How Am I Going to Live Without My Pills?

So the people of Israel put away the Baals and the Ashtaroth, and they served the LORD only. 1 Samuel 7:4

Very early on in my recovery, as I began to accept that I could never return to drug use, I remember this despairing thought, How am I going to live without my pills? For 15 years, I’d developed and relied on this coping mechanism and then, in the disastrous consequences of my addiction, that coping mechanism was ripped away. Pills were how I relaxed. Pills were how I went to sleep. Pills were my release and relief in times of stress. Then, in the most stressful time of my life, I could no longer turn to that relief. I looked at my future with hopelessness, not knowing how I was going to face life without my best (and worst) way of dealing with the world.

Looking back now, I can see that pills were a terrible coping mechanism and that, if I wanted any joy and peace, I had to find a new way of dealing with life. It wasn’t enough simply to remove the drug. Getting sober didn’t eliminate all life stressors. I had to find a new coping mechanism. It was in that disaster that I began to rely on God. I’d always believed in God, but I’d also always just turned to my natural appetites to find relief. My natural appetite is profoundly self-destructive though. Recovery then, has meant finding something new to fill the hole that drugs left. God was all I had at that point. God, as it turns out, was all I needed as he was the only adequate answer to my life’s deepest needs.

Though it didn’t involve opioids, the Israelites found themselves in a similar situation in today’s passage. In the story, God’s people turned from him to worship foreign gods. In response, God allowed them to be conquered by the Philistines. Under that oppression, the Israelites cried out for deliverance. Speaking through the prophet Samuel, God told his people they must abandon their idols. To do so must have left a gaping hole in their lives and so, it wasn’t enough to simply turn away from the idols. To find the life which God desired for them, they had to remove the idols and then, they had to fill that hole with God, relying on him for their deepest needs.

It’s no different for us. God created us to live in a loving relationship with him. It is only in that relationship that we can truly know the joy and peace that he desires. We, however, try to find our joy in a thousand different pursuits, becoming addicted to immediate gratification, which is always self-destructive in the end. To find the life we truly desire then, means daily doing whatever it takes to abandon our idols, filling that hole with God.