Spring Cleaning! Addictomy – March 21

SpringCleaning!
March 21, 2021

Addictomy

Galatians 5:19-21, ‘It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on…(MSG).’

When I was about fourteen, the era of coming-of-age, when every word that falls from someone’s lips are dissected and devoured, I was told by someone who’s opinion was important, that I weighed too much. Or rather, that I didn’t weigh as little as my best friend. In other words, I was the heavier one. Four decades have come and almost gone, and I battle still today, a weighted complex. I have wandered in a starved and thirsty wilderness for forty years much like the Israelites who were determined to do it their way, not God’s way. Can you imagine meandering in circles endlessly in a wasteland, returning repeatedly to the same empty spot, no destination in sight, for half a lifetime, because you cannot lay down, surrender, give over, what you are controlled or obsessed by?! Well, that was the Israelites and that was me. Is it perhaps you too?

There are many addictions in this life that we get tethered to. This world has so much to offer, right? One minute we are just motorin’ along, minding our own business, staying in our own lane, and the next, we are dragging something behind us. And what’s even worse, sooner or later, ‘it’ is dragging us behind ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is. For some, like me, we spend a lifetime trying to get free.

It is a sad fact that some people we know, (or scarier still, whom we don’t know, because we were taught as children not to accept anything from a stranger, right?!) would like to see us caught up in the same tangles they are snared by, so they hand us their addiction on a silver plate, and if we aren’t careful, it can soon become ours also. Misery loves company!

In all truth, an addiction becomes like a god to us, and we find ourselves bowing to it instead of the one true God. In fact, we find ourselves beholden to it, and suddenly it is requiring us to do things in our lives to honor what we are now addicted to, rather than honor our Father, the Creator of each of us Who knows us better than we even know ourselves.

I have heard it said like this: ‘an addiction will take you someplace you never intended to go; you will stay longer than you ever intended to stay; you will pay far more than you ever intended to pay.’

So, this month of our SpringCleaning tasks was born from my eating disorder/addiction that desperately needed being taken out with the trash. The Lord has removed so much from my life in the past two years. It has been very painful, this reclamation He has done of my soul. I haven’t understood all of it and I have whined a lot. Sometimes I have even tried to be in charge, and this has just cost more time and heartache when I tried to do it my way and not His. Many of my bad habits and my controlling addictions, He has been taking one by one, and a handful of months ago, He said it was time to overcome a forty-year fight. I have to be honest; it has been a huge struggle for me. To learn to eat again, to starve my ego not myself, to accept gain rather than loss and set a victim free, to pick life over death, to choose the best version over the skinniest version of me…all of it has been a battle. But, Beautiful You, all of my life, it has been a war, and I am so ready to no longer battle this; to win a war that the enemy has had me fighting for much of my life. Won’t you join me too and begin your own ‘addictomy’, and ‘cut-out’ anything that has become your god so that the Lord your God can return to His rightful place in the center of you.

Come with me in March and let’s clean house!
If you are anything like me, you have kept some things around far too long
and now they got to go! And with the Lord’s help, they can!