our backs on life toward the death we now experience in our souls? How could we but faint into Him and accept this invitation? Nothing more matters to Him than our restoration back into the life He always intended us to live, a life full and at His side.

I am taken by His love, and I can do nothing but gasp with my fainting breath a solid yes to the offer. Where else could I go?

 

The Greatest Mystery

The day promised to be beautiful, one of the warmer and sunnier days of the month. My journey would take me more than two hours from home, and I awoke and greeted the pre-dawn morning with thoughts of my drive and my time. Would it be good? I had anticipated this day for a couple of weeks now. I was planning on meeting someone. Some days earlier a friend who knew what I wanted for this day, what I needed, told me what he had overheard: that I would be met there in the cabin. There would be someone waiting for me. But would I be met there, as promised? Was this more a scheme of my own making than an invitation I was pursuing? Would this one I was meeting really show up? Or worse… what if this one really did show up — what then? I’ve learned from times past that often what I think may take place flies out the window, my plans and predictions consumed in the flames of desire when I come face-to-face with him. In fact, the friends that knew what I was up to had become for this day my soshben.

In Jewish culture, the soshben served as a best man to the groom during a wedding. He would be the groom’s closest friend, the one he could count on and trust to help guard his greatest treasure: his beloved bride. He helped make all the preparations for his friend, making sure this day would be perfect for him and his bride. During the ceremony, it was customary for the soshben to escort the bride from the banquet to the bridal chamber, where she would prepare herself for her groom and what would follow that night. They understood that to become one through sexual union was a profound involvement, one signifying nothing less than the union of their souls in marriage. The soshben would guard the door of the bridal chamber until the groom arrived, since in Biblical times, at least, brides were sometimes stolen. Once the groom stepped into the chamber, the soshben’s job would be done. The stipulation of the custom says that the soshben is now to “go away rejoicing.”

I had come to this place to lay my body out before the Lord God, this wild one who would meet me here, in adoration and consecration and submission, to offer my body as a “living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1). I thought of the old wedding vows, “With my body, I thee worship.” When I arrived to the cabin, I realized that all the preparations had already been made. It was a quiet day, my heart within me at rest even though beating wildly with anticipation. The Enemy who constantly sends his emissaries to attempt to disrupt my time with God was held back. I couldn’t see it, but I knew by the sense of peace that an angelic assembly had been stationed over the place because of the prayers of my soshben friends.

We are at war. I am not oblivious to that fact. I have understood that for some time, and I fight daily to “resist the devil,” as James commands us. But to resist him without complete submission to God, as James earlier states (4:7), is to fight in our own strength. The seven sons of Sceva learned how dangerous that could be (Acts 19:14-16). But we are also in a love story, one in which the God of the Universe beckons us to intimate fellowship with Himself and a return to our place in His Kingdom.

My time that day was sweet and profound. I gave myself over to him as He led me, specifically and intentionally, and He spoke to me in deep places. The intimacy, though, cannot be explained. It is why, I think, Paul says in Ephesians 5 that to speak of Christ and the church “becoming one flesh” is a “profound mystery” — he simply didn’t have words to describe it. It just has to be experienced.

And that experience, that constant experience of intimate communion with the Lord God, is what Jesus promises we will have. Just listen to what Jesus said: “On that day, you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). Our most intimate experiences with another person on earth are only a reflection of what is available to us here and now with God.

If you read carefully through Paul’s works, and John’s, and James’s, and Peter’s, and the rest of the New Testament, you will see this theme constantly reemphasized. It’s what they wanted for us, for us to experience, to share in with them. (To see what I mean, check out John 14, 2 Corinthians 13:14, Ephesians 1:1-14, Philippians 3:12-14, Hebrews 12, 1 John 1:1-4, James 1:12.) What they are trying to say is that there is a life that is inextinguishable and inexhaustable and full, and it is available to us now in the person of Jesus Christ, in intimate relationship to Him. “In him was life,” said John, “and that life was the light of men” (1:4).

I had set that day aside for a specific purpose, one God had led me into. Maybe the greater mystery is that it’s not “there” at the cabin that I met God. Nope. That was just a quiet place set aside for my time. The real communion took place within, where He dwells.

A great mystery, indeed.

 

The Tell Tale Heart

Perusing through some blogs this morning, I hit on a post by my friend Kendall here called “Inside Where?” In it, he tells of reading through a book called Neverwhere where the protagonist finds himself hurled into a world where things don’t make sense and he has to begin to simply accept the extraordinary for what it is rather than trying to understand it.

Kendall relates the story to his life, saying that he is left with the choice to try to make the life he experiences fit into his own expectations or to “start accepting the extraordinary and out-of-box realities of every moment.” Something he writes concerning relating to others hit me between the eyes. He says, “There are people I meet that, if I follow my prejudices and expectations, should be complete screw ups, and yet, are some of the strongest hearts I’ve encountered.”

