Recovery Advice

Overcoming addictions is a battle on many fronts; first the spiritual and then the practical. One of the simple but practical components is to avoid idle time, isolation and boredom. 

Sweet, wholesome, healthy recreation is important; and if it's denied, it will cause us to be moody and live in a dull melancholy, and along these same lines, it leaves us grim and comfortless in despair. In addition, there can come a huge infectious troop of mental uneasiness that are enemies of a happy life. God has spread a vast table of wholesome pleasures in food, sport and life-preserving rest, and His Spirit will help us balance the pursuit of wholesome pleasures with duty. 

Shakespeare said this so eloquently -- 

"Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue but moody and dull melancholy, kinsman to grim and comfortless despair; and at her heels, a huge infectious troop of pale distemperatures, and foes to life." 

 "Experience is for many of us a process of emptying, of bringing us to our senses, of showing us that there is but little we are permitted to do. We start gay and confident, with a strong sense of our good intentions, our refinement, our perceptiveness, our uncommonness, and we have got to learn, most of us, that it does not count for so much after all; that we cannot hope to have a great effect upon the world, but that we must be thankful to be shown our place, and be grateful for our little bit of work. We are not meant to be hopeless and despondent about ourselves, to grovel abjectly in a sense of feebleness, to welter in ineffectiveness, of course. But we are meant to know that even if we are inside the wicket-gate, we are yet a very long way from the celestial city, and that we are better occupied in minding the road, and facing goblins, than in drawing imaginary elevations of the King's palace, or in arranging who will enter and why, in anticipating our own triumph and the blowing of heavenly trumpets. 

 It is often when a man least expects it that he finds his feet are on the steps of jacinth (Rev. 21:20), and when he is most aware of his own failure to do what he might have done, most overwhelmed by the murmurs of regret and disappointment, that the music of the melodious notes breaks serenely on the misty air." Arthur Benson. 

This old kitchen isn't so different from my grandmothers. She kept it painted better, and it was neat and clean, but the rest was about the same. The contact paper counters were a far cry from the granite counters we simply must have today. Now emerging generations feel they need an HGTV house, with kitchen big enough to serve 50 people and showers big enough for ten! St. Francis of Assisi said, "Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live", it's not easy to follow his advice, but there is a freedom in simplicity that far outweighs the fleeting and elusive butterfly of luxury.

 I read Ps. 103:4 today where it says, "The Lord crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion...." 

The crown of royalty depicts power, and as I considered the meaning this morning I applied it differently than I have in the past -- God, through the Holy Spirit, crowns us at conversion with the power of lovingkindness and compassion for humanity, that is our power, our crown. We break the jaws of wickedness with the power of lovingkindness and compassion.  We change the world for Christ because He has graced our hearts with love and compassion for all.

 

 “May he give you the desire of your heart and make all your plans succeed.”Psalm 20:4

 

I think this is a pretty insightful and revealing quote. A lot of truth there. 

I read a random chapter on Old English "Mottos" this morning, and after reading many, these two struck me. 

"The Eagle does not catch flies." 

and a second - 

"I don't stick at trifles." 

They reminded me of Paul's exhortation in Titus 3:14

"Our people must also learn to engage in good deeds to meet PRESSING NEEDS, so that they will not be unfruitful." 

May I always use wisdom in prioritizing my free time, "The fields are ripe and ready to harvest, but many workers are catching flies." 

 

 

  "Benefits showered on the distant shine in unmixed beauty, but native want hath pined, where foreign need was fattened; 

Woman been crushed by the tyrannous hand that upheld the flag of liberality;                                                                                    Poverty been prisoned up and starved, by hearts that are maudlin upon crime;                                                                                      And freeborn babes been manacled by men, who liberate the sturdy slave." Martin Tupper. 

 

 

For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were born in 1900. When you are 14, World War I starts and ends on your 18th birthday with 22 million people killed. Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until you are 20. Fifty million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million. When you’re 29, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, global GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy. When you turn 39, World War II starts. You aren’t even over the hill yet. When you’re 41, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war and the Holocaust kills six million. At 52, the Korean War starts, and five million perish. Approaching your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, could well have ended. Great leaders prevented that from happening. At 64 the Vietnam War begins, and it doesn’t end for many years. Four million people die in that conflict. As you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends. Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How do you survive all of that? A kid in 1985 didn’t think their 85-year-old grandparent understood how hard school was. Yet those grandparents (and now great grandparents) survived through everything listed above. Perspective is an amazing art. Let’s try and keep things in perspective. Let’s be smart, help each other out, and we will get through all of this. In the history of the world, there has never been a storm that lasted. This too shall pass. - Author Unknown

  "I believe we ought to have recourse to very simple but cozy and comfortable remedies indeed for combating shyness. It is no use to try and console ourselves and distract ourselves with lofty thoughts, because we only become more self-conscious and superior than ever. The fact remains that the shyness of youth causes agonies both of anticipation and retrospect; if one wishes to really get rid of it, the only way is to determine to get used somehow to society, and not to try and avoid it; and as a practical rule to make up one's mind, if possible, to ask people questions rather than to meditate impressive answers. Asking other people questions about thing to which they are likely to know the answers is one of the shortest cuts to popularity and esteem. It is wonderful to reflect how much distress personal bashfulness causes people, how much they would give to be rid of it, and yet how very little trouble they ever take in acquiring any method of dealing with the difficulty. 

