Hope Is AliveSample

"Surrender Daily"

Just a few weeks after my intervention moment, I was shipped off to a treatment center in Oklahoma. It was a warm April day when I had my first encounter with my counselor, we took off on a walk around the facility and not more than 20 steps into it, he turned to me and said, “Lance, do you know what being powerless means?”

After rolling it around in my head and failing to come up with a suitable answer, I responded with a simple and honest, “No, I guess I don’t.”    Over the next thirty minutes we walked around and around that facility, he slowly and patiently described to me the principle of powerlessness and the ways it related to my addiction. He went on to say: “Lance, what you need to begin thinking about, is that this addiction has you beat. It’s defeated you. So instead of continuing to fight it for years and years and watching it destroy what’s left of your life, why not just consider surrendering to it? Accept it got the best of you and admit you are powerless over it.”

When I took a moment to step back and look at my situation, “surrendering” began to sound like a good idea. It was logical. I had been defeated. As my counselor described the process, it became so clear how, over a period, I slowly lost any power over my drug and alcohol use. I had begun to do things that I’d promised myself I would never do at all.

I compared it to the familiar analogy of the frog and the boiling pot of water. I’m sure you’ve heard it before: put a frog in a pot of water on a stove top and slowly turn up the temperature, the frog will just sit there without realizing that the water he is sitting in is increasing to a scolding hot level. The next thing little Kermit knows, he’s dead. Done. Over. 

That is what had happened to me, and that is what sin does to our lives. It slips in. We don’t recognize it as first. It starts slow.  A series of crazy situations compounded by heart-breaking loneliness and depression lead me to a normal existence of bouncing checks, pawning stolen jewelry, stealing pills from my poor grandparents. 

In that moment with my counselor, as I looked back on my life, I could finally see the insanity. Accepting that it was out of control then became an easy choice. 

My first step in surrender was to humble myself. After years of trying to do things “my way,” it became clear I had encountered a foe I was helpless to overcome. I had to accept defeat. I quickly realized: not only did I need to surrender myself to my addiction, but I needed to surrender my entire life to my Savior. With God on my side, I could freely give Him my cares and anxieties, releasing my soul from the worries and heaviness I had been carrying around for years. 

As we follow this first action, humbly surrendering our hearts to God, He promises that He will eventually restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish us in His time, setting us on a course for a new life free from the toils of addiction. 

As you look at your life today, have you become powerless over a substance? Has sin crept its way in and pushed your life to a place of insanity? If so, take the first step I did and surrender today!