Today

The nice thing about Today is anything is possible. We are an empty canvas to be painted on every time we open our eyes. Everyday we have a brand new set of choices we can make. Brand new things we can learn and brand new prayers we can pray. I wanted to share with you a poem I wrote last year about my desire to be a better person and the willingness to let God change me, by trying to keep an open mind everyday. I didn't always succeed past lunch some days but I started out wanting to. Here is a segment from that poem:

If Jesus could paint a picture of how my life has been, what color would He use to represent my sin?
How thick or thin of brush, How short or broad of stroke would He use to show the day that I awoke?
Here I am, my day is at its' start, I am an empty canvas, Jesus make your art.

I long to be a masterpiece in my Fathers eyes, ones that can see past the addictions, pain and lies.
Eyes that can see deep inside my heart, I am an empty canvas, Jesus make your art.

Maybe you can use the black for the nails that pierced your human skin,
and the red to demonstrate the blood that washed away my sin.
Wash my pallet clean because my colors have run together, I wish to be your picture now and forever.

It may sound a little corny but that is what I feel inside even to this day. Each day offers me opportunities to live better, love better, pray better and recover better. I am taking my life back literally one day at a time. Which by the way is a recovery slogan. It means all we have is today, we just have to not act out today. Just for today we don't have to give into our urges. That makes it a lot easier than giving it up for life. We just have to give it up and give it over for one day, that's it. Then the next day we do the same and again and again. Before you know it we have a lot of days with no acting out.

They say in some 12 step groups to get used to giving it over to God daily, that you should put your shoes under your bed. That way when you have to kneel down to get them, you may as well pray while you are down there and ask God to help you today. That way you are turning your life and your will over to the care of God right from the start. If that doesn't quite work for you though there are many other opportunities to do this before you start your day. At breakfast, in the shower, over a cup of coffee in your favorite chair, your drive to work or even when you are laying there cursing the fact that is so darn early. You can pray anytime you like, God is always up and He is always there.

Today is something for God to do, give it to Him. He wants us to be free from this life starting Today. So today is a very important day. He knew how awful we would feel being a slave to an addiction whether it be sex or otherwise and He wants us to be free of that guilt, shame, depression, anxiety, lies, and every other sin that goes along with living an addictive lifestyle especially ours of sexual immorality. Despite how we feel and no matter how much we want to change we have to relent to one simple fact in order to move on. We have a sinful nature called the flesh and the flesh lives in the "world" and not the "word" and only Jesus can free us and help us combat this natural sinful nature, how do I know that? God told us so in the Bible. Which is of course, The Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. In Romans Paul writes about our sinful nature and struggling with sin.

Romans 7:21-25; I have discovered this principle of life-that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God's law with all my heart. But there is another power within me  that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to sin that is still within me. Oh what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God the answer is Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is; in my mind I really want to obey God's law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin.

Jesus can set us free from that prison above our shoulders and give us a more peaceful, purposeful life. Because of my sinful nature I gave into it because it seemed natural to me. I was just over sexed or some other lie like that. The path that I was on seemed right to me because I was justified in all of it. If this or that didn't happen I wouldn't of done whatever, or if something wasn't said I wouldn't of done whatever. It was not till I was spiritually, morally and financially bankrupt that I really realized this path is non negotiable. I can not pave my own way. This path I was on was ending in a very bad spot. Proverbs 14:12; There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death. That is what I was endanger of. The spiritual death of your soul is no joking matter and not one to be taken lightly. Remember I have said I was at a point in my life where I could feel and sometimes see the evil around me. Jesus was warning me the pornography, affairs, prostitutes, strippers and whatever else was claiming me, not me it.

This is the last thing I have to say about today. Tomorrow may not have a today. What if this is your last day on this Earth? What if its mine? Once we die, it is too late to repent. It is too late to change. That is why today is so much more important than any other day. It may be our last chance at salvation. It may be our last chance to turn things over to God. Our death comes at a time we will not expect. Since I have given my life to God I have gone to bed repenting for the things I have done and fight the things my mind tells me to do. I have accepted the gift therefore I can not return even as excruciating as the draws can be some days.

I implore all who read this to learn from my mistakes, listen to the scriptures presented, and repent today because tomorrow may never come. Let God take charge of your days on this Earth and whole heartily try to do the right thing. You will fail, I have. The nice thing is today offers restarts at anytime.

