I often tell my preaching students that if you want to know what is going on in the personal life of a preacher, just listen to their sermons. So, if you have been following Thursday Circle this year, even sporadically, you will notice that I have spoken much about the business of forgiveness and the pain of addiction- two subjects at the very heart my story, and the last year of my life in particular.

And so it is that I find myself while I type on the keyboard this week that I am being inspired by Jason Isbell’s new album “Southerner.” Isbell is a former member of the band Drive By Truckers who is all at once a gifted singer, poetic songwriter, talented guitarist, as well as a former drug addict and a recovering alcoholic. 

This week he sat down with Terry Gross on Fresh Air for an interview that proved to be part performance, part confession. The entire piece can be heard here, and is well worth your time. Isbell is humble and gentle and speaks with a certain mix of deep-reflection and tenderness, especially when he speaks about his father and his wife. Both of which played important roles in his recovery.

This week I also watched a documentary on the life of Todd Marinovich, the boy wonder whose father dedicated his entire life attempting to build his son into the perfect athlete, only to watch him spiral down into a drug induced darkness of heroine, cocaine, and crystal meth that few people will ever experience.

The stories of Marinovich and Isbell have much in common, not least of which is the role that family and art played in their recovery. The piece at the top of this blog is a painting by Marinovich entitled “Mask.” Anyone who has ever been addicted, to anything, understands the reference. Addicts are actors. When we aren’t busy anesthetizing life, we produce records, throw touchdowns, we preach sermons. All the while trying to make sure that Mr. Hyde doesn’t reel his ugly head in view of the public. But just like Dr. Jekyll of Stevenson’s work, eventually the master becomes the servant and the entire charade comes to a screeching halt.

Isbell sings candidly about this experience of transformation in his song “Live Oak.” Gross asked him to sing it on the show and before he agreed Isbell confessed something particularly insightful. It captured the essence of the journey all addicts must travel before they reach the other side. In a few simple sentences he is able to express both the absolute fear as well as the desperate desire for freedom prevalent in every attempt to let go: the reason many of us can’t, and the reason we must never stop trying. 

Isbell said, “I was inspired to write the song by this worry that I had, what parts of me will I lose after I go through this process? I was scared, you know, what else am I going to lose, because it can't all be better? Everything, you know, the changes can't all be good changes. There's got to be something that you're losing there, some kind of potency or, you know, humor even or some sort of attractiveness not only to the person you're with romantically but to your family, to your friends.”

That is the fear, the unfounded fear, that people only love you when you are high, or drunk, or thin, or gambling, or gossiping…name your vice. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in your life is shedding countless tears over your choices and pleading for you to get help. Even after you have been estranged from your kids, or lost a spouse, or a job, or a scholarship, or friends, or a will to live…you continue to lie to yourself to justify the addiction. People like me better this way.   

Addictions of every stripe become so much a part of our identity we, quite literally, forget who we are without them. Which is why Isbell’s next line had me fully choked up as I drove alone in my car.  

“Now, had I known then what I know now I probably wouldn't have been able to write that song because I see that I still have all those parts of me that I want.”

I still have all those parts of me that I want. That’s freedom. That is second life.

It was not all that dissimilar from a conversation I had with my own therapist when I began my personal journey to recovery. We were sitting in the borrowed office of a local pastor drinking cheap coffee and siting on uncomfortable furniture. I remember the way that she just gazed across from me, cutting through all my attempts at smooth talk and justifications, and asked, as if it was the most innocent question she could ask, “Steve, is this getting you what you want most out of life?”

I felt like some kid had just screamed, “the emperor has no clothes” from the crowd at the parade, and there I sat, feeling completely exposed.

It is a question an addict can’t run from. There is no lie an addict can tell (themselves, at least) that could possibly frame their life of addiction as the dream they had always had as a child, or the goal they have always pursued.  

Helping someone remember that dream is the road to recovery. For me it has always been the desire to break the sin cycles of my family: to be a present father, to be a faithful husband. None of my vices were pushing me in that direction and I just needed someone to help me see things clearly, to help me remember, to give me hope that freedom could actually come. Isbell says it is possible. Marinovich says it is possible. I can tell you it is possible.

You will still have all the parts of you that you want, and so will everyone praying for your freedom today.  

