Like a cocaine addict...

I'm not courting God like a ravished lover - No. Mine is a much messier quest. I'm courting Him like a cocaine addict - counting worthless & selling off anything that stands between having what I seek...

Scouring the deep recesses of all my comfort zones for any remnant of change that may have slipped between the cushions... every penny counts & everything that is mine is handed over that I might apprehend Him, know Him, walk in the pleasure of His presence, in His resurrection life... Even if it means fellowshipping with suffering.

Here, anchored in the sweat & snot & tears & shakes of a morning 'episode' .. my longing overtakes my logic & reason. I curse my brokenness, swear through a vow, & hand over all my gods & goods for another sight of His face, his heart, His soul... Him.

I'm not courting God like a ravished lover - This day, my Philippians 3:7-12* is a much, much messier quest - I'm courting Him like a cocaine addict. (Written by the director of 24-7 whose writing is found at http://www.theuprising.typepad.com/)
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I found that gem tonight during another visit to 24-7, my favorite quiet place in Charlotte. I had some free time before seeing my amazing therapist, so I drove there, hid myself away, deep in a corner to pray and journal and sit in silence. Sticking up out of a book, a card caught my eye. I grabbed it, read it, and tucked it into my journal.

Truthfully, I am feeling a lot like a sugar addict these days. I spent many secretive hours last week binging on candy and cookies and pie. Drinking heavily sweetened tea. Wishing, longing, jonesing for more sweetness in my days and nights, I filled my body with sugar. Over the weekend, my face began to shrivel and shrink and sprout pimples. A troublesome patch of skin next to my right eye began to darken and itch again. It took me a while, but I finally figured it out: I needed more water. Living Water. I needed to cut out the crappy food and eat well. I needed to cut back on the sugar and fill up on healthier, heartier fare. In the words of a dear friend, I need to "wipe that smile off my face" and get real about what's bitter and sour in my life right now.

So there I sat at that table at 24-7 tonight. Gulping down mouthfuls of Living Water, peace, quietness. Writing in circles, literally turning my journal around and around so that I filled a page with sentences and questions in a circular pattern. They were traveling in circles in my mind, so why not spin them around my journal as well? A faint buzz began very soon thereafter. Then came a few furtive smiles. Stiffled giggles. The munchies.

Is that what happens to cocaine addicts? Or alcoholics? Do they spin around and around, selling everything they have, giving it all away for the next hit, the next high? That's certainly how I felt earlier today: like I was ready to sell just about everything for peace, for silence, for a few moments alone with The Alone. And that is exactly what I experienced tonight at that table in that dark, candle-lit warehouse where silence and prayer and meditation and contemplation are the only things that are expected.

I stumbled out of there high as a kite, sweaty, shaky, snotty - and at peace.

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* Philippians 3:7-12: But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ - the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrecton and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.