Today may be the best day of your life. Today the possibilities are endless. Today you don't have to act out.

Father in Heaven, we owe you thanks when our eyes open to a new day. We pray Father that today you are in charge and you help us through the day. Help us to grow in the knowledge that you have created our hearts and our minds. We wish to honor you and our families and ourselves by having the heart and mind in agreement and action. So for today Father we give up our addictions to you to help us through the day. If so blessed for another today, tomorrow, we ask the same and everyday we have left. Father we pray this in the name of the one who offers us salvation and rest, Your Son Jesus Christ, Amen.

My prayers are with you. Jason.

Surrender, sacrifice, and service

Having a life in recovery with Christ is no different than a garden. A desire to "grow" leads to a seed being planted.  This seed is nurtured, fed, and tended lovingly.  The garden is kept free of weeds that if given the chance will choke the life right out of what you've planted.  What you will harvest is beyond imagination and your bounty will be more than blessed if you plant first with Christ at the heart of it.  This takes surrendering your life and will to His, sacrificing yourself for Him and His plan for you, and serving Him daily by living a life that puts others needs ahead of our own.  It will take these three S's to grow a bountiful garden planted in Christ rich soil. 

You can't have one without having the other, or at the very least without being called to another.  Follow me for a minute here...to surrender means to relinquish control.  For many of us, if we are relinquishing control of something we want, we are sacrificing our wants, and if God wants us to surrender and sacrifice our own needs to meet the needs of others, we are serving both our God and our siblings in Christ. 

How do you accomplish this task? By having an attitude of Christ.  In a letter to the Philippian church Paul wrote:

Philippians 2:1-11; Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from His love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? Then make me truly happy by agreeing whole heatedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and one purpose.
Don't be selfish; don't try to impress others. Be humble thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don't look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others too.
You must have the same attitude Christ Jesus had:

Though He was God, He did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead He gave up His divine privileges, He took up the humble position of a slave and was born a human being. When He appeared in human form He humbled Himself in obedience to God and died a criminals death on a cross.
Therefore, God elevated Him to the place of highest honor and gave Him the name above all other names. That at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow in Heaven and on Earth and under the Earth. And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God the Father.

Remember the slogan that came out a few years ago WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) Well lets talk about what He would want us to do. It is just one addicts opinion take what you want from it.

Surrender: (Planting the garden) As you know step 1 says, "We admitted we were powerless over our addiction and that lives have become unmanageable". So we have to surrender ourselves to the fact we have a problem with using sex and having unhealthy sexual behaviors that lead to rather life complicating situations and unwanted emotional dependency on sexual activity of various forms. To counteract this activity we have to do like step 3 says "decide to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him". Then we have to surrender our problem and our lives over to Him because He can help us over come the lies the enemy tells us and help us the learn the truth that He promises us. We have to depend on our creator not our computer, strip club, adult book store or latest tryst. I wouldn't say this unless I was not doing it myself. An example of this is I work at a place where there is a lot of female customers. My wife understands that it is not one specific person that can trigger me but a lot of skin can. Therefore, I say to God a helpful prayer, usually daily, "God help me stay focused, help me keep my mind and my eyes focused, and when I start to get on the wrong path please Lord pull me back." and He helps, but I have to surrender my addiction to Him daily. Otherwise, experience tells me it can go bad quickly. To have an attitude of Christ with surrendering our problem to Him to is no different than when Jesus dedicated His ministry to the Father. We have to dedicate our recovery to Him.

Sacrifice: (Tending the garden) This is where the weeds that choke the life out of a Garden come in. By nature addiction is selfish. The negative sacrifices that occur around the world in addiction dramatically affect families, spouses, jobs, finances and peoples sense of worth. We give up a lot of things to satisfy the addiction and make sure it is well cared for. We have to sacrifice our selfishness to recover. There is no other way. You can not recover and still hold on to this part of it or that part of it, because holding on to one piece of the addiction can basically make that part grow like a weed that ends up taking back over a garden. By example I tell you, that will happen every single time. I can not tell you how to sacrifice the addiction because you know how far and to what extent you have gone and what it will require you to give up the problem. The only thing I can really say is look at the positives in your life and decide not to be selfish enough to ruin those things. People remember, kids remember, everyone remembers even if they forgive you. You have a chance now to water and weed a different garden. One that produces bountiful things, and completely bull doze the one that sucks the life out of you and your family. Now let me leave you with one final thought on sacrifice: Christ sacrificed His life to give us life. We will not recover if Christ is on the Cross and self is on the throne. To recover we must put Christ on the throne and Self on the cross and sacrifice the life of our addiction to gain a life with Christ. Plain and simple that is the only way. Because who are we to think that we can share the throne and don't need to nail our sacrifice to the Cross, when Jesus Himself was nailed to it.

