Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!

Psalm‬ ‭139‬:‭23‬-‭24

For all the negativity that could be preached and all the finger pointing that is typically toward the misadventures of our culture…we’ve got one thing right.

We long for things well. We desire. We strive and strain and pull ourselves toward what we want.

We are just misdirected a lot of the time.

Addiction completely upends proper desire. And it is perpetuated by an accepting society of permissibility.

Long before the answer surfaces to get help, to stop or to seek God we seem to be told to moderate, live freely and just don’t hurt anyone else.

These aren’t inherently wrong or bad. But they’re too flimsy by themselves. My basis for living can’t be constrained to myself. This is where I found myself in addiction, and it was an unbeatable dead end.

I couldn’t fly back to God fast enough although I actually made the journey in short, slow-motion fits and starts.

And it’s because none of the God stuff makes proper sense in a world where He has been discounted and written out of so much.

It’s hard to take the way everlasting seriously when the weekend is as far ahead as I permit myself to look.

This is where we let God in. We need a director though we don’t want to follow rules. I need a model I can try to emulate. I need all the help I can get.

The 12 steps of recovery make this effort a lot easier than it seemed at first. They break things up into bite sized pieces that I could look at and mull over and walk through with a trusted friend.

My willingness was the fertile soil that God needed to start planting seeds. Because I need to see it working to believe, and it takes time to germinate in the broken life of the addict.

God, keep my soul broken enough to stay fertile.