Sister of an Addict

Dedicated to Jonathan and Joseph: Forgive me for any moment that I felt ashamed of you. I hope today you hear the roar of my applause for how proud I am of you.

Our search engines can easily take us to articles that will inform us on the topic of addiction. Information is easily accessible about this disease and there is no shortage to the paramount idea of “addicts.” However, one will rarely find language wrapping itself around the other characters that are too hidden amongst the shadows that addiction brings – siblings.

In the years of my brothers’ opiate addictions, what my heart longed for the most was for my path to cross with those who also had siblings in active addiction or even recovery. Addiction is dark and it is as if darkness always pairs itself together with loneliness. The highs are accompanied by a thick cloud that seems to get in your line of eyesight, making you see nothing else. The circumstance itself makes you feel as if you are the only one.  The enemy will only come and echo what you have already heard.

It was not uncommon for me to type into google “sister of an addict” with the hopes someone had tackled the concept. I found that anything I would come across would be written by those who had been affected first hand by their loved one falling victim to this monstrous disease. Their words were from a place of brokenness and from the cracks resentment and bitterness was oozing.

Resentment and bitterness occupying the same heart will inevitably rub together with a friction that will spark a flame. If you let those feelings become stronger and stronger, they will always end in destruction. Something in me knew that the words of the articles I would stumble across were only going to pour gasoline on the slight flame that was already burning. The existence of the embers were proof enough of how alive resentment and bitterness already were in my life but the existence did not dismiss me from needing to confess and repent of it.

We must not believe that just because God knows it is there means that there is not a responsibility on our end. Repentance is a word I pray will become common language once more. His grace is as abounding as the ocean but the waves of grace do no wash away the calling scripture gives us to repent.

What I found was that none of the words of these people were comforting me. They were not encouraging me. They were not helping my dwindling hope. What a clear indication that when we are in a place of resentment and bitterness we are not helping ourselves or others. I do not write today to tell you how to work through your resentment and bitterness. The road to get there is a different for us all. There is no highway I can tell you veer onto. You must find out what the journey looks like for you on your own. But I will tell you the journey is necessary and it one that will lead to freedom. I will tell you that you need to take it.

I write today because it is time that the world knows to be a sister of an addict or a recovering addict is one that does not only have to be marked with “I am ashamed of you” but it can be “I applaud you.”

Culture mutters the word “addict” with disgust and looks down upon them because of where they were or where they have been. I wish we could say it is only those who are outside of the church that do so. I have seen first-hand how that is not the truth. Even those who know Jesus have been quick to pass judgment. How contradictory is this to the gospel? If we all looked at where we were through the lens of salvation, we would see that we were all in the same place – dead. By His grace alone do we have breath in our lungs and how dare we use that breath to cast judgment.

For far too long I looked at this chapter in my story filled addiction with disgust and shame, only to later realize that shame has no place in the story of God. There are no exceptions to that.There are setbacks but the setbacks are not written onto the pages with a permanent backdrop of shame.  There was only one thing that brought me to a place of understanding this. The only thing that snatched me out of the self-pity party I was throwing was contemplating the cross.

“Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.” John 19:25

Mary-Magdalene, this is the the same woman who had demons cast out of her and the same woman referred to as the woman who lived a sinful life. In Jesus’ final moments, she was one of the ones who got to look up to where the Messiah hung, beaten, bruised, with open wounds. The Roman soldiers would see the blood that came from his brokenness but Mary-Magdalene would see the same thing she had seen since the moment she met Him- grace.

The Roman soldiers would see a faintness in His eyes as Jesus approached death but Mary-Magdalene would gaze into the same eyes and see more. She would see a different message. His eyes would tell her the same thing they told her the first time she looked into them “even you.”

Don’t you see it? Side by side, we all kneel in the same dirt and look up to a God who never once said He would cluster us together by where we had been or what we had done. There is no caution tape marking of sections. There is not a “us” and “them.” There is not addict and then the sister of an addict. At the cross, there is only one name being spoken over us and it is: Child of God. It is a name that tells us more than what we are but reveals our deepest desires have already been met. To be His is to belong. To be His is to be loved.

Walking with someone through addiction will break you, but the brokenness does not have to come seeping in resentment and bitterness it can be seeping in grace.

Friday marks four years of one of my brother being drug-free. Statics say that 60% of people who enter into recovery relapse, typically ending in death. He is God’s power on display. Both of my brothers are a blaring message that the darkness will never be a place that God’s light cannot penetrate into.

For so long my mindset was to celebrate the milestones but the truth is in recovery everything is a milestone. Four seconds, four days, four weeks. Celebrate them all. Applaud them. Those of us who have never been there will never know what it is like to be handcuffed to a drug.

The reality is this goes beyond just drug addiction. It could be porn. It could be alcohol. It could be anything. We need to be the kind of people who never let those in the fight think that we will not celebrate them until the milestones come. We cannot be the people who judge. We cannot be the people who stiff arm and keep the addicts at a distance. We must remember that at the end of the day we are all one in the same.

I know some will find their way to this post whose story of their siblings did not turn out the way mine has. Some have lost loved ones; some still have siblings in the middle of addiction.  I have a sensitivity for you that words cannot convey.  My hope in writing this was simply for it to be the post that nobody else was writing when I was there.

One that tells you, let there be grace.

One that tells you, setbacks do not have to come with shame.

One that tells you, do not listen to the ones who try to classify them by what they do.

One that tells you, deal with the resentment, do not stay there.

One that tells you, do not look through the lens of your circumstance.

One that tells you, contemplate the cross.

Addiction can steal a lot of things but I can promise you this – it will never still their identity. They are your brother. They are your sister. They are a child of God.

I choose gratitude today for this chapter in my story because the revelations that Jesus showed me through it were all things that I desperately needed to know. Sometimes the greatest way you can understand something is to have to give it. In order to give it, you have to first be a recipient of it.

I am a better person because of my brothers in more ways than just one. Funny how the ones we have at times thought we were better than end up being the ones who make us better.

xoxo,

a proud sister