Service: (Harvesting the Garden) This is where maybe I will sound a bit harsh but oh well. When Queen Elizabeth was a little girl she got in trouble and she felt bad, and her nanny saw her in her room talking to herself in the mirror and Elizabeth said "You are the future Queen of England, NOW ACT LIKE IT!" We are children of God and we must ACT LIKE IT! To serve others is what we are called to do. Addicts can not serve anyone but ourselves. In recovery we have a chance to slow down and think about others. We have the chance to change our way of thinking by thinking of others. In doing so we develop new senses of responsibility to our fellows which helps us get outside of ourselves in the more crucial moments when we feel ourselves wanting to act out. Just like Queen Elizabeth did, we will say our own things to ourselves in the mirror. In serving others we do harvest God like responsibility to help and do. We begin to feel better inside, like we actually have worth and can give back. We have to look at others first and ourselves second. There are many ways to serve others: service work at your meetings like making coffee, buying donuts, things like that. We can open a door for someone that has their hands full, buying someone a cup of coffee or giving them $5 for some gas to get to work. Smile at someone who looks sad. It doesn't have to be a mission trip over seas, it just has to be outside of yourself in an effort to help another somehow.

So you see having an attitude of Christ is basically living and loving right. WWJD is a good slogan, it is not an advertising campaign, it is a way of life worth striving for. Let me share the Parable of the Farmer scattering seed to demonstrate the garden theory of surrender. sacrifice and service:

Matthew 13:3-9; Jesus said, "Listen! A farmer went out to plant some seeds. As he scattered them across his field some seeds fell on a foot path and the birds came and ate them. Other seeds fell on shallow soil with underlying rock. The seed sprouted quickly because the soil was shallow. But the plants soon wilted under the hot sun, and since they did not have deep roots they died. Other seeds fell among thorns that grew up and choked out the tender plants. Still other seeds fell on fertile soil, and they produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted!  Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand.

Plant yourself and your recovery in Christ and blossom where you are planted. Be transformed from an annoying weed to something beautiful. Tend your garden because no one will do it for you. Basically it comes down to this: in the movie Shawshank Redemption,the main character Andy said this after being turned down for parole, "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'" it is your choice.

Father in Heaven, we spoke today of our recovery and our relationship with you being like a garden. Many of us do not know gardening of this sort. We ask that you teach us and give us the proper tools to grow in a relationship with You. That we let go of the lies the world tells us and that we tend to others needs to help them grow and to help ourselves grow by learning how to love one another like Christ loves us. Humbly we submit, that you may help us blossom. Father we pray this in the Precious name of  your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

My prayers are with you. Jason.

Rest

People used to say to me, "you look tired" in retrospect I guess I was. The energy that went into my addiction required a great deal from me. I gave more to my lies and my obsessions than I did my own wife and family. Three decades of giving to the addiction and taking from others wore me out, so yeah I can see why I had bags under my eyes, looked a little pale now and again, not eating or sleeping right can do that to a guy. There is some photographs of me in where I just looked plain horrible, almost sick, especially the more recent years. I don't mean to come across as dramatic but I have thought about how I looked to myself in the mirror, I do recall the grayness and lack of life in my eyes, it hit me just now that the discoloration was emotional, mental and physical exhaustion. Some days I didn't even recognize the reflection that looked back at me, because that man was not the man I dreamed of being when I was younger. It wasn't my childhood aspiration to become a struggling sex addict, with no college education, failed relationships and at one point no hope for being any better than the token I slipped in the video slot. Not always but sometimes. I needed to be that man so I could be this man today, a man that can hold his head up high and say "I love God and have been blessed for my life to bring Him glory". You know what else? I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and my eyes were white, a little red cause I just woke up, but white nonetheless. Also I realized no one has told me "you look tired" for going on quite a while. That is God and that is worth a lot.

