Luke 13:6-9
Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
Hello, my name is Chris. My family and I are fairly new here. We attend second service and are just beginning to get involved. My wife, Mary, and I have been married for over 16 years. We have two amazing daughters, Elliott and Harper, and two spoiled dogs.
When the weather warms up, we can normally be found outside. We fill our weekends camping and enjoying nature. Woods and fields; oceans and mountains; waterfalls and caves; these are the things that fill my cup. These are my sacred and holy places, the places I most often encounter God.
To find places to explore and then make my way through them, I need a map. I need directions or a guide, otherwise I get lost. I have a pretty decent sense of direction on the trail or in the woods. But sometimes I get lost. Sometimes I get really lost.
A few years ago, my family and I were camping in North Carolina over fall break. It was my wife’s birthday and we decided to celebrate by hiking up a mountain to this—supposedly—beautiful waterfall. Except we kept climbing, switchback after switchback and, as the day got hotter and hotter, we could not find the turn off for the waterfall. We kept saying “just a little farther” to two very grumpy kids and then we’d get “just a little farther” and see nothing. We didn’t bring water or snacks or a map or anything you should take on a 3-hour hike on a hot day because we didn’t know it would take this long. Eventually, my family, on the brink of despair and starvation, turned around having never found this waterfall. If you think they have let me live that down, or not mentioned it every time we go on a hike even years later, you would be gravely mistaken.
A lot of the lessons I’ve learned in nature help me when I return to my everyday life. Getting lost can feel helpless and out of control. It can be scary. It can feel lonely.
I felt those things for years. For a long time, I felt out of control and alone.
I didn’t want to be an alcoholic, but I was. I had become one.
I didn’t want my dependence on alcohol to separate me from my wife and kids, but it did. And even in the middle of so much loss and hurt, I could not stop drinking. I was not done hurting myself or others, even though I desperately wanted to be.
I know God loved me in my addiction. God continued to love unconditionally even as I continued to hurt myself and those around me. But I also know God wanted better for me. God wanted me to feel less shame, less loneliness, less scared. God wanted to help me out of the wilderness I’d found myself in. But I didn’t know how to find the map. I had lost my sense of direction. I felt lost.
When you’re lost in the wilderness of it, it's easy to forget that addiction, of any kind, impacts other people and not just the addict. We can convince ourselves that “one more time” won’t hurt anyone. But that’s not the truth. Our decisions always have a ripple effect. We don’t drop a single stone into a pond without hundreds of ripples. It’s the same with addiction; we are not islands, our choices impact others.
In the summer of 2017, I was in a pit of despair. I could not control my drinking and the effect that had on my wife and on my children was hard to avoid. The tears. The anger. The sadness. The confusion. I wasn’t living in our home anymore; I had monitored visits with my kids. I had to prove I was sober and safe before I was allowed to be near them. I was sleeping on other peoples’ couches and guest beds. I was untethered. It was, in the truest sense, a wilderness.
I went to AA. I went to Celebrate Recovery. I spoke with drug counselors and therapists. And all I wanted to do was drink. Drinking was what made everything feel better. It helped me to forget the past. It helped me to forget the present. I was able to drown the world in alcohol. But now it was the drinking I could not forget; I had grown physically dependent on alcohol. I could no longer function without it. I couldn’t get out of bed without a drink.
I said foxhole prayers. “Oh God, get me out of this. Help me feel better. I’ll do anything! God, please!”
Alcohol ruled my life. It made all my decisions for me. Where I went. What I did. Who I spent my time with. In the end, it had secluded me, isolated me, separated me from the people I loved. My wife was at home wondering how long it would be until she had to tell my girls I was dead. I was in the wilderness, and so was my family.
You might be lucky enough to not have had to deal with addiction. But I can guess, you’ve experienced loneliness, fear, and anxiety. We all, at times, feel unlovable, lost, or helpless.
I felt those things and blamed God for all of them. I was in the wilderness of my own making and begged for a map, for a way out. If God would just give me a map, this would all be over. I was sure of it.
In September 2017, I woke up in a hospital. My wife had made the hard decision to call the police as I was driving drunk the night before. I vaguely remembered a police officer telling me I could take a ride to a detox facility or get into the car with my very angry wife. I chose the hospital. It was the less scary choice.