A friend emailed me earlier this week with a request for prayer. He has been participating in group-counseling for the past two months and next week it will be his turn to tell his story. He wrote me asking, rhetorically, “Do I tell another polished, memorable, funny, dramatic story, and keep hiding what's really bruised and broken? Or do I tell it like is, even if that's sloppy and tearful and I don't know what the hell any of it means? For a lengthy list of reasons, it's tempting to have another go at the former option.” There are many words I use to describe myself including father, son, husband, Christian, pastor, teacher, doctor, or reverend. Oddly enough, I never seem to introduce myself as an addict. I never say I am a sinner, a failure at times, anxious, hypocritical, uncertain, insecure or someone who is simply scarred to death that anyone might ever find out any of the things I just listed. Perhaps most ironic of all is that the people and the places around which I am least likely to ever be fully honest, are also the people and places where the most Christians are. I had a seminary professor once confide in me that he felt more comfortable at the pub than in the pulpit because “the people in the pub give me more slack.” Can I get an Amen? But here is an important truth, I am learning that what has kept me hiding from others all these years, and what probably keeps many of us hiding all these years, is the fear of rejection and our inordinate desire to protect ourselves from pain. We want to be known and we want to be found worthy of the love and affection of others. Lots of people have let us down. I have let many people down. And so, like you, I have learned to stop searching. I call it emotional anorexia. The most obvious downside to our typical games of hide-and-seek, I am learning, is that as long as we persist in the game, we are forfeiting our ability to obtain the very things we so desperately want. Like the anorexic who is desperate for control and ends up being force-fed in a hospital, if you make yourself comfortably numb in an attempt to be free of depression, you can’t help but to do away with joy as well. Turn your heart off to loneliness and you dismiss intimacy to boot. If you won’t risk rejection, you can’t experience acceptance. In his book Telling Secrets Frederick Buechner reminds us, “I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.” In community, Jesus offers us real freedom. Freedom to rip the mask off and lay ourselves bare before a brother or sister, people who have their own secrets, people who also want to be loved and accepted, people who are just as scared that you might find out who they really are when the lights are off. Admittedly, the response to our honesty is not ours to dictate. I am well aware of the risk involved. And yet the truth remains that if you want freedom more than you want protection, if we want freedom more than we want protection, then we will find it. For in the moment we choose to share our secrets, Jesus is invited to stand in the midst of the community and bear his own scars so that we all might be reminded that we are the community of the wounded following a wounded God who offers eternal healing to anyone willing to admit “I am sick.”

Just a few months into my career as a pastor I found myself burying a friend who had committed suicide. He left behind a wife and children and a community who felt guilty for not recognizing the signs of his deep depression. Perhaps most shocking of all about the incident however were the details he shared in his suicide letter which outlined the situation that drove him to such a drastic, and final, solution. My friend claimed his suicide was not a way out of his depression, or financial struggles, or tied in any way to poor moral choices. Instead, he told us, in no uncertain terms that his suicide was the only way to free himself from his addiction to online gaming. Recently CNN produced an investigative piece on the growing issue of online gamming addiction in the country of Korea. The video is worth 10 minute

s. http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/08/tech/gaming.series/korea.html#cnn_gmsrsstoryntro One of the interesting lines from the video is a statement a psychologist makes about what drives so many Koreans into cyber world. In a word, he believes it is a search for “identity” (skip to 8:20 on the video for full discussion). In Korea’s strict class society youth feel that they are unable to break free from social expectations based on education and wealth, and chose to live, as much as 18 hours a day, in a virtual reality instead where their identity can be re-created without social pressures to conform. The search for identity is hardly unique to Korean youth. I have watched countless students (largely, males) during my years of college ministry, with great potential, squander their lives by staring blankly into a lit screen for the majority of their day in an attempt to escape reality, and responsibility. But online gamming is only one of the potential vices people reach for when trying to establish a sense of identity. Recent reports on the man, Wade Page, who opened fire at a Sikh temple this week in Wisconsin, revealed that he was a white supremacists and a member of a popular hate-rock group. Writing about the impact that music such as Page’s has had on the movement Devin Burghart, author of "Soundtracks to the White Revolution," noted that, “Bands like Page's are instrumental to bringing disaffected teens into the movement. They're isolated individuals, often with behavioral problems, perhaps problems at home who are looking for a new familial bond as well as a sense of identity and belonging." Identity. It drives the clothes we wear, the movies we watch, the friends we gather with, the cars we drive, the people we love, the people we ignore, the people we hate. And many people today feel that their personal identity is not theirs to choose. It is being dictated to them from every website, billboard, magazine, Facebook post and advertisement. Every moment in every day we are being told, “buy this and be free”…”wear this and be loved”…”drink this and be accepted.” For many, all too many, there are only two choices, submit or rebel. Increasingly, whether it is through online gaming, pornography, gangs, drugs, or suicide, many are choosing to escape and to rebel. But there are also many who have discovered, and who are discovering, that there is a third option, letting your identity to be shaped by the one who made you. The only one who truly knows you. In his letter to the Corinthian church the apostle Paul once wrote, “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.” (NLT) Paul’s words indicate that being known by God is in the present tense. We are already fully known people. Even when we are uncertain about ourselves, we are known, and known fully by the one who breathed life into us and wants to rescue us from all of our empty pursuits to rescue ourselves and our vain attempts to submit, escape or rebel against the hollow definitions of purpose and success that the world offers. If you are on a search to “find yourself,” let yourself be found by the one who made you.