Recovery Articles

By: Chris A

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” (Luke 23:46)

The final recorded words of Jesus, before He breathed His last, are not the cry of a victim; they are the proclamation of a king! Jesus was not a victim of the cross; He was the author of the sacrifice. 

In my recovery journey, I thought surrender meant giving up, waving the white flag, admitting life had beaten me. But true surrender is not resignation. It is trust. It is the moment I finally released the exhausting illusion of control and placed my life into hands far steadier than my own. Anyone who has walked the road of addiction recovery knows this moment. It often comes after the striving has failed. You know, the promises to “do better,” the plans to “try harder,” the bargains made between self and God. Eventually, I had to came to a place where Step One became undeniable for me: I was powerless to manage this on my own.

But recovery doesn’t end there. It moves toward the hope of Step Three––“turning our will and our lives over to the care of God”. Even in agony, even when everything appeared lost, Jesus models this posture [in His final breath] and entrusts himself to the Father, and that is the heart of recovery. We do not recover by gripping life tighter. We recover by placing our lives—our fears, our failures, our cravings, our future—into the hands of God. Not once, but again and again. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” is more than Jesus’ last sentence. It is a daily prayer for those of us learning to live free. And what’s beautiful about this is that the hands we surrender to are the same hands that raise the dead.

By: Aaron W.

Today you will be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43).

“Today you will be with me in paradise,” Jesus spoke to a criminal hanging next to him, one living in the reality of his punishment. In honesty, I often want to be that man, but without the cost of suffering or facing my own inner turmoil.

In Michael O’Brien’s A Father’s Tale, a character reflects that three crosses grow in every heart: the cross of Jesus, the repentant thief, and the unrepentant thief. He notes that while we hope to suffer like Jesus or even the repentant thief, we often find ourselves as the unrepentant thief—resentful and making others pay for our unhappiness. Yet, seeing ourselves as we truly are is the precondition for repentance. When we acknowledge we are the unrepentant thief, the wellsprings of spiritual transformation open, and we can turn to Jesus for forgiveness, becoming the repentant thief.

Much of my addiction and recovery was spent avoiding suffering by blaming others for my discomfort and then acting out or acting in to cope with the pain. I refused to face reality, trapped in cycles of shame. However, acknowledging and accepting my character defects and taking ownership of my impact on others allows for ground of true transformation.

While the repentant thief only asks to be remembered, Jesus offers His presence: “Today you will be with me…” If the opposite of addiction is connection, this “paradise” takes root in the furrowed soil of our brokenness. It is incredible that Jesus, in His own agony, communicates a desire to be with the one living in reality.

By: Lynson

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

On the cross, having been questioned by debouched leaders, scorned by the villainous religious elite, his deity mocked by mere humans, beaten beyond recognition, I can’t imagine what Jesus was thinking as the crowds pled for his death, many of the same voices that had not long before shouted, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.” The Messiah had come, to be sure, only the people his coming was meant to transform used the same fullness of prophecy to crucify him. This short prayer from Luke’s gospel depicts the supernatural, unadulterated love of Christ that would move him to intercede for us, even amid the most excruciating death in human history; we deserved the very cross we nailed him to, but the horror of it all didn’t stop him from showing us mercy.

I used to think addiction was a cliff with an unsuspecting edge, or a hill too steep to climb through, a labyrinth blanketed by fog is probably more accurate. Metaphor aside, addiction saw me, perhaps many of us, running toward its snare blindly, and of course, without knowledge. Because I, too, “knew not”, forgiveness from the Lord had long since seemed a thing too wonderful for me, a blessing fit for those who hadn’t fallen as far or rebelled as willfully. I am encouraged, however, that we have a Savior whose love reaches us at our very worst, a love that never tires, not even as he died on the cross. Only, now that we do know, we can receive the love of Christ instead of rejecting it. We can live sober lives because we know that this love comes not as a license to sin, but to cleanse us from sin, to release us from its power, to forgive us for the ignorance of our past, and to resurrect us at the last day.