As a life long Christian married to another life long Christian there are certain trials you think you are immune to, addiction being one of them. Unfortuantely, as I have come to learn addiction doesn't care about your religious beliefs. It doesn't care that you attend church or Bible study. Addiction tries and takes everything in its sphere of reach. It makes men become the person you never dreamed they could be or wanted to be. It takes the number one spot in the lives of the person who is struggling with it. Everyone else in their lives take a back seat to the bottle. The lies, hiding and deceit are never ending and the struggle becomes all consuming. And while it’s easy and good to feel for the addict it’s the people who love them that suffer the most. It’s the children, wives and mothers who feel the pain of it the most. These are the ones who can’t change it. They can’t find any reprieve like the addict in the form of a bottle or pill. They are torn between love of the person they knew and loved and the person they become on alcohol. How do you love the person and hate what they let alcohol do to them? How do you find peace in the midst of the chaos alcohol causes? How do you protect the innocent children who don’t understand why their hero is failing them? How do you support but not enable or even worse lose yourself? You see the bottle comes for us all even the ones that don’t drink it. It wants to take all our joy and destroy families. To those who are fighting for their children and spouse it can be overwhelming to navigate. How do you save someone who doesn’t want saved? Unfortunately, the answer is you can’t save someone who won’t save themselves. So, the next question is how do you survive? It would be easy if there was book with a clear path or clear answers on how to navigate addiction. Unfortunately, it’s different for each family who goes through it. In a perfect world, the alcoholic would want to fight to get better. They would see the constant pain they inflict on their loved ones and fight to get better. They would quit making excuses and start doing whatever needs to be done to get better. The love of their family and the Lord would be enough for them and they wouldn’t need the bottle to fill a void. But life isn’t perfect and sin can take hold of us and take us places we never thought we would go or wanted to go. I know God is the only answer for the family and that he can help them to get through the chaos and heartache the addict causes them but finding that peace can be so hard. Maybe that’s one lesson God tries and teaches the love ones. To put more faith in God and less on their struggling loved one who can’t even help themselves let alone their family. I hope that one day my family can find peace and happiness again and that we can have our dad/husband back. I pray the bottle doesn’t take him from us. I pray he finally chooses us over the bottle. I pray that he puts his pride to the side and humbles himself and asks God and those who love him to help him get better. The bottle will win and life without him won’t be the same if he keeps choosing the bottle over his family. The legacy he leaves for his kids will be forever tarnished by the bottle if he doesn’t fight to get better soon.
Hebrews 11:1
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Comments