Dear God,
Thank you for today, whatever it may bring. As is the case every day, I need your help. Today I need your help because I don't know what to do. I have lived so long - even when I wasn't physically acting out - waking up, thinking about one person or another, checking e-mail and messages for what might be there, just hoping for a little something. But thanks to your grace, I no longer feel compelled to do those things. I feel freed from the obsessions and I am so thankful.
Today I feel the vast emptiness of that hole my addiction was seeking to fill. I see myself in the bottom of that pit, looking up and out, feeling the wind and the rain, and feeling alone, and uncertain of what to do. I know that there is something more, another step, but maybe that's not today. Maybe what you are asking is for me to just sit here, faithful, and breathe in my presence in the quietness of my mind. I have heard before that doing nothing is doing something.
I guess that it is just different than I expected (there's a red flag word -- expected). I thought once I was no longer acting out, that the obsessions had been lifted, that I would be living fully engaged in my life -- full of energy and presence. But that is not today. Help me to recognize, Lord, that this disease and my absorption in it, has been a terrorizing trauma. I need to be gentle and let your healing powers work in me. Help me to feel that it is OK to be still and to still have a little trouble moving quickly or making decisions. It's just for today. I can deal with tomorrow as it comes. Give me the knowledge of your will, Lord, and the strength and courage to carry that out.
In your name I pray,
Amen
Still here …
5 years ago
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2 comments:
Incredibly beautiful.
I think this is often experienced in gut-wrenchingly true HONEST recovery: "waking up" to find oneself "utterly alone" in a huge, silent hole, wondering what to do next, how to get out. I think it's part of the exercise of recovery in that this place forces us to be still and listen, because nothing else CAN happen, in that place. And also, it eventually dawns on us to separate out our fantasy version of recovery from the reality of it. Once the compulsions are tamed, we tend to wish for a magical instantaneous, monumental change in our lives and perspectives. But the reality is that we are left staring at a hole in the ground - the new foundation that we now must build brick by brick, slowly. And we ask for each brick, one at a time, from our HP, whom we discover was there in that hole all along, and we still have trouble seeing our HP, but eventually learn to work our HP with by feeling, sensing, doing. It takes years.
This was beautiful, today's post.
-TT
That was beautiful and honest. You've got a lot of self-awareness, and it seems like that is a great thing for someone in recovery...
Take care of yourself, and I hope that quiet place you're learning to sit with sustains you more tomorrow than it did today!
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