Dead Man Walkin’

Celebrate Recovery is on to something big.  From humble beginnings over 20 years ago, it’s now in over 20,000 churches worldwide.  Conceived as a 12-step program similar to AA, but that is explicitly Christian, it is changing lives in profound ways, and growing beyond the wildest expectations of its founders.  It will definitely be an important component of our program at CrossRoads.

In the beginning, John Baker had gone from victory to victory in his life.  In high school he lettered in basketball, baseball and track, and was class president.  Yet he had two incompatible personality traits that caused a burning emptiness inside.  As he puts it himself, he was a “walking, talking paradox – a combination of the lowest possible self-esteem and the world’s largest ego”.  And once in college, he discovered what he thought was the solution to his problem – alcohol. 

After college, his success – and his drinking – went on to new heights.  He joined the Air Force, became a pilot, and spent lots of time in the officers’ club.  Later he earned an MBA, got a job in the corporate world, and having met and married Cheryl while still in college, they started raising a family.  But all the while, beneath the surface of this idyllic dream, he still felt like a dead man inside.

His drinking got worse and worse, and soon was out of control.  He woke up one morning and knew that he couldn’t take another drink, but realized down deep that he couldn’t live without one.  When he hit his personal bottom, he started attending AA meetings with a vengeance – more than 90 meetings in 90 days.

As he worked the steps, however, he started cleaning up.  He was working on the hurts, habits and hang-ups that had led to his trying to drown the emptiness he felt with alcohol.  And as he faced and dealt with each demon, his wife, from whom he was separated by that time, started to see the change in him, and liked what she was seeing.

The big breakthrough came when he learned that she and the kids had started attending a local church, and invited him to come with them.  He accepted, and God started working a whole new set of miracles in his heart.  He learned that Jesus, in the greatest sermon ever preached – the sermon on the mount – laid out the principles on which all people would be wise to build their lives.  They’re called the beatitudes. 

As he learned these life-changing principles, he realized that in them lay all the principles by which he could not only defeat his dependency on alcohol, but to attain an abundance in his life that would truly set him free.  AA had taught him to yield his life and will to a “Higher Power”, and he knew in his heart that the true Higher Power was and is Jesus, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world!  Yet when he shared his awesome discovery at AA meetings he was mocked!  He developed a deep longing to join in fellowship with other believers who were struggling as he was.  He wrote to the pastor of his church, Rick Warren, and described a vision God gave him for a Christian Recovery program, and Warren said “Great John, you do it! 

John left the corporate world, entered seminary, and started to meet with other folks in his church who wanted to recover from their own hurts, habits and hang-ups.  Celebrate Recovery, from a humble beginning in Saddleback Church, became the gold standard of recovery programs.

Along the way, something else profound started to happen.  At most churches, the washed, smiling, “normal” people met for Sunday services up in the main hall, while downstairs, the recovery people would meet for their own weekly service, and break into small groups to share and work the steps and principles.  Many of the upstairs people thought of themselves as not really needing to recover from addictive behavior, so it was often like two very different churches, meeting in the same building.

Gradually, though, some of the upstairs people would start to check out what was going on downstairs, and to realize that CR might be a way to fix a loved one who did struggle with something.  So they would go downstairs to check it out.  Before you knew it, many of those people started to realize that God wanted them to work on a few things in their own lives.  Eventually it became pretty well known that nearly everyone has something they’re struggling with, and that the principles on which CR is based are good for everyone to dig down deeply into.

And one final point.  The eighth and final principle (Yield myself to God to be used to bring this Good News to others, both by my example and by my words. "Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires) led to many folks making a transition from being served, to serving.  And as they did, they made another huge discovery – that although hurt people hurt people, HEALED people heal people.  "God never wastes a hurt", as Pastor Warren has said, and now through Celebrate Recovery, thousands of people were discovering for the first time why they had to go through their own valleys of the shadow of death – because nobody is more fulfilled by helping others with their own hurts, habits and hang-ups than one who had been there, and done that, and finally arrived at that place where they could truly say, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last!”

