Through Weakness We Gain the Strength of God

"About myself I will not boast, except about my weaknesses. A thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong."

 2 Corinthians, Chapter 12

     Power is brought to perfection through weakness. Through the first three of the 12 Steps, in particular, we learn to accept our weakness and to surrender it to a Higher Power. In this way, by letting go of our willpower, we grow from being powerless over addictive behaviors to being strong enough to say “No more!”

Like St. Paul, when we are weak we are better able to let go and allow God to guide our lives. Surrender allows God to subdue our egos. At once we have a reality check. We understand that we are imperfect and that we do need help from outside ourselves. What we previously could not do for ourselves, we now allow God to do for us. We are suddenly made strong by the grace of God, and miracles begin to happen.

We slowly gain power over the symptoms of our addictive disease. We gain the power to stop drowning ourselves in alcohol, or eating ourselves into cardiac arrest, or shopping ourselves into bankruptcy. Many of us learn to let go of our false gods (people we lost ourselves in). Suddenly we have new clarity of vision and life regains some of its sparkle. But we have to be careful at this point. It's very easy to swap one addictive behavior for another. It's very easy for addictive personalities to gain control over their drinking, for example, by switching their addictive medicating to cigarettes, or coffee or sex. This is where we need to understand that addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem. 

Many of us falsely believe that the addiction is the problem itself. Certainly addiction is a problem, but it is not our root problem. Shame is most often the root problem. Drinking, over-eating, excessive spending, gambling, etc. are merely ways of medicating away our shame of not being good enough. At a young age we came to believe we were defective and not good enough to be loved. We developed a deep shame about ourselves and our sense of self-love was destroyed before it could ever take root. We lost any sense of self-worth, and never gained a proper amount of self-esteem. And we kept this all secret to ourselves for sake of survival. We did all in our power to keep others from discovering how unlovable we are, and eventually we buckled under all of the pressure. This is where addictive medicating became essential to our existence.

Knowing the root problem of our addictive behavior--shame-- means we can better understand where we actually need healing. We need to surrender our shame to God. We need healing in our hearts. We need to see ourselves in a new, realistic light. And we need to start loving the person inside of us. We need to replace the shame with love and kindness.

For many people, reclaiming our true selves means revisiting the past. That's a scary idea and yet, even scarier is the fact that we are constantly reliving the past that we don't understand. Most of us react to life and our reactions we learned at very young ages. Some of us have unknowingly been trapped in the same old behavior since the age of seven. Everyday we have relived the same old mistakes. We failed and failed again because we've been too afraid to face the past. We've been afraid it would destroy us. Well, in a sense it already has. We've given it the power to sabotage our present. So, we need to take our power back from the past by facing it. Truth is that we survived the past once already. That means we are stronger than it is. It has no power over us beyond the power that we give it by simply fearing to look back. When we fear to look back, we continue to run and when we continue to run, we lose our lives to fear.

Let's take back our power today. We need to believe that we are stronger than the past. And we need to understand that the past may very well hold the key to our full spiritual recovery from addictive behaviors. Let’s look back, discover the root problem that led to our addictions and surrender it all to God! We must admit we are weak before God, and that it's OK to be weak because in our weakness, our Higher Power will make us strong-- and our souls will begin to shine!