A few nights ago, I went to a local Recovery Church with a friend who, like me, had devastating alcoholism in her family. I wasn’t sure what I’d find or exactly what I was looking for when I walked into a back room of a larger church. There were two aisles of folding chairs. An LCD projector stood ready to put the words from a laptop onto a screen. I got there a tad early and noticed a coffee pot on a table in the back lined with fresh fruit and individually cut pieces of cake. I didn’t partake of the goodies, however, feeling a tad like an intruder entering a secret sanctuary. After all, this was for alcoholics, and although I’d certainly abused the substance as a teen and young adult, I hadn’t been caught in its net.
On the far side of the room were clumps of men sitting and chatting together. A single row of women sat solemnly one row from the front on the opposite side. I positioned myself behind the women and next to a man I knew from my own church.
He and I exchanged a, “Hi, how are you?”
We both answered, “Fine.” Then why in the world was I there?
I kept quiet until the friend who had invited me walked in and sat beside me. A friend from the worship band at my church walked in and greeted us both, and I chatted briefly with she and her husband sitting behind me.
As the room filled, my worship-band friend proceeded to the front, the LCD projector lit up, everyone stood, and the guitarist accompanying her strummed the first few chords to a song whose lyrics displayed on the screen. Every voice in the room chimed in declaring the goodness of God even though every life in the room had been ferociously attacked by alcohol. The women in front of me joined hands and swayed to the music. By the second tune, my own hands were raised in praise of God’s faithfulness to me. We sang another as if the gratefulness of the hearts gathered in that room could take down the beast that had tried to take down all of us.
The pastor of the Recovery Church stepped to a lectern and after a short sermon of encouragement asked two men in the group to come forward. They in turn invited anyone who had surrendered something to the Lord during the week, to come up and receive a surrender cross. Several came forward to have the symbol of the ultimate surrender and resurrection, a simple wooden cross on a leather thong, hung around their neck. There were hugs, and more hugs, hugs galore for them and others throughout the evening who received other symbols and accolades for their sobriety measured in decades, years, even days.
Then the testimonies began to roll. The first was by one of the women in front of me who sprang from her seat, and in choking sobs, recounted with awe how God through this Recovery Church had rescued her from the relentless undertow of alcohol. One by one they rose, like waves crashing on a beach, to tell their tale of entrapment and rescue by a God too good to let them perish in shame.
When it was closing time, we ended with another song of gratitude to God, and tears welled in my own eyes. Tears of emotions I couldn’t immediately identify, but I no longer felt like an intruder. Jesus had rescued me too, not only from alcohol, but a multitude of shames. And I was thankful to have witnessed the wide wake of his compassion. I hugged the woman in front of me. I hugged my friend beside me. I hugged the husband of the friend who led us in song. I hugged as if my life depended on it, as if I wanted to be glued together with these souls equally saved and in the desperate process of sanctification.
Afterwards, we broke into two groups for further discussion: one for addicts, the other for family and friends of addicts. But by then we were one, all of us, swamped by the generosity of Jesus who reaches out and holds onto those who acknowledge they are drowning and want to live above the waves without fear.
Photo by Yael Gonzalez on Unsplash
BTW, the night I was there, Recovery Church celebrated the existence of 100 churches of its kind. They are congregations grateful that Jesus came specifically to seek and to save the lost. (Luke 19:10) And isn’t that all of us?
My prayer, that every church may be as welcoming and winsome to wounded hearts as they break open to the fact that Jesus is the way, the truth and the only way to a life worth living. (John 14:6)
Go Recovery church! You are beautiful!
Cover photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash
