Last night I caught back-to-back episodes of "Intervention" on A&E. Each episode featured an individual in a seemingly hopeless situation due to addictions and the family's efforts to intervene and save the individual from self-destruction. As the show progresses, you follow a life spiraling out of control finally reduced to a state of living to appease a perceived need literally minute-to-minute. Naturally, it can be unnerving to witness the depths of how far one's life can plummet.
The show is aptly named as in both situations, it was not the individual's own dissatisfaction that instigated a change but a demonstration of love and the conveyance of the hurt by the family that served as the biggest motivation for a reversal of the situation.
After reflecting on today's devotional, I realized that our stories were not very different, the primary difference being the timeframe in which we reach our fate respectively. Because of the accelerating effects of their physical addictions, the intensity of their downward spiral is amplified as their lives are compressed into a shorter period of time - something not as obvious over a "normal" lifespan.
Living to appease ourselves minute-to-minute isn't really an exaggeration. We may not all be addicted to narcotics, but we find other ways to medicate our insecurities and self-focused desires, ways that have become so commonplace that we don't even flinch.
Jesus says "whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it." Its a confusing proposition that has no appeal to any part of our nature. Yet nothing that we've been able to do on our own in history has ever proven otherwise. That's the real power of the Cross, self-sacrificial love. God has intervened on our behalf with the ultimate expression of love to begin the reversal of this dark vicious cycle we are born into. Likewise, each one of us is called to find our true life, not by focusing on ourselves, but to propogate Christ's example and organically build the Kingdom of God.
"Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
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1 comment:
thank you, dan, for a very insightful post. i think that what you say is so true. an addict's life of self-destruction is just an accelerated version of what will happen to those of us who have "dependencies" on other "substances", only in "normal time".
when we have the opportunity to watch the horror of the addict's life, we would be wise to remember that those of us who worship "other gods" (whatever or whoever they may be) will most certainly meet the exact same fearful end, but we are lulled into thinking our lives are not so bad as "that addict", because the process of our own "downward spiral" is not so pronounced when it occurs through "normal" time.
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