I can’t quite say why, but when I read those words my eyes filled with tears, my heart convicted and I think compelled by the possibility of a new approach to some old relationships. And there are a couple of friendships I have enjoyed along the way that have lately done that very thing — grown old.

Often, I am crushed by the desparity between who I am today and who I know I will one day become. The worship song “When You Call My Name” by Brian Doerksen and Steve Mitchinson capture the prayer I often utter to Christ: “I am seeking true identity in the light of Your presence. I am longing to know how You see me. In the time that You have given me, release the strength to follow and the grace to be who You say I am.” It is a faith, I think, that says, Give me grace, Lord, to be not who I think I am but to be who You say that I am. That reality is often unseen, buried ‘neath the layers of “coats and hats” we put on and take off to protect ourselves from the world’s weather, as Frederick Buechner has it:

“The world sets in to making us into what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all of our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”

And this works for others, too. Everyone you see is more than just what you see, much more than what you may first encounter or who you may come to know even after years of friendship. Many of us are familiar with C.S. Lewis’s famous thought that you “have never met a mere mortal.” All of us are made for glory, and we are constantly being shaped either to bear that glory or to shrink from it.

I think the Body of Christ plays a crucial role in helping a person receive that grace to be who God has made him to be. I think God gives a man friends who can see the deeper heart, the man behind the mask, and can call that true man forth. The inner man, with a new and redeemed heart. But still coming into play are the insecurities and fears and wounds and old abiding places that keep that man locked inside his prison cell. It’s as if the door has been unlocked and swung open wide and Christ compells him to walk free. Jesus calls him out into the free air, and He asks His friends to come alongside the man and do the same.

But for how long? How long will Jesus remain calling a man to let go of his past life and the fears and guilt that result from it and embrace the new, robust, and glorious life that He has made available for him? Maybe this is what was going through Peter’s mind when he asked Jesus how often he was supposed to forgive a man (Matthew 18:21-22). Jesus’ response was, essentially, as much as it takes. Forgive as much as we have been forgiven. Embrace as much as we have been embraced. Love as much as we are pursued and drawn and loved into the free life.

And I am not even speaking here of strangers, but of friends along The Way, brothers of Jesus and sons of the Father, their hearts in some way ravished by the Gospel. Maybe not completely. They stumble still, broken and in need of healing, or stuck still in their prison cell, but God’s beloved bride nonetheless. Screw-ups, all of them. All of us. But chosen and beloved, hearts beating with if not love at least longing to be as loving as God, hearts telling the Tale of their rescue by the valiant Warrior-God. The Scriptures are full of such souls, as is the church today.

Rich Mullins must have wrestled with this as well. He came to the conclusion that loving doesn’t always set us free from our prisons, while even as prisoners we are still free to love. But Jesus has embraced us, His arms still “strong enough to reach behind these prison bars,” reaching to set us free to walk alongside one another with God and to join God at the feast prepared for us.

Though we’re strangers, still I love you
I love you more than your mask
And you know you have to trust this to be true
And I know that’s much to ask
But lay down your fears, come and join this feast
He has called us here, you and me

And may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls
This drought has dried
In His Blood and in His Body
In the Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

And though I love you, still we’re strangers
Prisoners in these lonely hearts
And though our blindness separates us
Still His light shines in the dark

And His outstretched arms are still strong enough to reach
Behind these prison bars to set us free

So may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls the drought has dried
In His Blood and in His Body
In this Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

And may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Like those little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls the draught has dried
In His Blood and in His Body
In the Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

 

The Power of the Church

A few months ago I attended an AA meeting as an exercise for a class. I went as an “observer,” though my experience drew me to understand I was more than that. I wrote the following afterwards:

I wasn’t sure what to expect as I entered the room. I had just met one of the regulars to the recovery group outside. I’ll call him Tom, a man who seemed joyous, whose friendliness and genuine interest in others was contagious. A man who reeked of alcohol. That had been, he explained, his addiction of choice, and he spoke of it throughout the time in the past tense as if it were something he had beaten. His conviction was so compelling that at several points I found myself wondering if maybe I had taken a whiff of something else, maybe a hint of alcohol wafting on the air from some other source. Maybe it had been on his clothes or even on his skin. Could it do that? Could years of abuse with the stuff cause it to meld somehow into the skin so that years later other could still detect it, I found myself wondering. A worse thought came to mind. Maybe I had imagined it. Maybe I had expected it and my mind had created the smell for me. I was repulsed at the thought. Throughout the meeting, though, Tom’s stumbling and slurred speech confirmed for me that he had not yet found his freedom from the clutches of the disease as he had so passionately declared.

