Reflections on Being Clean for Four Years, Part One

Today I celebrate, by the grace of God, four years clean. Prepare yourself for lots of CAPS, boldness, BOLD CAPS, suave italics, and exclamations, ’cause I am one excited dude today! Also I’ve had lots of chocolate. Anyway. This is my first think in a series of thinks about it. (Being clean, that is. Not the chocolate.)

Why I Did It (Got High, that is)

This is a doozy. People ask, you know? They wanna know why. As you might imagine, I did, too, but it’s not an easy question to answer.

For a while, I thought it had to do with a few concrete things in my past. To some degree, I’m sure they played a role, and there’s no doubt in my mind that facing such things was a very important step in my recovery. That being said, a piece of advice: face yer demons but keep the train a’chuggin’. After spending too many years in the tangled thought-maze of Cause and Effect, I found no escape but the obvious one, namely, that the maze wasn’t real, that it had at some point become a false construct to mask my inability to face myself. Deep, I know.

Well, so I moved on to accusing my upbringing. Life is easier when you don’t have to take responsibility for it, and since I decided those few concrete instances in my past, while terrible, couldn’t be blamed for it all, my parents were the next likely target. But my parents, you see, are human, and as humans are known for making mistakes from time to time, I decided this, too, wasn’t going to provide the answer I sought.

But what about the Church! There’s a place FULL of bad, hypocritical people entrusted with teaching Sunday School just begging to be maligned! I did this for a while, and with gusto. Unfortunately, while I don’t hold to every piece of the Southern Baptist doctrine in which I was brought up, the Church, too, is full of humans, and as humans are known for making mistakes from time to time… yeah.

It was me, folks. I was the problem. More accurately, what I didn’t do was the problem. Jesus gives this caveat at the end of his revolutionary Sermon on the Mount: “Listen, y’all. If you do what I’ve told you to, you know what you’ll be like? You’ll be like wise and discerning men who build their houses on FOUNDATIONS (Does anyone else hear an awful lot of irony in this statement?), so that when hard times come – storms and floods and wind and whatnot – their houses don’t fall down. If you don’t, however, you’ll be like the unthinkably foolish, who decide it’d be fun to have a house right there on the beach…”

Here’s the thing: his words are so good! They’re for our good, not to put up some unnecessary red tape. They’re words for flourishing, for health, for life. From beginning to end, the Bible talks about people choosing either life or death. EDEN: all kinds of awesome fruit to eat, but Adam and Eve have to have the forbidden stuff (in other words they choose death) and they die for it. THE JEWS: sometimes they choose life (following Moses out of Egypt), sometimes they choose death (makin’ cows outta gold in the desert and then worshiping them, because that makes sense), and God’s always telling ’em stuff like, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse… so choose LIFE that you might LIVE!” I wanna LIVE! Don’t you? DAVID: gets off to an incredible start killing a giant, for God’s sake, but ends up choosing death – the death of his first, precious, baby son – all because he can’t keep it in his pants. SOLOMON: super smart, total disaster. ETC.

And then Jesus comes along and says, “You guys! I really want you to get this! I want you to have what I intended you to have from before Time began, and I want you to have it SO BAD I’ll die for you to have it.” And he did. He chose death for our life.

But then he got up! Can I get a Hallelujah?! But that’s another sermon.

In short, I heard the words of Jesus and I didn’t do them and my house fell down. And GREAT was the destruction of it. And LONG-LASTING the pain it caused, to me, to my family, to everyone I loved, and to lots of people I didn’t. I know it’s not in vogue to talk, in moments like these, of the danger of hell, but whatever. Heed my warning: The same destruction, the same growing, gnawing emptiness which ended with me and a needle full of heroin in my arm stares you in the face even now if you neglect Jesus’ words.

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.