Homeless Not Hopeless
A homeless man in Los Angeles sees a book leaning up against the curb, and like any other object he finds on the street, he picks it up, hoping to sell it for a nickel or two. He looks at his new find and discovers it is not just a book, it is The Life Recovery Bible. Unlike other objects he has found, he is no longer interested in selling it because the words “recovery” and “Bible” resonate with him—and he has never seen those two words together. The words resonate because he is a believer, although his addiction decimated his relationship with God long ago. He believes the loss of his job, family, and home are punishments from God.
Up until now, anyone associated with the church or the Christian faith viewed his addiction as a symptom of a spiritual weakness or deficiency that anyone with enough faith and a deliverance service would overcome. For those like him who were not healed or delivered, there was nothing but judgment, shame, and total rejection. He knows he needs recovery; he just has not been able to achieve it or find it, no matter how hard he tried under his own power.
The Miracle of Recovery
With all this in mind, curiosity leads the man to sit down and look through his new possession. He starts reading the devotionals for “Step One” and the Scriptures associated with the first step. He reads himself to sleep and awakens to a police officer kicking his foot and telling him to move on. He already was. Before he fell asleep, he was already on the move through the Bible, the 12 Steps and a Life Recovery journey that would eventually lead to the restoration of his family, home, and job.
To some, it reads like fiction. To others, it appears to be a rare miracle. It is a miracle, yet it is one of millions of miracles that started when surrendered fellow strugglers bought, borrowed, or were given one of the 4,000,000 Life Recovery Bibles that bring the Bible back to recovery where recovery began. Four million souls in need of God, God’s truth, transformation, and a miracle. How do these miracles occur?
Surrender: One Way or the Other
Each of us has an extreme limitation that will not be helped by trying harder. In fact, trying harder makes trying harder and harder. The research has been done with millions of people addicted to a substance, losing everything while continuing to believe willpower will eventually be enough. It never is. Life recovery is for everyone, and a struggler with severe depression needs recovery as much as an addict. Intense chronic and endogenous depression frequently removes the desire or ability to try harder, yet uninformed people believe it is exactly what a depressed person needs to do. Effort is not the beginning of transformation. Transformation starts with the realization that God alone has the power to conquer the extreme limitation, followed by surrendering to God.
Surrender comes in two forms. We are familiar with the type of surrender that accompanies a spiritual awakening. It is rich in emotion and experienced at the soul level and results in a change in feelings, thinking, motivation, and actions. It does not instantly change everything because character, maturity, and sanctification take time. The other form of surrender is simply a choice to comply with what has worked for others. A struggler may not be convinced that compliance will work, but surrender is just as real when the choice to comply is made, even with doubts. The research on this type of surrender has also been done. The compliant doubter eventually becomes a believer, and transformation begins. Sometimes, the miracle begins for the stubborn resisters with a simple question by a recovery coach: “Have you thought about taking a different path and trying for 30 days the path that has worked for millions of others?”
Surrender: Then Surrender Again and Again
The initial surrender of some who were written off as hopeless seems like a miraculous event; it is. It is also the first of many to come. If that is all that happened, the miracle would be short-lived. For those who have refused to see the reality of their lives or hear the observations of others, the willingness to fearlessly unearth defects of character and then share them with God and another person requires surrendering pride, deception, defense, and self-protection. Surrendering those opens wide the gates to developing an authentic and mutually loving relationship. Then, rather than try to fix those defects on your own, becoming willing for God to do the work and asking God to remove them is another deeper and more specific required surrender.
Surrendering again and again allows for the miracle of soul transformation. The surrenders to come are the ones that miraculously transform relationships. I resisted making a long list of the people I had wronged and could not bear to think of the humiliation of making it right. Finally, I surrendered, and after I had made amends, I could finally look shamelessly in the eyes of everyone. The past was resolved; I was engaging with others as a man free of the unbearable burden I had been dragging into every relationship.
The miracle grows when defensiveness, unkindness, and dishonesty are not justified but surrendered and replaced with searching for wrongs committed and admitting them as soon as possible. Sadly, this is often where the transformation stalls out and the miracle begins to fade. When a person inventories themselves and surrenders the impulse to inventory the other, and then admits the mistake and surrenders the urge to judge and criticize the other, there is exponential mutual growth, intimacy, and attunement. From there, life gets better and better as the priority is discovering God’s will, carrying it out, reaching to help others, and practicing these transformational principles in all of life, especially in relationships.
Surrender of self to a transformational process, and surrendering others and their defects to God, is a practice right out of God’s Word. A life coach rarely goes wrong asking about surrender. What areas are not fully surrendered? Where is the surrender partial and shallow? Who deserves an admission of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time with the wrong motives? These questions, followed by encouragement to do the next right thing, often lead to more hope and healing and a miracle of healthy and even holy relationships. Recovery coaching is coaching repeated surrenders and watching the miracle unfold.
Recovery coaching is coaching repeated surrenders and watching the miracle unfold.
Stephen Arterburn, MEd, is the Founder and Chairman of New Life Ministries, the Founder of Women of Faith conferences (attended by over five million people), and host of the #1 nationally syndicated Christian counseling talk show, “New Life Live,” heard by two million people each weekday on 200 radio stations nationwide. As a nationally and internationally known public speaker, he has been featured in national media venues such as Oprah, Inside Edition, Good Morning America, CNN Live, The New York Times, USA Today, US News & World Report, ABC World News Tonight, along with GQ and Rolling Stone magazines. Steve is also an inductee to the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame and a best-selling author of books such as Every Man’s Battle, Healing Is a Choice, Toxic Faith, Walking Into Walls, and his latest books, the Arterburn Wellness Series, and more. With over 11 million books in print, he has been writing about God’s transformational truth since 1984. Along with Dr. David Stoop, he edited and produced the award-winning Life Recovery Bible, which is on exhibit at The Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. His ministry endeavors focus on identifying and compassionately responding to the needs of those seeking healing and restoration through God’s truth. Steve currently serves as the Teaching Pastor at Northview Church in Carmel, Indiana, where he resides with his family. See more at: www.newlife.com