Eight Principles Based on the Beatitudes

1. Realize I'm not God. I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and that my life is unmanageable. "Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor."
2. Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him, and that He has the power to help me recover. "Happy are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."
3. Consciously choose to commit all my life and will to Christ's care and control. "Happy are the meek."
4. Openly examine and confess my faults to myself, to God, and to someone I trust. "Happy are the pure in heart."
5. Voluntarily submit to every change God wants to make in my life and humbly ask Him to remove my character defects. "Happy are those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires."
6. Evaluate all my relationships. Offer forgiveness to those who have hurt me and make amends for harm I've done to others except when to do so would harm them or others. "Happy are the merciful. Happy are the peacemakers."
7. Reserve daily time with God for self-examination, Bible reading, and prayer in order to know God and His will for my life and to gain the power to follow His will.
8. Yield myself to God to be used to bring this Good News to others, both by my example and by my words. "Happy are those who are persecuted because they do what God requires."

Zombie Land

The character Edmund, in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, when offered some Turkish Delight by the White Witch, saw no purpose in concealing His pleasure. The sweet confection was unlike anything he’d ever experienced!  It was more than just sweet, it was the taste of heaven!  His entire mouth, nose and tongue tingled, his tummy felt warm, and his body felt like it did just before he fell asleep – mellow and satisfied.  It was definitely a feeling he liked, and he wanted it to continue.  In fact, every time he stopped eating, the memory of it was so pleasant and alluring, that it drew him back for just one more taste.  So he continued to eat another, and another, and another, never suspecting that it might lead to trouble.  The White Witch was so nice, and seemed to have a never ending supply of the stuff.  What could be wrong?

Yet soon his desire for it was all he thought about.  It became an obsession.  He turned his back on his siblings, became irritable and irrational, and became blind to the rising danger of the White Witch’s evil intentions. 

How might Edmund have felt about his relationships and what his obsession was doing to them?  When he thought about them, he no doubt felt bad, and might even have sworn, from time to time, to simply say no to the next bite, in order to try and give up the habit and feel normal again.  Yet the memory of that initial pleasure he felt would come sneaking back, and it was irresistible.  “Just one bite”, he would tell himself, all the while knowing it was controlling him, not the other way around.

Now imagine instead of Edmund, the character’s name was Dave.  And instead of Turkish Delight, what he had been offered was cocaine.  How seamlessly these two changes fit into the story.  We need to change little else, except perhaps to change the word obsession to addiction.  The phenomenon is precisely the same, even though the euphoria that cocaine can deliver is much more powerful than that of Turkish Delight.  

But the two substances have this in common: They both make the user feel so much better than they do normally, that they are compelled to replicate that pleasure.  Yet each successive high is just a little less pleasurable than the one before it.  So it takes more and more, to get less and less of what the user seeks.

Now, substitute the love of money for the substance.  Can the story line still hold up?  Of course it can.  When Paul the Apostle wrote that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, that’s just what he was talking about.  Don’t you see?  The problem of addiction or alcoholism requires something much more than just the overuse or abuse of a substance.  It requires a person who has a void in his soul and is in need of something to fill it.  The man or woman obsessed with the accumulation of wealth is no different, in this respect, than the sexaholic, the alcoholic or the addict.  What ruins lives is not the object of our obsession, it’s the obsession itself. 

So what’s the answer?  How can we human beings pursue financial gain without money becoming an obsession?  How can Edmund have a bit of Turkish Delight without allowing it to control him? And how can a social drinker take a glass of wine without it taking control of him?  The world is full of shiny new things, things that unexpectedly enrapture us in ways we have never experienced before.  And some of them, if we are not careful, have the potential of becoming an obsession for some unsuspecting soul, intent only on a pleasant new experience.  And don’t think for a moment that you are not one of those people.  You just haven’t found the stuff, or the experience, or the quest to chase after, that really blew you away and turned you into a green-eyed monster the way Turkish Delight did Edmund.