In writing these short articles, it is to educate those who don't know and help those that do and share God's word to help others and myself gain some hope and make wiser decisions. With that being said why is "Rest" such an important thing? Some days it is everything to a sex addict. We who have this problem will tell you, "if I could only have just one day where I don't think about it. That would be heaven." It really would, because even to this day my obsessions can get the best of me if I don't pray about them to be taken away or ask for help to manage them. Before I had God as a regular part of my life, my obsessions created a significant amount of problems. Sleeplessness because my mind wouldn't stop thinking about sex, lack of concentration of getting simple daily things done because I ran out of time to do chores once I got it to subside, or I sat in a depression of having to deal with this need. I would become emotionally absent from my wife, unattached from our marriage and lost in my own world of sex, anger, depression and resentments. Using excuses for my behaviors, hiding things to keep my secrets, telling lies and taking risks that I had no right taking. All for these obsessions that flooded me sometimes daily for months on end. One day of rest from sex would have been really nice. Sort of like the credit card commercials: Hooker $20..., video rental $4.99, 3 days on porn site $1.99, one day without thinking of sex...Priceless!

That is what the enemy has to offer us. Jesus made us a different offer to get through this life. One that I am trying very hard to take Him up on and am seeing the rewards it has to offer. In the scripture I found for rest He talks of taking on His "yolk" and yoked to another by definition means: being united to another in order to work together. In doing so their work is considerably easier. By taking Jesus up on His offer our burdens and obsessions will become much more manageable. Matthew 11:28-30; Jesus said, "Come to me all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my Yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls; For my Yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light." Sound a bit more inviting than going it alone? I think so. By following Jesus I got the white back in my eyes and my life is easier to navigate without trying to cover my tracks or remember what lie I told who or where. I struggle but I have God to help me out. When my mind won't rest when my body wants to I ask God to make it so and He does. I am learning to be a partner to my wife instead of the addict she lives with. That is a "yoke" worth taking on. Yes I have burdens but Jesus didn't promise we wouldn't have any. He just said the ones I give are light. Meaning to me anyway, that He doesn't give us anything we can not handle with Him. He also carries the burdens for us sometimes, i.e. the footprints poem. "It was then that I carried you" is how that one ends.

Jesus offers us the rest we need. He gave us salvation and He did that through dying on the cross for us, He also offers rest in many forms...scripture, prayer, counselors, supports, friends, and recovery programs. Speaking of which in recovery we will and have found rest. Because Jesus offered us a way to live a life not so heavy laden by providing those who are sick a way to get better through people He put on this Earth like Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson of Alcoholics Anonymous. They wrote of the nine promises that come true in a spiritual program of recovery. In the fourth edition of the "Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book"-pages 83-84 these promises are spelled out. They are as follows per Alcoholics Anonymous writers: If we are painstaking about this phase development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. The writers continue on to say, Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us-sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them. A true spiritual program of recovery, this is what is waiting for us who choose to get better and give our life over to God and seek His will for us. Scripture promises it and people are living it. Rest is Jesus and our eternal rest is what we forge through this life to receive. He teaches us to achieve it if we seek Him and obey Him. In Isaiah 57:2; the bible speaks of this: it says: For those who follow Godly paths will rest in peace when they die.

Long story short; I want rest, you want rest, we all want rest. Jesus is the way to get it. This life will run us into the ground if we let it. This life will also put us in the ground if we let it. So lets not. Remember for me and this life, it has been three decades, for you maybe the same or more, others less. Some not yet but will if they are not careful. Therefore, lets get better and take the rest of our time to work on a better life, more peaceful life and a life that offers us more rest than we have ever had before. You have the scripture and promise from Jesus Himself, AA's promises in writing for a more peaceful-restful life, what else can be said about this? Make the choice for these choices it is worth it. It is not easy at first, but it gets better, it will be up and down but always the worst day with Christ is better than the best day in addiction.

I would close with a prayer but you know exactly what you need rest from. God is just a breath away so I will let you and encourage you to choose your own closing prayer to this one.

Jason.