Tom’s declaration of complete freedom from his illness seemed an exception rather than the rule. For the others, the tug-of-war between freedom (and life as its fruit) and imprisonment (and death as a result) would become the kind-of mantra of the evening, the theme to the lives of each of members who came. Addiction for the majority of them was not something they had completely overcome, but rather they had braved the journey away from it, and “addict” was not an identity they were quick to shed, aware of their propensity to return to its lair when the temptation came. It seemed to be an ever-present reminder for them of their desperate need of grace and strength from Christ. Nowhere before had I encountered such an immediate and practical appreciation of the Apostle Paul’s impassioned intention to “boast about my weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:5) and his understanding that Christ’s strength was made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Two ladies greeted me as I entered the room, Jane and Cheryl. Jane was quick to tell me that she had been a heroin addict for twenty years of her life. Cheryl’s addiction had been alcohol, though she said she had tried a variety of recreational drugs as well. They had both been sober for some time, but returned weekly to these meetings as a way to remind themselves that they are only a puff or a bottle away from destruction and that they needed the fellowship with others who could empathize with their weakness as well as remain authentic enough with them to challenge any inflated sense that they had it all together.

I took my seat beside a man reading his Bible. He seemed young, maybe in his late thirties, though his eyes and face, his numerous tattoos and scars, defied his age and seemed full of old secrets and stories. He introduced himself as Brad, and I came to see very soon that he was the elected teacher for the group. Whether he had been elected by the group or by God to teach I was never sure, for he was amazingly knowledgeable of Scripture and handled the Word of Truth with deep wisdom and passion. He spoke of addiction in terms of both disease of body and disease of soul, of both the assault from the Evil One and the assault from the flesh within. And he spoke of the real design and result of any addiction: the stealing of peace and joy, the killing of the deep heart and soul, and the destruction of relationships and purpose.

I later learned that Brad had once been a pastor, though it was unclear whether or not it was before or since his battle with addiction. For the benefit of everyone in the room, he was quick to tell his story and detail both the horrors of his addiction as well as his battle for freedom from it. And he was not alone in his gut-level honesty. It had seemed perhaps a requirement for the group, a kind of unspoken rule, that there would be no posing or pretending, and that each one would have the freedom here – if only here in all of the world – to be real and to share in the naked tragedies of their addictions as well as the unabashed triumphs as they came.

How Tom’s pretending fit into all of that I was never sure. No one called him on his obvious use of alcohol that day. He had seemed comfortable to share his struggle, though always in the past tense. Perhaps that was another stipulation of the group: that each member was free to be where they were on the journey, without fear of judgment or manipulation, the group itself acting as a kind of safety zone, a reprieve from the weight of others’ eyes and prejudice. Maybe Tom had needed this more than anything else, and he had found it here.

Nearly an hour had gone by as Brad led the discussion on the topic of knowing God and obtaining freedom from the imprisonment of addiction when the counselor brought in a well-groomed middle-class-looking couple and introduced them around. They took their seats across from me. The woman was pretty, well-dressed, and young. The man was tall, handsome, and fit, looking more like he belonged on a golf course or a basketball league than in a recovery group. The look of embarrassment on his face betrayed his discomfort. It was obvious that his wife was in distress, as if she would burst into tears at any second. After the introductions, the leader of the group, Shawn, asked the man simply and directly, “Alcohol or drugs?” The question dropped at the man’s feet like a lead weight, and he remained motionless for a few seconds trying to figure out how to answer. I had a picture in my mind of a trapped animal running back and forth trying to find a way out. He found none, and quietly answered, “D-d-drugs.” It was enough to burst the dam of his wife’s pain, and tears poured from her eyes. The man explained that he had smoked pot for years, and had hidden his addiction from his wife since their wedding a year ago. Devastated, she felt not only the pain of his addiction but also the betrayal of his secrets. It was Shawn, I think, who then said pointedly, “You’re only as sick as the secrets you keep.” We spoke more as a group to the couple, and the wife was given room to cry and to tell a bit of the story.

The entire meeting lasted an hour and a half, and then everyone got up, prayed together, said goodbye, and left. The introductions, the conversation, the teaching, and even the farewell had all been very simplistic, non-manipulative, easy. The regulars seemed to genuinely care about one another, and yet there were no attachments, no dependence upon one another outside of the concern within the meeting. Each, it seemed, had their own lives to attend to, to rebuild, to work at. And all gave room for each one to be human, full of weakness as well as glory.

What struck me perhaps more than anything else was this notion of “addiction.” Why is it that, though I do not have and never have had addiction to drugs or alcohol, I felt very much a part of the members’ stories, their lives, their teaching. Sharing with them I realized that we all have our whores that we run after instead of our One True Lover. My favorite bedfellows of resignation, of cynicism and noble despair – these are no less potent than those of drugs and alcohol, no less defining, and no less deadly. The power of the recovery group laid in authenticity with one another and desperate dependence upon the rescuing and sustaining grace of Jesus. The power of the church lies in the same.