Addictions

If you read my last post, you realize I'm in a class called Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counseling. Of my six classes, I think it's my favourite, possibly tied with Marriage and Family Therapy. (Interesting enough, they're both taught by the same professor...) It's a really interesting class and the material just seems so relevant, so applicable, so necessary. I'm only about halfway through the semester and have two years to go, but I've begun to toss around the idea of what it might look like to work in the alcohol and substance abuse counseling field.

For class, I just finished reading a book titled "Addiction and Grace" by Gerald May, M.D. This book, along with the lectures and other texts, have really gotten me thinking about addictions. It's so easy for me to see an addition as something "they" have, something that's far away, something that is easy for me to stereotype into people who live in the inner city, on the street, or in jail. It is so easy to be terribly wrong, to keep it all at a safe distance, and while that may be comfortable for a while, I think it's a fraud.

May agrees. One of the presuppositions of his book is that "all of us suffer from addiction...We are all addicts in every sense of the word" (4). This may seem dramatic at first, or possibly flippant, but as I read and thought and processed, I realized that I think he's completely right. I began to think about my own addictions.

But of course, talking about addictions is only half of the title, the other is about grace. I love what May writes: "Grace is the most powerful force in the universe [I suppose I would say love is the most powerful, but grace flows out of love...]. It can transcend repression, addiction, and every other internal or external power that seeks to oppress the freedom of the human heart. Grace is where our hope lies" (4-5).

I say all this because the subject of addictions has bee on my mind, and not just because it's a class I'm in. A very good friend of mine is currently dealing with a powerful addiction, not in his life, but in the life of his father. I talked to him on my way home tonight, and after I hung out, I began to cry, hating the situation, hating the power of addiciton, hating the addictions in my own life, hating Satan, hating that a family was suffering, and not for the first time.

I want to believe that grace is where our hope lies, that God is bigger than the situation, bigger than my addictions, bigger than my hate. But tonight, my heart is also grieved. I long for truth. I long for freedom. I long for Christ to return.