John: Short Term Recovery for Long Term Healing

I met John last night. John is a recovering alcoholic, who works at an AA recovery center just a few blocks away from our church. As part of our church’s urban renewal ministry (SEED), community groups will take a break from meeting once a month and go out to serve. For the last three months the group that I am part of has gone to this center where John works, but this was my first time to go.

The only cleaning that the building they use for the meetings get is what we’re able to do once a month. But we have a standard operating procedure that any time you’re able to spend with one of the men or women who are there trumps cleaning time. Why? Because they need, or at least want, someone to listen to their stories. Some need encouragement for the struggle they’re currently facing, and some who’ve made it through want to be an example of victory.

Enter John.

A friend and I were filling up some mop buckets (which takes quite a while because we have to do it with water from the sink by transferring it with a coffee pot) when we met John. I was standing in the background, so I wasn’t doing much of the talking or asking many questions, but my buddy was firing away, and John was more than happy to answer any questions he had. When we asked how long he had been “clean” his answer was “3 years, two months, and 23 days. Praise God!” Those two words at the end are just a gateway to finding out much more about a person, so we pressed it. What we found out was that John was a believer. Not just a believer in a generic sense, but one who knows that his only hope is in Jesus Christ. He knows that there is no other explanation for his recovery, no other explanation for his sobriety and no other explanation for his happiness than Jesus.

Being in seminary, sometimes you can forget how simple faith in Jesus really is. John was good reminder for me. At the end of the day, millennial positions, theories on the age of the earth, etc. are not what the measure by which we will be judged. Don’t get me wrong. I love studying those things; perhaps, to a fault. What I mean is that faith in Jesus – true faith – is what matters.

Later last night, after I got home, I was thinking about John again, and about how terrible this must have been for him and still is. I thought about the ways his addiction may have hurt, if not destroyed, certain areas of his life. Honestly, I felt bad for him, and maybe that’s not entirely wrong. But if his addiction is what drove him to see the mercy and grace of God, isn’t that a sort of strange gift that I should be thankful he received? Could his addiction have been a time of suffering that was used by God as a catalyst for conversion? I would say absolutely so. Now, without letting this die the death of a thousand qualifications, let me just say that this does not mean that we should pray for the free reign of sin over people’s lives in order to see them converted by such means (Rom 6:1). However, it does mean that we can look retrospectively at people’s lives and see the providence of God in any affliction they may have undergone.

I kept thinking about this even this morning. I went and pulled out some old files I had from First Presbyterian, Chattanooga, a church I attended when I was in college at Tennessee Temple. One Sunday when our pastor, Dr. Milton, was out for a second back surgery, he put a special note to the congregation in the bulletin to tell us about the things he had relearned. The last observation he made was that there are weak areas in our lives that will have to be treated in a special way for the rest of our lives. Here is a selection from what he said:

 

“There are weak areas of our souls that are going to have to receive special prayer attention with Christ for the rest of our lives. The adult who was abused as a child will have to take that pain to Christ for the rest of her life. But the abuse, in the hands of a loving God, has become a strange “gift” that draws her to Jesus. The alcoholic will have to cling to the strength of Jesus to stay sober. But he will linger longer at the Throne of Grace than some others. Is there not a blessing for the one who must depend on God and linger at the throne? You see, the blessing of our weaknesses is that the thing that is conspiring to bring us to ruin – anger, lust, resentment, bitterness, depression – is the thing that is bringing us, all of our lives, to our Remedy: the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a life spent living out the Cross in unique ways. But again, lingering in the presence of grace is not a bad place to be.”  

 

 

Dr. Milton would go on to say that suffering doesn’t guarantee spiritual maturity, but it does, as C.S. Lewis said, get our attention. Even more so, “it guards us, keeps us from straying, keeps us alert to sinful propensities and keeps us close to the shepherd of our soul.”

I hope you find encouragement in these words. Know that there is salvation for even the chief of sinners, and that even as you, even as I, struggle with a sinful nature and evil desires, we can be drawn to the Throne of Grace to drink of free mercy and so be healed. If we can remember that our weaknesses are not meant to abstractly hurt us, but to draw us to our Savior, we will be more prone to go to him.

John knows this, and if he remembers it, that is what will keep him.