You’re overwhelmed. Life is going on all around you and suddenly crisis happens. You’re faced with a problem. Ever been there?
You don’t need to have experience in addiction or have had to battle with a family member in addiction in order to understand the nature of dealing with a problem.
Though for many of us our initial reaction is to try and find a way to avoid dealing with the problem. We don’t want to be inconvenienced by what we’re facing so we move on and tell ourselves we will get to it later.
The bigger concern is sometimes this becomes a pattern. We move from problem to avoidance to a new problem to avoidance. After a while we end up standing on top of a mountain of issues.
I’ve been involved in a few remodeling projects throughout the course of my life. One of them we worked on is a building that had been built in 1937. It seemed that every time we pulled a piece of Sheetrock off or began to work on a room, we would uncover another issue that we didn’t expect.
Throughout the course of the project we found evidence of where the people before us had either completely ignored an issue that needed to be fixed, or even worse they threw a “duct tape solution” together when the problem merited more consideration that it was given.
We’ve been working on this building now for 4 years and frankly it’s been a stressful project. It seemed like every time we made progress we uncovered another issue. Yet we continued to stay diligent because we knew that if we put in the work, eventually things would get better.
Guess what? They did get better. Today I stand in the middle of a room that’s been completely remodeled. A building that once was uncomfortable and caused us a lot of stress because it didn’t meet our needs, is now a shining beacon of hope. This is the same room we gather in to have chapel on a weekly basis. No one that enters even realizes the issues that once existed.
I hope you can see the parallel to your life here. One day the problems you’ve faced will be a testimony that you were able to endure the test of time. The stress and the pain that you have experienced will fade away and you will stand as a beacon of hope for everyone around. I know it’s hard to see now and the fear of what you might uncover can paralyze you from moving forward. Face your fear and go for it! The time to start is now.
