(Excerpt from 120 Days To Freedom)

120 Days

     A ruler questioned Him, saying, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?  ...I have kept (the commandments) from my youth.”  When Jesus heard this, He said to Him, “ One thing you still lack;  sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in Heaven; and come follow Me.”  But when he (the ruler) had heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich (Luke 18:18-23).

      I gave my life to Jesus and accepted Him as my Lord and Savior in January 1991.  Instantly Christ took my heart captive.  I came home and continued doing the things I’d always done, but my heart was no longer in it.  I began to feel a great deal of remorse.  I began to understand how these things hurt my Lord.  Not because they in themselves were so evil, but because they turned me into someone else.  Someone I was never meant to be.  Jesus hurt for me because He couldn’t bear to see His child like this any longer.  And for the first time ever, I didn’t want to hurt Him!

     Because this new torment made it nearly impossible to enjoy living the sinful lifestyle that had never bothered me before, I began to plead and beg God to “show me how” to stop abusing substances.  I cried out that I wanted to be a true follower, and no longer the hypocrite that I, in fact, was.

     One day I was in a park near my mother’s house, lying under a tree, quietly meditating and again asking God to show me what I could do to be a true follower of Jesus Christ.  I heard a small voice say in my head, “Quit smoking and drinking and doing drugs for 120 days, and then you can follow me.”  At the same time I felt the brightness of the sun tremendously increase under my eyelids.

     Well, I jumped up and started back home, convinced that I’d found the answer I’d sought and certain that 120 days of abstinence would be simple.  Being an addict, I was still convinced that somehow I could control my behavior.  But like the ruler in the Bible story above, my passions were my first love.

     Nevertheless, I’d never felt quite as jubilant as I felt just then.  I asked, “Lord was that You?  Was the brightness of the sun You?” 

     All of a sudden I heard an ice cream truck circling the park.  That in itself was not unusual, but this truck was playing the melody of my favorite tune.  It was a Christmas song, What Child Is This!  “What Child is this, who laid to rest on Mary’s lap is sleeping?  Whom angels greet with anthem’s sweet, while shepherd’s flocks are keeping.”  With joy and astonishment at what I believed was a confirmation that He had actually spoken to me, I sang excitedly as I ran back home, “This, this is Christ the Lord!  Whom angels guard and saints adore.  Haste, haste to bring him laud, the babe the Son of Mary.” 

     After that day, I never heard the ice cream truck playing that melody again.

     I knew without question that Jesus wanted me to quit for 120 days, what I now know to be a significant number in the Bible.  At the time, however, I was ignorant of many things.  I couldn’t stay clean and sober for 120 days consecutively, and I knew nothing of what God expected of me.

     120 days taught me something though.  I found that what I wanted most was not necessarily what I could do.  Conversely, I could easily talk myself into wanting what my body needed.   I learned that although I was very strong about consuming drugs and alcohol, I was weak about doing what I knew was right.  I realized that God was showing me my weakness so that I would rely on His strength.  And best of all, Christ continued to forgive me when I fell, and loved me back into giving it another shot.

     Take the journey with me.  120 days of reflections that describe what God taught me about my own struggles with addiction.  It’s not just a matter of quitting smoking, or drinking, or cussing, or any other abuse.  It’s getting down to the nitty gritty.  Getting to the heart of the matter.  Why did you start using in the first place?  Why do we addicts abandon the natural for the unnatural?  Does God expect anything from me?  If He does, will He help me to stay the course?

     My prayer, hope, and belief is that 120 days from now you’ll have the answers that you seek and be better equipped to achieve your goals in Jesus Christ.  The freedom He gives may not be a quick and immediate fix, but a true understanding of the root problem itself.  Someone once said that a long journey begins with the first step.  For the addict, the long journey to freedom begins first with the acknowledgment that you are a slave to something.  Then and only then will you begin with a determination to loose the shackles that bind you and finish victorious.  Then you’ll begin to know what it means to be free!