A popular saying in the world of recovery from addictions is: “Let go and let God.”  I recently heard someone say it with a twist: “Let go or be dragged.”  When I heard it spoken, my first reaction was to laugh out loud (that’s right, I actually LOLed).  But when I stopped laughing, the thought settled in and I realized the implications of the comment.  Let go (give up/give in, surrender, ask for help) or be dragged (hold on to a speeding truck as it drags my body across rocky terrains and knocks me about uncertainly until I’m battered and bruised beyond recognition).  Yikes!  That’s when I really stopped laughing.

Before I entered this world of recovery, I was being dragged. I was unhappy but didn’t want to do anything to change my life – I thought the world owed me instead of the other way around.  I rarely asked anyone for help because I didn’t want the rest of the world to know that I didn’t know what I was doing.  I constantly sat in judgment of others (in my mind and sometimes out loud to their faces), which built my heart up with ugliness and hatred.  Needless to say, I didn’t have many friends to speak of.  In addition to all that, I kept doing the same thing over and over with the addictive substances in my life and lying to myself each time:  “This time I will be able to control it.”  I was holding on tight to a whole lot of stuff that was dragging me across rocky terrains and knocking me about uncertainly until I was battered and bruised beyond recognition.

The implications of “Let Go or Be Dragged” are no longer funny to me.  I don’t want to be that person that holds on so tight to her old ideas and ways of living that she misses the opportunity of trying a new or better way.  I don’t want to be that person who has contempt for someone before she gets to know them.  I don’t want to be dragged anymore – not by my addictions or my old ways of thinking.

I want to be the person who lets go of her self-will-run-riot and trusts God.