What is Recovery Anyway?

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14

Recovery is one of those words I use so frequently now that I don’t even think much about what it means anymore. To be honest though, before I struggled with addiction myself and before I found a lasting recovery back in 2014, I never really liked the word. It just didn’t make a lot of sense to me. What do you mean when you say recovery? Recovery was what you did after coming out of anesthesia. Recovery was for lost treasures on a sunken ship. Recovery was what your body needed after a marathon. I now embrace the term because I’ve learned what it means, but there was a time when, if I’d have been in charge, I’d have renamed the phenomenon. If I would have been asked, I would have called it healing.

God is in the business of healing and healing is what God desires for his people. This is illustrated in today’s passage in which God appeared to Solomon in a dream, instructing him on the nature of his relationship with his people. God knew his children would wander from him and he knew they would make themselves miserable. God knew that he’d have to watch as his people self-destructed, making themselves sick with sin. God knew all this, so he made sure that his people understood this about him – God wants to heal his people. When the Israelites hurt, God hurt with them, and it was his continual desire to heal that hurt.

The same is true for us. When we stumble, fall, and injure ourselves, distancing ourselves from God, it is his desire that we stop going our own way, that we turn around, and that we follow him. In doing so, God forgives us, restores our relationship with him, and heals us. In our addictions, we make ourselves sick. We make our loved ones sick. We poison our relationships with others. And we damage our relationship with God. In abandoning our addiction and returning to God, he begins to heal everything we poisoned. Because we’ll never be perfect, this is an ongoing process. But as long as we keep returning to God, daily following him, he will continually heal us. Recovery is healing and it’s what happens when we stop following our way and start following God’s.