What A Difference a Day Makes!

If you’ve got those January doldrums or are feeling sad, bad, or mad because you’ve already blown those New Year’s Resolutions, take heart. Although life might look bleak and a little bit hopeless right now, some slight course corrections can make a HUGE difference in a short amount of time.

In the process of writing our first book, Now Choose Life! I read every page of my husband’s many, many recovery journals (with his blessing, of course). From the earliest days of trying to find help for a severe sexual addiction, his counselor had insisted that he journal every day. Those journals became a place to deposit his frustrations, his victories, his questions and the truths he had learned.

Some of it was hard to read. There were days when he was so frustrated and full of self-disgust that he wrote of contemplating killing himself. At times he truly believed that it might be the only way to loosen the addiction’s sadistic grip on his life. But then, just a few short pages later, he would be rejoicing over a small victory or a renewed feeling of hope. His feelings and his tone would often completely change in just a few days. It was amazing.

As I kept reading I often saw that a week or two later something would happen—he would slip up, return to old behaviors or thought patterns, feel like a victim, have a disagreement with a loved one or just plain wake up in a bad mood—and his words would once again reek of anger and self-hatred. Such is the roller coast of addiction recovery. Up one day, down the next. Frequently going from feeling wonderfully hopeful to completely hopeless in just a matter of hours or days . . . and back again.

It made me realize how important it is to just “hang on” during those rough periods, whether our struggle is with addiction or the incessant challenges of normal daily life.

If we refuse to give up, keep turning quickly back to God, reaching out to others and going back to what we know are the right things to do, our mood and outlook will change.

There are even examples of this in the Bible where part of the Psalms are, in a fashion, David’s journal. So often David would start his writing by expressing his anxiety and frustration or his own feelings of self-disdain, as he did in Psalm 22 — “My God, my God why have you forsaken me. Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anquish” . . . “I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people.”

As he vomits his thoughts and feelings on the page, you begin to see him slowly turning back to God, and remembering his faithfulness. The very next chapter is the widely-beloved Psalm 23, where he victoriously proclaims “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing . . . he leads me . . .  he refreshes my soul . . . I will fear no evil because you [God] are with me.” What a change of outlook.

It was sobering to realize that David, the one God called ” a man after my own heart,” had his down days and struggles too. It’s not just us. We’re not uniquely flawed. It’s always been that way. And the answer has always been the same, as well.

“I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning…”—Lamentations 3: 19-23

Leave A Response

* Denotes Required Field