I see many undergraduates, and am often aware that they are friendly and responsive, but without any power of giving expression to it. 

I sometime see them suffering acutely from shyness before my eyes. But a young person who can bring himself to ask a perfectly simple question about some small matter of common interest is comparatively rare: and yet it is generally the simplest way out of the difficulty." 

Arthur C. Benson. 

 

 

    "As one goes on in life, this terrible and disconcerting shyness of youth disappears. We begin to realize, with a wholesome loss of vanity and conceit, how very little people care or even notice how we are dressed, how we look, or what we say. We learn that other people are as much preoccupied with their thoughts and fancies and reflections as we are with our own. We realize that if we are anxious to produce an agreeable impression, we do so far more by being interested and sympathetic, than by attempting a brilliance which we cannot command. 

We perceive that other people are not particularly interested in our crude views, nor very grateful for the expression of them. We acquire the power of combination and co-operation, in losing the desire for splendor and domination. We see that people value ease and security, more than they admire originality and fantastic contradiction. And so we come to the blessed time when, instead of reflecting after a social occasion whether we did ourselves justice, we begin to consider rather the impression we have formed of other personalities." 

Arthur Benson. 

Knowledge puffs us up

 

"Good heavens, what a mind my acquaintance had, how stored with knowledge! How admirable equipped! Nothing he had ever put away in his memory seemed to have lost its color or outline; and he knew how to lay his hand upon everything. It seemed like his mind was like an emporium, with everything in the world arranged on shelves, all new and varnished and bright, and that he knew precisely the place of everything.

But I'm quite sure I do not want to possess that kind of knowledge. It is the very sharpness and clearness of outline about it all that I dislike. The things that he knows have not become part of his mind in any way: they are stored away there, like walnuts; and I feel that I have been pelted with walnuts, deluged and buried in walnuts. The things which my visitor knows have undergone no change, they have not been fused and blended by his personality; they have not affected his mind, nor has his mind affected them. I do not wish to despise or to decry his knowledge; as a lecturer, he would be invaluable; but he treats literature as a merchant might -- it has not been food to him, but material and stock-in-trade."

Arthur Benson.  

  "My future husband was becoming my whole world; and, more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, like an eclipse intervenes between man and the sun. I could not, in those days, see God for this man, of whom I had made an idol."  Charlotte Bronte.

 

 Balancing the emotional intensity of romance is not child's play, and many sabotage their lives with love's blindness.

    

  I read this piece by Arthur Benson about how are moods can impact the entire family. 

  "The husband was a man of moods, jealous, irritable, self-absorbed, and the sense of his possible displeasure lay like a cloud in the background of the lives of all the family members. He was apt to be vexed if things didn't happen exactly as he wished, while at the same time he was annoyed if any notice was taken of his moods, or if he thought he was being humored and arranged for. 

 What distresses one about such a case is the silly waste of happiness and peace that such a disposition can cause, in a family circle where there are all the materials for the best kind of domestic content. 

Yet the case is not a very uncommon one, and the cause is a mere lack of self-discipline. 

 The only hope for persons with such temperaments is that they should become aware, early in life, of all the unhappiness they can create, and determine that, whatever they feel, they will behave with courtesy, justice, and kindness. 

The difficulty is that the most trivial incidents tend to confirm and increase such irritable suspicions and there is moreover, in jealous people, a sense of complacency in the thought of how much they can affect and influence the emotions of the their family circle. But such power is a very mean and selfish business. 

The worst of it is that it is perfectly possible for a man to despise and condemn such conduct in others, and yet to do the very same thing himself and to justify it, not without a certain contemptible pride in his own superior sensitiveness." 

  "Worse still, there are people who like, if they can, to throw cold water over the enjoyment of others, and belittle or explain away their successes. One of the most well known instances is the case of Mr. Barrett, the father of Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He was a man who was passionately attached to his children; he desired their love to such an extent that he couldn't bear to see them care for any one else.

He refused his consent to his daughter's marriages, on the grounds that it was ungrateful of them to wish to leave him. When Mrs. Browning, knowing that it was impossible to hope that he would consent to her marriage with the poet Robert Browning, married him clandestinely and went away to Italy, hoping that she might ultimately be forgiven, her father never opened any of her letters, and refused ever to see her again, and kept to his word. 

It was an intense grief to Mrs. Browning, but she never took a morbid view of the situation, and realized with supreme good sense that no human being has the right to cripple another's life, and to deny another the paramount gift of wedded love."  

I like the simplicity of this photo. Pick anything in life and this will apply, if it's worth doing.....