This propensity for human beings to turn into the living dead because of an obsession or addiction, is nothing new, of course.  And man’s cruelty to his fellow man assures us that we will continue to invent new ways of trapping innocent wanderers.  Who would have ever suspected that something as innocent as Turkish Delight could have the same effect on a young boy as it had on Edmund?  Yet many have been ensnared by the addictive power of glue sniffing, cutting, gambling, internet porn and all manner of things.  Again, it’s not the object of the obsession that ruins lives and turns people into zombies, it’s the obsession itself.

A man named Thomas Chalmers, writing in the 1800s, said that if one did fall victim to an ‘impure affection’, the answer was to expel it, and replace it with a pure one.  Few people who have themselves fallen victim, or seen a friend of loved one do so, realize just how powerful the spiritual aspect of the phenomenon is. In fact, few people have ever heard or been told that the substance itself may not be the main issue.

Participants in Alcoholics anonymous and other so-called 12-step programs learn about this spiritual aspect in the very first three steps of the program:

1.       “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2.       “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3.       “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

Many of the testimonies of the early AA pioneers were assembled into a book, often referred to as simply “The Big Book”, although its official title is Alcoholics Anonymous.  It’s in the public domain, and can be read in its entirety online at http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/.  Each testimony is just a few pages, and it only takes perhaps a dozen of them to realize that almost universally, completion of the first three steps became the key that unlocked many, many doors to recovery.  Participants in the early AA movement discovered something on their own that had baffled the medical community for many years: That God could replace in the alcoholic the need to take another drink.

Pursuit of that higher power, Chalmers would say, can become the pure affection that can successfully replace the impure one. Edmund met Aslan, who spoke wisdom to him powerfully, and became for him the pure affection he needed.  Christians would say that the power of God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, is the only pure affection that can permanently replace the impure one.

As stated previously, everyone is at risk, either directly or because of the relationship with a friend or relative.  It is so pervasive and insidious, that we should all be on guard at all times.

Edmund had never tried Turkish Delight before.  He was totally unprepared for the powerful feelings of desire that rose up in him when he did.  So the question to ponder here is this: Could you become an Edmund at some point in the future?  Have you already fallen victim?  This world is full of tender traps like this one.  What makes you so sure you won’t fall into one someday?

The other thing to be aware of is that an addiction alters the chemistry of the brain.  Either the substance itself or the chemicals the brain releases because of the euphoria take the addict to an altered state of being, and those under their spell can go years, even decades, until they finally experience enough pain that their desire to heal starts to eclipse the desire to get high.  And while that’s going on, the growth and maturity that takes place in ‘normal’ people is arrested.  Many of the addicts we encounter are in their 40's, but have the emotional maturity of teenagers.

Addictions of the adult kind are so persistent in their ability to entrap us, that victims often go many years, even decades under their power, usually thinking that the cure is to stop drinking or stop using.  But we can now safely say with a high level of confidence that that’s simply not the case.  The drugs or alcohol are not the problem.  The reason they took hold is deeper.  The key is that their victim felt such pleasure at first.  Yet some people try the same things and don’t feel so good.  The ‘high’ is just not all that high.

Of course those of us who encountered our own Aslan, or higher power, have reason not to fear.  Pursuit of that relationship is almost alone in its ability to replace the impure affection.

Christian 12-step programs like Celebrate Recovery, believe that as well.  They believe that the HP has a name, and that it’s the name above all names: Jesus Christ.  And they believe that belief in the power of the right and true Higher Power is much better than believing in one who is mythological or false.

Whether one is willing to accept Jesus Christ as the true HP or not, however, this much is undeniable based on the evidence.  No other program or method has helped more alcoholics get sober than AA, bar none.  And those who have read the testimonies can easily see that the power of those first three steps is the key.  Many report that taking that third step created for them such a powerful effect, that they felt free almost immediately.

We are such curious creatures.  We ask ‘God, where are you?  Where have you been?’ We don’t realize that it’s like standing in a hurricane and searching for the wind. 

He is there.  And He is not silent.