Encouragement

[StevenBelievin]

Four years ago tomorrow my wife passed away from a fairly rare auto-immune condition called auto immune hepatitis. Basically her immune system attacked her liver until it went into cirrhosis. Before she died she had a liver transplant which seemed to work for a while and then she started showing signs that things were not quite right. well, it slowly got worse and then they started talking about the possibility of a second transplant, but while leading up to that she got some really bad infections and when it came down to it she was too sick to get another one. Rewinding a little bit, I started drinking from time to time when she started to get sicker, and I started taking prescription pain killers (hydrocodone) because I have a bad back. I was not taking the pain killers beyond what was prescribed and only in the manner prescribed, but the drinking was getting a bit more regular and a bit more heavy. After she died the drinking got pretty bad and I also started taking Prozac as well. several months went by and some old friends came by who smoked pot, and guess what? I started smoking pot too. But for me it had been a long time since I had done that, so it consisted of a puff or two after work. I also managed not to drink until after 5pm even on the weekends. You see my wife was 35 when she died and I had a 6 year old son and a 8 year old daughter. I was a wreck. My kids were oblivious to 98% of this as I didn't drink or do anything else in front of them.

About a year and a half after she died I stopped smoking pot as it was getting hard to find, and my main thing was the booze anyway. About 6 months after that I stopped taking the Prozac and met my new wife. Even though I was still not in good shape she saw a good man deep down. I no longer take pain killers. I no longer take Prozac, although I don't condemn the use of anti-depressants. I stopped the pot nonsense a couple years ago. I have not quite kicked the habit of drinking, but I drink a lot less and a lot less frequently. There's generally 2 to 3 nights of not drinking to every 1 that I do, and God is leading me more and farther away from it. The more time I spend in God's Word and in prayer, then more I revile the sin in my life. Not just the drinking but anything I feel that hinders that relationship with Him. I spend a lot more time in the bible than I did when things were really bad. I initially had a lot of doubts and questions about how could God let this happen with my late wife dying, but things have gotten a lot better.

All of that to say this... Things may look bad now, but it will not always be so. Keep holding on no matter what it looks like. Deliverance from substances is rarely a single event where you're delivered in an instant, although possible. Also if you have made progress, focus on that. You're not there yet, but you are not where you were either. If you feel you haven't made progress or it's getting worse, just hang in there. It's going to get better. Just say to yourself "God loves me even if it doesn't feel that way. He has a plan and it's going to end up being a good one."

Jeremiah 29:11-13