“Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.

Joel‬ ‭2‬:‭12‬-‭13

The patience of the Lord is deep.

Thankfully, some of the people in my life have echoed that patience with me.

My return journey was marked by a walk home on a cool Sunday morning.

A handful of days before I managed to get on a plane headed to a treatment center in the middle of nowhere Mississippi, I walked home with a permanent knot in my stomach.

This was the moment when the knowledge of my addiction went from my head to my gut.

On the way down, it solidified into an unpleasant iron weight of guilt, despair and hopelessness.

But hey, it’s always darkest before the dawn, right?

I was going home not out of some kind of praiseworthy confessional state of mind, but because I had simply gotten to the end of other options.

I kept running till I got to that point and I’m not proud of it.

But thank God there is hope for those of us hardheaded enough to not stop until we have no other choice.

My heart was not in a good place. I was more concerned with physically and emotionally feeling better than spiritually recovering.

But I also had the beginnings of an awareness that I would need a deeper remedy than simply getting cleaned up.

I was smart enough to have begun to see what satisfaction looked like and how this chasing after my own fixes would never lead me to peace.

And so, born from desperation, the beginning of my recovery started there on a beautiful Sunday morning when I felt like crap.

God, help me pay attention to what you’re telling me—in the good times and the yucky ones.