But it was still scary, waking up in a hospital gown in an unfamiliar room. I knew this was it. Nothing else had worked, and this was the end for me. This was not the end I had envisioned. It felt like God had left me; I had not been rescued from myself. I did not plan to live much longer and now I was naked except for a very airy hospital gown in a locked medical facility. As I walked to breakfast surrounded by people in real clothes, I knew this was it. I had reached my bottom. I was emotionally, mentally, and spiritually broken. I had no job. No home. No family. My wife was talking with a lawyer to end our marriage. I had nothing left.
I spent a week in the medical facility detoxing. I wanted that to be the end of it, but my wife said no, you can’t come home. My friends said no, you can’t come back. I was out of options. I checked myself into a residential rehab facility. You have a lot of free time in rehab but no access to your normal vices. I did what I was told to do because what else was there to do? I was a whole other kind of wilderness.
Sometimes the map out of the wilderness is other people and routine. It’s trusting those ahead of you on the journey. I didn’t feel like this was the way out of the wilderness, but I didn’t have any other ideas or options, either.
In Exodus, Moses encounters a burning bush. I’ve heard the story of this strange event my whole life. This burning bush phenomenon has always fascinated me. God speaking to Moses from a fire in a bush. Holy ground. I can’t help but imagine Moses being at his rock bottom during this time. Here was a prince of Egypt wandering the wilderness tending his father-in-law’s flock. He was running for his life, in hiding because he’d just killed a man. He didn’t even have his own sheep. And now he was talking to a bush?
I could relate to Moses. I had hit my own kind of rock bottom, and I liked the biblical company.
A few weeks into my rehab stay, I began to walk around the grounds. Behind the house was a small-wooded area. On this day, I had just learned that my insurance company was ending my treatment and wanted to discharge me. I was scared. It was the longest I had been sober in years. I wasn’t ready. I still needed constant supervision. I still had so much work to do. While wandering around the woods, I came upon a downed tree. The tree was covered in a bright orange-red fungus. It consumed the tree, giving it the appearance of being on fire.
It felt like my own burning bush. I could feel God—in the midst of all my worries and hurts and fears—say, “I will be with you.” Just like God did for Moses. The ground I was standing on felt holy.
I had been pleading, begging, and calling out to God for years asking to take this addiction away from me. I didn’t want to be an alcoholic like my dad. I had seen the destruction it had caused. Addiction ruins marriages and families and lives. It steals so much. In this moment, when I had finally gotten quiet enough to listen, God reminded me that He was with me. God had never left me, but I had forgotten what it felt like to not be alone. And I wasn’t alone. God was with me.
Things did not get magically better. But God used people to help guide me out of the wilderness I had ended up in. Sober people who knew how it felt to be so lost. Counselors who helped me address the reasons I drank. Guides showed up along the path and led me when I was too tired and scared to do it alone. I did in-patient programs, out-patient programs, AA meetings, and lived in a halfway house with supervision. I stopped hiding, I showed up, I was held accountable. I was given directions and I followed them even if it was painful. (And it was painful; recovery is hard and painful.) But it was worth it.
I had been in the wilderness alone for so long that I forgot how much I needed other people. I forgot that hiding and shame alienated; that the map I was begging God for was always going to be other people and honesty. I was demanding something God had already provided, but I wasn’t ready to show up for or receive it yet.
Isaiah 41:10 says, “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” God is with us, always. And when we don’t feel it or believe it or see it, there are people who come alongside us and reflect God’s love, mercy, grace, and peace for Him. For me, those people were my wife, my girls, my fellow addicts and alcoholics, the friends and family who showed up again when I was ready to show up again, too.
Like I said before, your wilderness might not be addiction. Your wilderness might look different than mine, but the feelings are often the same: loneliness, fear, shame, or anxiety. We feel lost and out of control and forgotten. We feel unloved and sad. Often the answer God is giving us, when we care to look around, is the people who surround us. People are the map to higher ground. People are the support when we feel tired. People are the guides that reflect God back to us. We just have to be willing to pay attention. I’m glad that I finally did and grateful for the chance to try again each day.
Amen
