Through Christ alone you can defeat the tools of Satan.
Swearing, alcohol, tobacco, drug, sex, porn, lying, trauma…. (INSERT ADDICTION HERE).
I defeated them. With prayer, encouragement from fellow Christ followers, and laying it all at the foot of the cross.
It isn’t going to be easy. Nor should it be. Iron sharpens Iron, if it were easy than a blade of grass could sharpen my sword, but it doesn’t.
“Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” Proverbs 27:17
When I found Christ, I was already on a glide path to sobriety from alcohol and opioids. The truth is, when I realized that Christ was the only thing that was going to set me free of these chains of addiction, trauma and bad life choices, I was sitting in a military hospital reading the bible.
Read “Out of the Darkness: How a special Operations Marine Found the Light” for the entire story.
My life had collapsed in front of me. Over the course of ten combat deployments, multiple combat wounds, brethren killed and maimed, and watching bodies turned into pink dust in front of my own eyes. Once sobriety finally kicked into my mind, my brain urgently wanted to address all those traumatic events.
All at once.
When jumping out of an aircraft at fifteen thousand feet you feel an uneasy upward pressure in your stomach as your feet leave the aircraft ramp. Maybe there is something unnatural about jumping from an airplane? The best is when you exit facing the front and watch as the aircraft continues cutting a path through the sky as you drop like an anvil.
Now the work begins.
Get stable, check altimeter. Track so you can close the distance to your team mates. Check altitude, conduct a couple maneuvers and adjustments.
Check altimeter, look around and wave off, and pull the golf size ball under your pack tray and…
Pray your canopy opens.
Feeling the pull on the shoulders as you are jolted back upward as if a angel from heaven had plucked you from the sky.
The chute opens without a hitch.
Checking your canopy for any holes, twists or line overs, you cinch up your slider. Pulling down your toggles you check left and right turns for chute stability. You look around finding the rest of your team and start heading for the designated drop zone.
At about 250 feet you are on final approach to target, you pick an aim point and stay the course.
As a symbol of all my sobriety, trauma and addictions all converging to be addressed all at once, and under the weight of the world, the parachute collapsed, throwing me accelerating to the ground.
BOOM!
I was alive….. but bashed, bruised, shaken.
And traumatized.
My options at this point were limited. I could stay in the hospital with veiled hope that my bruises would heal and trauma would be suppressed by pharmakeia, or I could lay it all at Christ’s feet, through prayer and looking to our father above for healing and ultimately salvation.
The road was split.
One path, I had already been down before. Using drugs and alcohol to suppress trauma and pain. It was a dead end road with no turn around, it led to a cliff that I had already flung myself off countless times. Remember the time I overdosed on adderall and alcohol in Afghanistan, only a month after I had been hit in the face by a 39mm Taliban grenade. I couldn’t feel my face but my heart was about to explode out of my chest! The countless times I got blackout drunk waking up in the weirdest of locations with no recollection of the night before.
The main reason after a certain point in my military career I drank alone and at home.
Yah.. that road is warn out, with to many potholes, broken guard rails and washed out bridges.
I choose the straight and narrow path.
Let us walk, “Out of the Darkness” together.
“Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Matthew 7:14
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