Freedom

I had a dream on Saturday night that I didn’t remember until I was walking around on Sunday. When I woke up I had a feeling that I’d had a dream about someone I know, but I couldn’t remember the dream at all and I wasn’t sure if I’d just been thinking about him. Later in the morning when I’d left my apartment I stopped off at the bank and a man came in after me. There was something about him that seemed a bit off as if he’d been partying the night before, and then the dream came back to me.

I used to be a big party girl. Let me go back a bit and say that when I was young and all the way through high school I’d been a real geek. I had a brother ten years older who partied a lot and another one 15 years older who had gone to college in the 60’s so he had his own stories to tell. But I was a geek who loved school and I ran track, indoor and outdoor and cross country, and I loved the out of doors and reading. The only time I had an alcoholic drink at all was on Christmas Eve when my mother would let us taste a small sip of port or sherry, and on New Year’s Eve when we could have a sip of champagne. Other than that, the first real drink I had was at a college party I went to when I was a junior in high school, and I got so sick I never wanted to drink again. But eventually I did drink again, and when I went to college I decided I’d remake myself into the cool party girl I’d always envied. I didn’t want to be a geek any more, and the first cool girls I found I made friends with and pretended I’d done everything they were doing and they were doing a lot.

In my dream on Saturday night I was with a group of people I didn’t know very well. In some strange way the way that dreams can be I was not just myself, I was a friend of mine too, a man I know and care about a lot who has a past very similar to mine. His drug of choice back in the day was cocaine, something that never really stuck with me, but that was the drug in my dream. The group of people I was with in the dream were people I was trying to impress with how cool I was. I had a big pile of cocaine that they’d given to me. I hadn’t bought it, they had just given it to me. I think they were dealers. They were people I genuinely liked – I’ve had friends over the years who were dealers who I have really genuinely liked. Drug users and drug dealers can be very nice people, but the drugs not only can kill you but they also cause all kinds of problems in your life and that’s why God doesn’t want us doing drugs. He loves drug users and drug dealers as much as He loves everyone else, and He wants them to be healed of their need to do drugs so they can live their lives in the fullness and abundance that He has for them.

In my dream, I was who I am now, meaning I was born again and hadn’t done any partying in years, and here I was with this group of nice drug dealers and partiers, and I wanted to impress them with how cool I was. That’s why I know I was my friend too, because it hasn’t been as long for him. I was both who I am now and who he is and who I was before. At some point I started to think that maybe I’d just have to start doing some lines because I didn’t want these people to think I wasn’t cool. I had such a huge pile of my own and I didn’t know how to get rid of it without it being obvious that I was throwing it away.

Finally it occurred to me that I could break it up into lines and then pretend to snort it while throwing it away on the sly. Everyone else was so messed up anyway they wouldn’t notice – they had their own piles to do. So that’s what I started to do, and then all of a sudden it occurred to me that I didn’t have to pretend at all. It came to me all of a sudden like that –  I could just tell these people that I didn’t do drugs and I could still be friendly with them. If they didn’t like me because I wouldn’t party with them, then that was their problem. I got up in front of the group and took the big pile and started to brush it off into a sink, running the water to wash it down the drain. They asked me what I was doing, and I told them I was born again, and that I didn’t need drugs to have a good time. I could hang out with them, but I wasn’t going to join them, and if they wanted to they could join me. They were shocked, but they didn’t stop me, they didn’t even argue. And then the dream ended and I woke up.

Cocaine is one of the most highly addictive drugs there is. And it destroys people’s lives every day. People think they can control it and just do it once in a while, but it affects every aspect of your life. It makes relationships impossible and your life becomes a lie. You’re hiding behind the drug all the time even when you’re not doing it. I was very lucky that it was never something I enjoyed, but I had my own addictions. I thought I was functioning too, but I wasn’t really. People get into addictions for all kinds of reasons. Abuse from childhood, lack of love in their lives, a sense of not being cool enough or smart enough or of wanting to be liked and to fit in. One Pastor I know had a perfectly normal and seemingly happy life, and then a friend gave him some heroin to try and he said it was the greatest high he had ever known. He thought he could do it just once in a while "for fun" but it started doing him and it wasn't fun at all. This was before he was a Pastor, and he lost everything because of his addiction, but then was completely restored through the power and grace and love of God. We laugh now that the greatest high we've both ever had was knowing the love and power of God in our lives. And it's true. There are times when you're walking in the Spirit and the power of God is working through you that you can feel like you're flying. At other times it's a more peaceful joy, a feeling of purpose and direction and fulfillment that only God can bring.

There is only one way that I know of for sure that anyone can be healed of an addiction and that is through the power of Jesus Christ. It is only through the miracle of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives that we can change any behavior that is negative. Cigarettes and alcohol and drugs are things that we think of as addictions that are bad, but what about anger? What about gossiping? What about negativity? What about cutting people down? Those things are all addictive behaviors. We don’t call them that, and sometimes the very people who are doing those things are calling the drug addicts bad names. I’d rather spend time with some of the drug users I know than with people who cut people down and gossip. But more than anything else I’d rather tell them who I am in Christ and what He’s done for me so they can know the freedom I have.

Galatians 5:1 says, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery.” And James 4:7 tells us, “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Come near to God and He will come near to you.” In my dream, all I had to do was stand firm and draw near to God, and the power of the enemy was completely broken in my life. I had started acting in ways that were not part of who I was all those years ago because I wanted to be liked by the girls I thought were cool, and I wanted to be as cool as I thought they were. But that was not the person that I am – it was not the person that God made me to be. I did a good job of pretending for a lot of years, but I’m really just a geek at heart who loves God and now I’m not afraid to tell people.

The idea of submission to God is something that people sometimes have trouble with. Even in that chapter of James, it can sound pretty harsh. He talks about grieving, mourning and wailing and changing your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. (James 4:9)  But that is exactly what happened to me naturally when I accepted Jesus into my life. I spent the first year that I was born again weeping at the altar of the first church I went to. I thank God for that church because they let anyone who wanted to lie face down at the altar and I did every Sunday and sometimes on Tuesday and Thursday nights too. It was not something that I had to be forced to do. When I understood the way I had wasted my life and when I realized the sacrifice of love that Christ had made for someone like me, all I wanted to do was grieve and mourn. There were joyful times too – God promises to turn our mourning into dancing and our sorrow into joy (Psalm 30:11). But first we have to go through the process of recognizing our sin and asking His forgiveness. That is the submission part, and it’s not hard because He makes it easy. The whole time I was weeping I had the feeling of His arms around me and of His healing grace removing the heavy yoke of bondage that I had been carrying so long.

I’m looking forward to hearing from my friend that he has gotten to a place in his life where he can do what happened in my dream. He is in my prayers always, that he would have that freedom, and if there is anyone reading this who is in a place where they want to break free of, know that you can have that freedom in Christ and that He will not judge you when you come to Him to ask for His help. You will need to submit to His will for your life, but His will is a beautiful one. It’s one that will bring you peace, joy and love, and one that will give you the power you’ve always wished for, the power to be yourself and to be happy with who you are.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan