For he says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.” See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation!
Psalm 139:7-11 (KJV)
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. 8 9 10 11
Addiction, like any other disease or difficult predicament, can lead to hopelessness, especially when the afflicted person fails again and again and finds herself in the same situation she was in when she started the
journey to recovery.
In the real world, recovery—whether from drugs, alcohol, or other dependency—is a daily, hourly, moment-to-moment process. God is with us all the time (though we may be unaware), so that if we fail in one hour, we have the opportunity to begin anew in the next.
We receive forgiveness seven times seventy times seven hundred times, and each new attempt to get it right carries no weight of past failure. The present is the best position for recovery, and luckily it’s where we happen to be all the time and all that there really is. The clean, always fresh, now.
Now is where we meet God, where we have an ever-renewed chance at salvation. And for transformation, we absolutely need the help of a higher power. We cannot do it alone.
People with dependencies can sometimes feel they have failed so many times that they have gone to a place where recovery and God are beyond reach. But there is no place or condition where God is not present.
Sometimes God can come in the form of another person or a deep part of yourself previously unknown to you. Recently, while rereading parts of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, I came across a chapter devoted to a sermon on Jonah and the whale. It is essentially about hope: the preacher says it’s impossible to escape God,
even if you’re on a ship going in a direction opposite from where you should be headed:
He thinks that a ship made by men will carry
him into countries where God does not reign....
Or you may be at the lowest point in your life, being digested in the stomach of a whale at the bottom of the ocean:
But God is everywhere....God came upon him in the whale,
and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom....
Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet—’out of the belly of hell’—
when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then,
God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.
• When have you ever felt hopeless?
• Where is God present?
• When can healing begin?
• What can you do to inspire hope—in yourself and others?
Dan Licardo, USA
Now is the acceptable time. Wherever we are in our spiritual journey, moving forward or sliding back we cannot escape God. God is the fresh air we breathe, God is the feeling that we of touch, every sound we hear, every voice that speaks and yet we don’t always take notice. Now is the acceptable time.
ReplyDeleteNow, this very minute, as we share here together, we can claim our covenant with God to take notice. To accept the HOPE that has been so graciously given to us and to act upon the call that God wishes for each of us. The simple call to love and to be loved awaits us all.