Last Sunday we sang a song in my church that was a devotional song and one of the lines mentioned a longing to hear God's voice. It is a worthy sentiment, but I thought about how that gets twisted in my 'stinkin thinkin' mind and how that has played out in my addictive behaviors.
When I act on my addictive behaviors, then, especially by now, the routine is pretty 'comfortable'. I know what is going to happen, how it will play out. There is a little "buzz" at first and then followed by a period (sometimes a long period, unfortunately) of compulsively going from one porn image or video to another, each time questioning myself about when am I going to quit this stupidity and feeling more and more guilty each time, with that counteracted by an excitement of the moment. At some point when my conscience gets the best of me or I feel saturated or there is some interruption, then I will quit. I will begin to feel a deep hatred for myself and what I have done and tremendous guilt. Then I will get on my knees and pray a prayer asking for forgiveness.
I go through all of this because perhaps then comes the payoff. Sometimes it seems like I "hear God". In my mind I find ways to try to avoid the behavior in the future. I become so earnest and passionate in my desire to not let this happen ever again. God has been gracious to seemingly help me find a way out of this every time and I become busy implementing whatever it is that will put a bigger wall between myself and my temptation. I then have a purpose and I know in my heart that it is of God because I know that God hates what I was doing. Even though there was a type of comfort and a familiarity in doing it. But perhaps that comfort is from this final payoff of getting back in a (self-?) righteous mode.
And when does this usually happen? It usually happens when I am feeling overwhelmed, stressed and/or uncertain about things in my life. So I am wondering if this is a way out of the uncertainty, among other things. There are so many uncertain things in my life and life in general. What do I think about politics? about religion? about the war in Iraq? about situations in my family? about my job? the list goes on and on and on. I like to have concrete answers, but they are so hard to find in so many cases and, even then, the concrete answers don't seem so concrete after awhile. But after my addictive behaviors, following the above scenario, I do have concrete answers. I know what to do (fight the disease, build walls against my addiction) and I can do it with abandon and a feeling of knowing that what I am doing is right. I have "heard God's voice", in a sense, and now am ready to "fight the good fight".
The problem is, of course, that... well, I am missing something here. It is downright hypocritical, stupid and ludicrous to keep going through the same cycle. And it is not what God really wants for how to live my life. Not really. So what I need to do is to do better at being comfortable with the silence of God. Yes, God may not give me concrete answers to all of the myraid of issues and situations in my life when I want them. But that is OK. After all, God gave me a mind and I can figure out a lot of things myself over time. But I need to be patient with the pace of my own understanding and with life in general. I should be able to live in this life of uncertainty without having to have all of the answers. I just need the answers for living this one day, one minute at a time, one hour at a time, one day at a time. I have some good habits and I need to keep those and live so that I can rationally assess changes that I might need to make on a day to day basis. But for the uncertainties of life, I need to always remember that solving those things never takes precedence over my sobriety, over my staying in a good relationship with my God, my Higher Power. And I think that sometimes instead of trying to hear God's voice, that means listening to God's silence.
Tags: Reflective
