Reflection
As National Recovery Month comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about what nearly four decades of recovery have taught me.
I can summarize much of it in four simple stages:
Give Up. Clean Up. Grow Up. Live Up.
Click here to give my most recent Higher Leading Podcast a listen, where I go in depth on these four phrases.
Give Up. Recovery begins with surrender. I had to stop trying to run the whole show and admit that my way wasn’t working. Surrender wasn’t giving up on life—it was giving up the fight that was keeping me from life.
Clean Up. Getting sober didn’t erase the wreckage. Recovery required me to take responsibility, make amends, seek forgiveness, forgive others, and allow God to clean up things inside me that drugs and alcohol had helped me avoid.
Grow Up. Sobriety is more than not using. It’s learning how to live. Recovery has challenged me to become more self-aware, emotionally mature, humble, teachable, prayerful, and willing to admit when I’m wrong. Nearly forty years later, I’m still growing.
Live Up. Eventually, recovery turns outward. Step Twelve calls us to carry the message to others and practice these principles in our daily lives. God can take the parts of our stories we once wanted to hide and use them to help someone else. Our mess can become our message.
For me, the progression has looked something like this:
Help me.
Change me.
Use me.
That’s the journey…daily.
God didn’t give me a second chance simply so I could survive. He gave me another shot at life so I could use my experiences, good and bad, to serve Him and others.
The scars remain, but their meaning changes. They serve as evidence that healing occurred there.
So, as we close this month, maybe recovery, and living life to the beat of a Higher Calling, comes down to four questions:
What do I need to give up?
What do I need to clean up?
Where do I need to grow up?
How is God calling me to live up?
Recovery isn’t perfection. It’s progress.
It isn’t arriving. It’s becoming.
It’s about living for Him.
Soul Search
Which of the four — Give Up, Clean Up, Grow Up, or Live Up — is God asking me to focus on today?
“Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” — 1 Corinthians 10:31
P.E.A.C.E.
Jay@EagleLaunch.com
