During the pandemic many of us had high hopes of being more productive. However, my list of things completed seems short. This week I finished and started a movie and I finished reading a great book.
My wife and I and our youngest watched the movie, My Octopus Teacher. This beautiful film gives us an inside look on a broken man rediscovering himself by getting outside of himself in nature. In an extraordinary moment of connection there is one prayer in the whole film. “God, I hope she is ok.” He prayed for the octopus! I believe it was also a prayer for himself; he needed to know recovery was possible.
Many of us have been praying through the pandemic, “God I hope we are ok.” In staff meeting a few weeks ago, we explored the observation, “When we get to the other side of the pandemic we may discover that more of us have addictions to something.” The merger between pain and loss, soothing and using, body and soul, exclusion and embrace makes any discussion of addiction seem complicated and at times bewildering.
Aaron’s White’s book Recovering: From Brokenness and Addiction to Blessedness and Community is a timely call to pastors and church members to meet Jesus honestly. We need honesty about ourselves; we need honesty about brokenness and our ragged hallelujahs. The book is filled with painful realities but always with hope. That’s how the beatitudes work. Jesus’s vision of life in His Kingdom holds together the realities of our brokenness and draws us into His promise of life and wholeness.
Aaron’s book is less a “how-to” and more of an invitation for movement toward each other with Jesus. I will let him summarize, “We are moving either in the direction of addiction and alienation or in the direction of connection with God and community. Relationship is heaven’s answer to the dislocation of addiction, both now and forever.”
I hope you will get a copy and read it with friends.