Something my friends in recovery have taught me is the absolute necessity of choice: The decision to choose sobriety is the linchpin of those who are recovering alcoholics.
You have to choose sobriety. No one can choose it for you. No one should aid and abet your alcoholism. No one can underwrite it, endorse it, fund it, or clean up behind it.
My wife and I spent a wonderful time in Vancouver not long ago. The Canadians have an extraordinarily generous social system. Some would say ruinous — but the politics of it is not my point.
What struck me forcibly is that the system doesn’t keep people from living on the streets — some of them obviously in drug induced states. What is the problem here? The system is co-dependent with the addicts on the street.
What is the spiritual lesson here? The same one that is thread through Scripture: “Choose you, this day, whom you will serve…” “Whosoever will….”
If you want a life grounded in God, a life with a bit less chaos, a life with spiritual focus, then you need to choose it.
Stop making excuses.
Stop rehearsing the past.
Stop waiting for some one to bail you out.
It’s not going to happen.
It wouldn’t make a lasting difference if it did.
You need to choose.
What follows may not be easy. But it will yield to your choice.