Unshackled Moments ~ April 18 ~ Need A Fix? Fix The Need

"Need a fix? Fix the need," is a saying heard in the rooms of drug recovery. It's an understanding that drugs were never the problem but rather an attempt to fix the real problem chemically. Regardless of who we are and what we've been through we all are born with a piece missing from a complete and joyful life worth living. That hole causes symptoms of misery, anxiousness, discontent, fear, etc that we try to fix. Some of us used drugs, or alcohol, or sex, or food, or relationships with other people, or use work, or shopping, or gambling, or _________________ (fill in the blank), or use a combination, but sooner or later our solutions start working less and less and cause more and more destruction and misery.

The pain from this causes us to look for another solution. Those of us blessed enough to find that the answer is relationship with God, that only He fits the hole perfectly and completely and without the side effects our solutions of selfishness caused, find freedom. But what we don't find is an instant cure to all our problems and issues. We are reborn free and new, but not yet perfect, and therefore our relationship with God is growing and not yet perfect. That means we still feel need from the vacuum in the places of that hole that we have not yet let God fill. So we feel the need, desire or temptation to try our old solutions again (even though we know that they lead to death and don't work long-term) or try something else. For whatever reason the temptation is to fill it with something other than God, but that never works. When we feel the itch, when we start jonesing for something old or new to provide instant relief over true freedom, we don't need to satiate the desire. We need to fix the need. The need is the absence of relationship with God. The cure is not in self indulgence of any kind but in running to Him, in being in His presence, in conscious contact with our Creator.

Lord, help me to respond to the pull of self to change the way I feel with more of You instead of more of me. Help me to fix the need rather than scratch the itch/ Amen.