From Joy into Addiction and Back Again

There is a longing, a craving deep in my soul, and I have a feeling it is the same as the longing in yours.  It is the craving that draws out of us our most beautiful acts of courage and goodness, and it also drives us in our deeds of desperation and depravity.  If you have been to a wedding celebration perhaps you have seen it, or maybe you felt it when you witnessed the birth of a child.  This desire is so deep and so foundational that to deny it would be to deny the very thing that makes us human.   

Philosophers as old as the foundations of the earth have praised its pursuit and sometimes decried it.  The writers of the Constitution of the United States were aiming at it when they protected the right to the "pursuit of happiness."  But for most that are blessed enough to find happiness there is still a tug deep inside.  For happiness is only the gateway to something deeper, something more profound and meaningful and so this inner pull draws us to do more.  Sometimes it draws us to serve others, sometimes it draws us to work more, to give more.  Other times it draws us to more food, more entertainment, more pornography, more drugs and alcohol.  If we could satisfy this craving then all our searching, our working and striving would be over.  We would be satisfied because we have found joy. 

Joy is the first and final pursuit of the human heart.  If we could lay hold of it, sustain it, and maintain it, our striving would cease.  Joy is what we are grasping for when we do not know what we are grasping for.  It is what inspires us to gather friends to laugh and work and fight together.  Joy is what we are longing for in our pursuit for riches, glory, and fame.  It is joy that the alcoholic is searching for in the bottom of the bottle, and what the addict expects to find with every inhale.  

The world offers us a multitude of synthetic replacements for joy: entertainment, sex, music, sports, food, drugs, alcohol, and money, to name a few.  These are seductions, deceptions, designed to pull us away from the one true source of joy, Jesus Christ.  The world offers us a used Honda Civic, when God wants to give us a brand-new Rolls Royce.  The world gives us a fast-food cheeseburger when Christ is offering us a filet mignon.  And we accept these substitutes because they are quick and easy, and let’s face it, they seem to be working for everyone else, right? 

This is not to say that those who do not follow Christ cannot find happiness, they certainly do.  God has created a beautiful world and happiness is altogether possible.  Many people find happiness, or as the catch phrase has it, they find their bliss.  But this happiness, this bliss, is only the beginning.  Happiness is just the beginning of the climb up a great mountain and there are lofty heights waiting for us.  We are far too easily pleased.  We are content with happiness when God is offering us infinite joy.  Christ offers us so much more than happiness, something more substantial, more deep and abiding, more eternal.  The Apostle Peter describes this in 1 Peter 1:8 “Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."  

Peter is tapping into something more than the happiness that comes from eating a Happy Meal, from buying a new car, or getting a promotion.  This is something even more substantial than the joy we feel at a wedding or a birth of a child.  These are peak experiences and they certainly lift our souls to heavenly places, but these are temporary, in time these feelings pass.  What Peter describes, and what Christ is offering, is eternal. 

The pursuit of this joy has been the great quest of my life though I didn't always have this language for it.  All of us at the youngest of ages learn what it means to be happy and as soon as we learn what happiness means we all start on a similar quest.  I wanted to be happy, after all, who doesn't?  I became a believer and follower of Christ at a very young age and I found great joy in walking with Him and serving Him.  But as a teenager my life became injected with a poison that would threaten to turn my joy into sorrow and despair.  I had discovered internet pornography. 

In this blog I will be sharing my journey from joy into addiction and back again.  I don't know if I have found the "joy unspeakable and full of glory" that Peter speaks of, but that is what I am after.  My quest continues and I invite you to come along.