The Big Picture

About 8 years ago at a women's meeting with women from my church, we were discussing a variety of topics. Suddenly, one woman was discussing her son's fight with cancer that he battled a few years prior and was now cancer free. I can't tell you what type he had, but that doesn't really matter; cancer is the word that shakes us all to our core. Listening intently as she recounted her experience, I noticed that she became more intense as her recollections came to the surface. The pain as a mother wondering if she'd lose her son was overwhelming and oozing from her pores. It was apparent that spending time suffering through her experience was still raw in many ways. Then the words that caused me to sit up straight and still grabbed my ears and shot a bolt through me from head to toe.

"Why couldn't God give this to some junkie instead of my son?"

My spirit was so wounded inside of me that I could say nothing. I wanted to scream "I'm a junkie's mother!! Do you think I love my son any less than you love yours??" But in my right mind I knew that this woman's pain was so great, that from where she sat, a person on drugs deserved nothing more than being left to die alone somewhere. It's their problem and they chose this lifestyle. And in my right mind I can see her very point. It doesn't seem fair or just that one person who is living a productive life, contributing to this earth should suffer at all while another who is seemingly sucking life out of everything and everyone around thrives.

We oft forget that in the garden when Adam and Eve went for the apple, God said in this life we would have nothing but hard work and unfair results. Nothing would be just in our minds. In the Bible the book of Matthew says that the rain will fall on the just and the unjust and the sun will rise on the good and the evil.

Life doesn't make sense. I don't get to call all the shots. I can only call the shots for which way I will go. There's not one promise that all will be right in my world. Nothing, nothing at all, is for sure except for God's promise that He will walk with me through this life and into the next if I let Him touch my soul. God alone sees the Big Picture.

Every junkie and alcoholic has or had a mother. Most junkies have loved ones scrambling in hopes that their junkie or alcoholic would get the Big Picture and let God change their lives inside out.


Today I choose to concentrate on the Big Picture when what I see two inches in front of me doesn't make sense or when MY PLAN isn't coming to fruition quickly enough to please me. Step 3 says:


We made a decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God


In Celebrate Recovery we also read:

So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Romans 12:1, The Message

6 comments:

Lou said...

People do think that way. That's another reason we enablers keep quiet. I have to say with cancer, you know how to tackle it, and most likely where it will end. I feel addiction is a nebulous nightmare that never ends.Is it a disease or not? Will they die or use for another 20 years? The pain I have felt has a lot to do with not having medical answers. I'm totally helpless with addiction because I'm used to outcomes based on sound science. We don't have that. It's only theory (and prayer).
Life's not fair, and often does not make sense. That's why, no matter what your burden, you have to give your life over to God. That is the only cure that has proven 100% effective.

ttt said...

Hi, Laura

Thanks for stopping by. I'm not familiar with Celebrate Recovery. Another Alanon book? Sounds like maybe I need to pick it up.

What that woman says does hurt, doesn't it? Ignorant....she was hurting though, I know. Aren't we all.

Anonymous said...

Oh, Laura! How SO much simpler my life is, if I but remember always and all ways, to 'turn it over' and let Him run it...even the little things, those grains of sand in my shoe.

I believe God brought me to this screen today, to read several of these posts which are really touching my heart. Thanks you.

Barbara B. said...

I understand that woman's pain, BUT... it was totally inappropriate and self-centered (and judgmental too!) of her to say that. I'm sorry for her thoughtlessness.

cedrorum said...

I agree, what that women said was pretty ignorant. It's actually sad.

Patricia Marie said...

WOW, A BOLT WENT THROUGH ME AS I READ THIS. My pain is no less because my son was an addict than her pain due to her son having cancer.