A letter writer to Dear Abby said, “I
don’t want to waste my life watching her [mother] waste hers.” I think many of us who have friends and loved ones
captive to addictions can relate to the writer. I’ve certainly experienced
times when it seemed like another person’s addiction was draining the life out
of me. Carrying that thought into the spiritual realm, I’m now wondering if we
don’t have the same sort of feelings when it comes to non-believing loved ones.
Are there times when we are so desperate for others to come to the Lord that
our life gets consumed by their failure to accept Jesus Christ? It seems
possible that some of us might be wasting our life by watching a non-believer
waste his life.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----In a phenomenological sense it seems like someone else’s addiction drains our life. The actual drainage is of our life’s resources, unless we are careless watchers. Time is consumed in hand holding, fetching, and running errands. Money is lost to the cost of fetching, errands, recovery programs, and the addict’s pilfering. Then emotions get pummeled by frustration and sucked down the drain. Finally, attitudes start to follow. That’s just the short, obvious list.
-----And by the time attitudes start going down the drain, it is hard to say the sense of lost life is merely phenomenological. Life is so vested in its resources that they can be mistaken for it. But life is not even emotions and attitudes, if you want to get right down to it. Life is a process. It is a process caused by attraction to what is real leading to a search for what is real resulting in the application of what has been found to be real. And that is kind of an oat-meal way of saying it. More specifically, it is attraction to truth leading to search for truth resulting in application of found truth. OK, unequivocally stated, since what is real is true, and since Jesus Christ is truth, life is attraction to Jesus leading to search for Jesus resulting in application of Jesus. That may sound trite, but it is clear, and it points straight to the heart of matters.
-----Now I think we can see life separately from life’s assets (resources.) Life is a path having a certain redundancy (called practice.) Your desiring, searching for, and applying truth is your participation in life, but is not life itself. The path you center yourself more upon by practice, being the truth, is life. Its life becomes in you as you discover and use more of its truth. Now we can begin to see how attention given the addict (a non-believer is merely a deceit addict) does not necessarily waste life.
-----Some attention is proper. Some is not. I learned this from my wife! She is right about enabling. There is a certain point to which fixing an addict’s problems is fulfilling his true needs. Fulfillment beyond that point serves his possibilities to imbibe more addiction. Up to this point your assets are being fed to Jesus, are clothing Him, and are giving Him drink, because they are supplying the addict’s true needs. That makes more life. Assets spent on life made are not wasted. But beyond that point, attention and assistance has become enabling; your assets are wasted; your walk in the truth has taken on a bit of deceit; and your participation in life has diminished. Every way for making addiction’s disasters seem less ominous about its perils, or for securing more imbibing poisons the truth about need. This wastes life! Fortunately the redundancy in life gives us a chance to zero in on that line which demarks feeding from enabling so the consumption of our life’s assets will lead to life production rather than waste.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment