Sometimes
it is just hard to face life. We want to
run from hurt or pain. If we can't run
from it, we want to mask it or cover it up. Some do this chemically – pain pills,
alcohol, weed, food, self-medicating with substances that temporarily replace
the yucky feelings with good ones.
Others run from it by substituting their focus with something else –
hard work, internet surfing, materialism, social media likes/approvals, status,
evading the pain by burying it with action.
But when we do these things, we isolate ourselves; and we fail to hear the still small voice.
When
I picked up Seth Haines’s book Coming
Clean: A Story of Faith, I was not sure if it was the season to read it,
but it was next on my list. I was
sitting in the hospital with my husband who was recovering from surgery and
just diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer. What
interest could I find in a book about an alcoholic Christian, church leader,
devoted father and husband on the search of sobriety?
But
what kept me reading was the pain that Seth Haines felt during a time of life
when his two-year-old son was hospitalized and might not live. It was also
during a time when he realized he had used alcohol as a balm to soothe him
where God was not. Writing in the style of a journal,
he chronicled his path to sobriety over a period of several months. He reached back to pain that stemmed from his
childhood with a faith healer that failed him and how that experience had
infected him and his faith now. By
facing the pain, digging into it and not covering it up and isolating himself,
he found a new faith and a community that gave him strength.
For
me, this was more than a story of struggling with alcoholism and sobriety. It was a peek into
another one’s life who struggles with the issues of healing and faith. I could relate to the unhelpful things that
people say and find the grace to forgive them in it. I understood the desire to isolate oneself
and could relate to wanting to cover up pain.
He showed me ways that we tend to run from pain, and how instead, we can
let Jesus meet us there.
Disclaimer: I received a complimentary
copy of this book from Zondervan Publishing in exchange for my honest review.
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