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Welcome to the first installment of CLEARRLY Recovering. This is a place where you learn all kinds of fascinating things about being in recovery. You’ll find helpful hints and tips on living with joy.
You’ll find helpful hints and tips even if you’re not married to Joy. You’ll get recommendations about places you should go in recovery, places you shouldn’t go in recovery, and places you forgot even existed because you’ve never been in recovery.
You’ll find information about the different stages. For example, there’s a stage where you start out, and everything is everybody else’s fault. Suddenly, you realize it’s everybody else’s fault, but you are still in the room. Then you realize you actually paid for the room and invited the people in, but it’s still their fault. Then you get to the stage where you remember that that small fire that was started in the corner of the room might’ve been from the lit match you threw in that corner, but it’s still everyone else’s fault. Finally comes the stage where you stand there, looking at a burnt-down house, and everybody else has taken their toys and gone home (even your dog is too disgusted to look at you). That’s the glorious stage when you realize that this is actually all your fault. At that point…welcome to recovery!
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These fruits of the spirit are the real markers of recovery. Regardless of the path that you take, everyone in recovery makes a change, a 180, a full reboot, or a stop, drop, and roll. And somewhere along the way, you will submit to a power greater than yourself. For me, that is Jesus Christ. I say it often and in complete sincerity: my job is not to convince anybody about Jesus Christ but to tell you what he has done in my life.
So, if you’re still reading, you are either in recovery, looking to be in recovery, or Love Somebody in recovery or looking to be in recovery, or you can’t find anything else to read while you’re waiting for your root canal. Either way, I’m glad you’re here. This blog exists to share my thoughts, victories, defeats, and hopes. That’s what recovery is to me; it is being in a community with others who are trying to achieve the same thing.
I was once told if you want to stop being an addict, all you have to change is everything. I would add that you only have today to do it. So, do what you can today, pray to be better tomorrow, and don’t be defeated by the shame of yesterday. Remember, even Jesus can’t change the past.