"To change a person's religious system is to reconstruct the whole man himself.

When we seek to share Christ, we must be sensitive that we may seem to be attacking everything a person holds dear from childhood; all their beliefs are perfumed with domestic love, they convey to them the hopes and the fears of life, the childhood fancies, and the imaginations of manhood. Only the strongest moral natures can survive the shock of doubt that strips them of all that they have trusted from childhood. We are not just asking them to question their beliefs, but also the beliefs of all those they love; that is why humility is so important in evangelism and unless the Holy Spirit touches the heart we will never touch the mind."

Loose translation of Henry W. Beecher from The Life of Jesus the Christ.

To help understand these feelings consider how we react if someone simply brings up a doctrine that we disagree with. For example, "There is no hell" or if someone says they can show you the Trinity is not Biblical; we recoil and all manner of emotions rise up. So when we ask someone to question all they ever believed, well, it is a huge endeavor.

Marriage - Finding a worthy husband 

 

Because finding a loving, honest, nurturing spouse is so important; I'll cover some things aside from matters of faith  that, hopefully, will be helpful. I'll start with a brief list of things to investigate when dating.

 

How do they treat their parents?

How do they treat their siblings?

What are their friends like?

How do they treat the waiter or waitress?

How do they talk about those in authority over them?

What is their job longevity history like?

What condition are they in financially?

If they have children how bonded are they?

If they don't have joint custody, why?

What is their criminal history?

Do they have substance abuse problems?

Do they like gambling?

Are they addicted to video games?

What are their recreational choices?

Do they have anger problems?

Are they preoccupied with sex?

What are their feelings about pornography?

What is their spiritual condition and beliefs?

Do you share a common faith and encourage growth in each other?

Are they a victim of child abuse and have they found healing?

Would you want your sibling to date such a person?

Looking at the condition of their life, is it one you want to join?

What are their views on marriage and the roles of man and wife and child rearing?

 

Now of course we have to ask ourselves these same questions, and many more, but this line of thinking will help us begin the process.

 

Understanding our romantic feelings, our passions, what true love is, and what it is not, are very, very important issues. We can only learn that by dating, if we use that time to learn who this new person truly is, and who they bring out in us. When we date we learn a lot about our passions, our insecurities, about how fickle our emotions can be, and, not to mention how obsessive they can be.

We also learn about how strong willed we can be, and something about the depth of our faith and moral convictions.

These are not things that can be learned from a book, the power of romance is a force to be reckoned with, and if we go into it blind we will doubtless return bruised.

We also learn about how those of the opposite sex can draw us, manipulate us, sometimes deceive us, use us, sweep us away, hurt us so deeply and also bring out anger within us, and all manner of other emotional feelings. So, dating and romance is a huge learning experience, and I can't think of how you will ever learn about yourself in the same way as dating or experiencing these intense emotions.

It shows us how needy we are, we may be far more needy than we ever imagined, or we may find we are unable to bond, or that we have fears that make us act at times like a child. Needless to say, dating tests the strength of our convictions, faith, ideals, goals, plans, our children's welfare and our true priorities.

Passion, sex and affection are not the basis for a marriage, nor is financial security, needing help with our children, if we have any, nor is a new lover able to fill emotional needs we may have if we have suffered adverse childhood circumstances. If we look for a mate to fulfill the emotional needs that haunt us from childhood trauma, we will suffocate our new love.  When victims of childhood trauma fall in love, often it is a little too fast and deep.  

They often idealize their partner; put them on a pedestal, profess a rapid and deep connection, give of themselves fully, push for premature commitments. It may feel like the  "love of a lifetime."

In time, this idealization evolves into a devaluation of the partner when the partner does not live up to the victim’s unrealistic expectations.
When this happens, the victim of childhood trauma can become angry, resentful, abusive, and even vindictive.

Or the opposite may happen where the victim of trauma feels guilty, shameful and dirty; they become very emotionally needy and desperately need approval. When they find a person that shows them attention, they fall in love way too fast, way too deep and put all of their needs onto the new love, above all else.

The neediness created by childhood trauma and other insecurities overwhelms our partner with our constant need for reassurance, emotional support, and they often feel suffocated because they are having demands put on them that no one can meet.

If our relationships are failing we need to evaluate ourselves and take some time to just be alone and sort out what the next positive step should be. If we've had no counseling or therapy, that's the first step; especially if we are a victim of childhood adversity, sexual assault or domestic violence. To re-enter another relationship, clinging to the intoxicating romantic high instead of finding healing will lead to yet another failure. A broken heart is a poor judge of character, flattering words elevate our emotions, and sexual encounters anesthetize our deep inner hurts and needs but they don't lead to change.

 

Now this little piece contains a lot of food for thought, but it is meant to inspire you to learn more about the mechanics of a successful relationship. Needless to say, if you are a Christian matters of faith and faith aspirations are of major importance and I believe as Christians we should only marry a fellow believer.