WITH SOBRIETY, SHOULD COME REALITY, EVENTUALLY !

WITH SOBRIETY, SHOULD COME REALITY, (EVENTUALLY) !

Drunkenness can be achieved through a number of forms of ignorant behavior, from drinking, smoking, snorting, injecting, and ingesting every conceivable form of poison, but over time, and if left unchecked, they all lead to one result; addictions! Most acts of drunkenness, long before they become an addiction, begin in an effort to hide or mask some form of emotional or physical pain. Turning to drugs or alcohol to hide or mask our emotional pain and fear is hiding or escaping from reality, which often leads to deadly consequences. Anyone involved in addiction recovery knows many others who choose to spend their lives in programs that claim to free them from their addictions, when in reality all the program does is convert the addiction to the program itself! They convince the addict that there is no hope for recovery unless they “keep coming back”! They do nothing to restore an addict’s hope by revealing or exposing them to The Truth! The Truth, God’s Truth, is the only hope any human being has of finding and facing life’s many hard facts of reality! And at the same offers them the only Hope there is, which is the Freedom found in The Love of Jesus Christ, and Him Crucified! That Truth is NOT presented in AA 12-step addiction recovery meetings. Alcoholics and addicts are living in the fog and denial of the fantasy land that the drugs and alcohol created, and 12-step programs are simply a continuation of that fantasy. Consisting of absolutely no Truth whatsoever! The AA program is nothing less than a huge worldwide cult created by satan to deceive millions of followers into believing that they are hopeless, helpless, and powerless through their false doctrine!     

After 30 years of sobriety, I’m still discovering reality which has eluded me all these years because of the thickness of the walls of deception that the devil and I built while I was wasted and following him! Even after surrendering our lives and wills to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and hanging our sin and drunkenness on The Cross with Him, we must continue to live in this filthy rag of a body, in this filthy sinful world! While The Truth is revealed instantly, the walls we built with the devil linger, and we must begin the long, slow process of tearing them down, one stone at a time. Our progress will be determined by our Faith and reliance upon our Savior, not on our own works. “Ye of little Faith,” will see little progress in tearing down those walls and building a new life with Christ. While sober physically, mentally and Spiritually you’re still living “behind the walls,” or in prison! Reality remains an illusion until you tear down the walls! An ongoing lifelong process for many it seems as I stare into the mirror.

When we spend decades of our lives at some level of unconsciousness, inebriated on various forms of drugs used for the sole purpose of escaping from reality, the few of us who are fortunate enough to have escaped that prison would be fools to assume that suddenly we’ve arrived back into reality! While we were lost in our sinful drunkenness, we began building an imaginary world around us, that we eventually became very comfortable living in. All based on lies and deception that we created to fit our own personal character flaws and denial. The entire personality, life, and character of an alcoholic or addict is a mere illusion. As we grow older, the lies grow bigger and the walls thicker. We become invincible in our own imaginations, until suddenly one day for a few of us we get struck by a bolt of lightning and realize what a lie we’ve been living!  

Addiction recovery programs are filled with millions of people who end up there because they couldn’t face reality at some point in their lives. Escaping reality for a moment, or an hour or two, suddenly becomes a lifetime of denial, eventually leading to a lifetime of pain, suffering, loss, and failure. Or a lifetime in secular addiction recovery programs that offer no hope of ever being “set free” from the bondage of our addictions, or from the bondage of addiction recovery!   

  

Sadly, there are far too many in addiction recovery, or who should be in recovery, because their need to escape reality is valid. Sadly, our world is filled with millions of children and adults who grew up as children suffering from all sorts of childhood trauma and abuse! From neglect, to physical and sexual abuse that has led them to seek any type of escapism they can find! Then there are many others in recovery who don’t have the luxury of a valid excuse like that, and end up in recovery for a host of other invalid excuses. Most of which are all centered around issues of insecurity. The very act of escapism is a form of insecurity, and our addictions become a form of false security. Sadly for most, we’re living in a world that is living in its end times, and reality is eluding them.

While sobriety may initially reveal some degree of reality, we’re only continuing to deceive ourselves if we think that with our newfound sobriety, we somehow instantly and naturally start living in reality. Until we rebuild the personal world in which we reside, one stone at a time, we’ll be strangers in a foreign land. We must learn to tear down the many walls we’ve built over the duration of our drunken stupor. Trusting others will be next to an impossibility, and can’t begin until we learn to trust ourselves.   

The walls we build to protect ourselves from our insecurities and fear of facing painful realities, eventually become masks of false identity that we carry wherever we go throughout life. We end up not only hiding from our perceived enemies, but from everyone around us including our loved ones, and ourselves. We can get so lost in our own false identities, that we don’t even know who we are ourselves!

For the few of us who wander out of the fog long enough to catch an occasional glimpse of reality, and see something that lures us back for a second look, and maybe a third or fourth, we may discover enough of reality to realize that we’ve been lost in an evil darkness that’s kept us from discovering the real Truth about life! God’s Truth! Should He decide to reveal that Truth to us through the fog of deception that we’ve chosen to hide in, our addictions and drunkenness, we can rest assured that He has a plan for our lives! A plan that doesn’t include continuing to live in denial and some false identity.  

      

Millions keep returning to the bottle because a simple glimpse of reality terrifies them! They’ve created their very own fantasyland in which to hide and exist. Denial convinces us that not only are we invincible, but that the fantasyland that we’ve created is reality! It can take years of sobriety to break through and tear down those walls that many of us began building as children, as fortress’s to protect us from the evil that lurked all around us, and for far too many, it was not a perceived evil, but a very real evil!

Even for Christians who have repented, and turned from their sinful drunkenness, and have come to know the One True Living God and His Truth, and have Faith far greater than a mustard seed, the scars left by addictions that were acquired by years of insecurity and abuse as a child, while healed on the surface, it can take much longer to heal the heart and memory. As Christians in addiction recovery, no matter what circumstances led us to choose drugs and alcohol to escape reality, it is imperative to maintain our close personal relationship with Jesus, as the enemy will always be just one step behind us waiting for us to stumble. Waiting to remind us of how weak we once were, and to try to convince us that we still are! Stay focused on the Truth, which is that you are “SAVED AND SOBER”!