addiction....

...is so fascinating to me, which sounds terrible because it destroys everything it touches. but i think it explains a lot about god.

addiction messes up your pleasure centers- once you have indulged in an addictive behavior enough, a chemical reaction (or something like that) happens in you and it begins to tell the pleasure center of your brain that you can only be happy if you are doing that behavior. and the desire in us to access the pleasure center that allows us happiness is an extremely powerful drive. so when its messed up and reprogrammed, things are not good. once those chemicals mess with your pleasure center, stopping your brain from thinking that drinking/having sex/shooting up/working/shopping/eating/(insert addiction here) is not the center of all your happiness is nearly impossible.

which makes sense.

god asks us to be extreme sometimes. and sometimes he asks us to walk the line between two extremes. sometimes he tells us its better to be in the middle than go too far one way. the fact that our brains are basically wired for moderation makes me feel like god is real. because he made our bodies and brains in line with his ways. he knows its not good for us to overindulge in certain things of this earth because he knows the only thing we can really overindulge in and never come away sick or addicted or broken from is pursuing him and his kingdom in a healthy way. he jealously wants our whole selves and has created our brains in a way that we must moderate what exactly we put inside of us and what we surround ourselves with. when we don't, something inside us becomes broken.

but what's even better about God is that when we often fail to keep ourselves from extremity and addiction (because we are all addicted to many things, if we think about it honestly), he still redeems us. still heals us. still picks us up off the ground and teaches us to keep walking.

there is no place more comfortable for me than in an aa meeting. its the environment i grew up in, the aa crowd, and i loved it so much. these people know brokenness, failure, destitution, the view from the bottom. but that much more, they know mercy, forgiveness, humility, grace. they are the realest group of people i know. i wish the church was more like them in seeing the deep brokenness we all carry around, admitting it as a reality openly and still getting up everyday and facing life with the belief that we can be redeemed.

what recovering addicts know is how to live out of their broken state. when we can truly learn to live out of our broken state, we can truly learn the meaning of humility. and in humility, grace.