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A LIFE TAKEN BACK
TO SAY THAT IT’S not easy to take your life back is quite an understatement. It is a long and difficult journey out of the hell of hopelessness into the challenging but manageable realities of living your life fully in the present, possessed by no one but your real self and God. What so many people never seem to realize is that as difficult as recovery can be, it is usually not half as difficult as staying stuck in the old ways of victimhood, struggling just to make it through to the next day. The old ways are a one-way street leading to greater difficulties, with less hope and deeper despair. Taking your life back puts you on a path full of wonder, meaning, and blessings so plentiful that you can’t even imagine all that is possible.
Most of us can’t even ask God for this, because the magnitude of everything he has for us is so far beyond our comprehension. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take giant steps in the direction of discovering God’s best for us. And it doesn’t mean we can’t live each day with anticipation, hope, and promise. Taking your life back puts you squarely on the path of becoming all that God intends for you to be—a holy vessel, yielded to God for use in service of his perfect plan. From the very beginning, we were designed for intimate relationship with God. And as we rediscover our real self and bring our lives back into alignment with our Creator, we find fulfillment, purpose, and meaning in life.
Mileposts on the Journey
In this chapter, we want to unpack some of the key ingredients of a “taken back” life. We want you to be able to identify that you are either living out God’s purpose for your life or that something is missing and needs attention. No one will ever fully arrive in this life. The journey is the goal. Either we will continue to grow, or we will begin to die bit by bit. Of course, unless Christ returns in the meantime, we all will one day die a physical death, but if we can take our lives back, we can live life to the fullest every day until then.
Because we’ve all had enough of dying bit by bit, here is one last invitation to rediscover your real self and begin to realize all that God has for you. This invitation comes with a picture of what your life can look like when it is fully yours and fully committed to God. The ideas below do not paint a complete picture—to attempt to do so would be to limit God—but they fill in the blanks enough to give you a vision of a life that most people, we think, would be excited to experience. We hope and pray that you are able to catch a glimpse of the possibilities. It will take hard work, patience, perseverance, and perhaps some counseling and encouragement from others. But it is a blueprint for being restored each and every day.
Seeing
For so much of our lives, we have been blinded by others who have wanted to control us and who actually did. We were blinded by their manipulations of the truth: gaslighting the things they wanted us to see and distorting or denying the things they did not want us to see.
We’ve been blinded by preachers and purveyors of toxic faith offering us superficial treatments for our deepest wounds.[53] We have tried the quick fixes of some teachers that fixed nothing. And we have experienced their shaming when our faith was labeled as weak, and we have borne the blame when the miracle of an instant solution did not show up.
Now we are aware of the defects we possess and the imperfections of others. We are not blindly idealizing others or idolizing ourselves. We see it all and are aware of the options available to us. We are aware of, but no longer available to, the option to sink back into despair, and we are aware of what it takes to stay on course for living in the hands of God. We see our vulnerabilities and how we acquired them. And we know how easy it would be for someone to tap into one of our weaknesses and trigger us back into sickness. But our ability to see makes that regression a very unlikely scenario. We are aware of our triggers and do not blindly walk into them or expose ourselves to them.
The gift of seeing can sometimes feel like more of a burden than a gift because we know we’re responsible for what we see. When we were blind victims, we were prone to react to someone else’s sickness. Now we see the trap, and we know that we can choose the proper response (not reaction). Even if it is the most difficult choice, we know that it’s the one that keeps us free.
Surrendering
Resisting, fighting, justifying, rebelling, and all the other things that children and adolescents do have been replaced with the very adult act of surrendering to God. As adults, we can surrender to him because we know that he really loves us and has only our best interests at heart. We boldly surrender by applying what we have seen work in the lives of others. Complying with that impulse transforms into surrender to God, who is the foundation and source of everything that has worked to help people take their lives back. We often move from our initial surrender into a process of turning more and more of our life over to God. At first we don’t understand much about God, but as we work and learn and grow, we find that he is more than worthy of our faith, hope, and trust.
Surrender is often viewed as a one-time event, but we have learned that it is a daily exercise that starts every morning when we connect with God and commit our day to him. And then we’re challenged to stay surrendered all day long. Moment by moment, we must resist the urge to take back control and run our ship onto the rocks.
We surrender our hurts and our sense of entitlement, our slights and our triggers, because when we don’t, we find ourselves trapped by our selfish motivations and actions. Surrender frees us from the harsh, delusional, self-centered choices that allow something or someone else to control what only God deserves to control.
We take our lives back by surrendering them all day, every day, to the one who gives us life.
Feeling
For much of our lives, we have been enrolled in a “dullification” program, numbing ourselves with denial, rationalization, minimization, drugs, drink, sex, compulsive habits, pornography—you name it. We’ve used things and we’ve used people, and we did it to survive. We learned to suppress our feelings because whenever we expressed an authentic emotion, someone made it seem as if we were out of line, off-kilter, or somehow sick. Before long, the most common emotions we experienced were resignation, hopelessness, and despair.
When we began to recover our ability to feel, we felt. As trite and trivial as it may sound, it’s true. Coming out of our dullness, our numbness, we started to feel again, and we started to live with those feelings and get along with them. We did not try to project an aura of perfect peace in every situation—not any more than Jesus did. In fact, we found ourselves acting like the real Jesus, who wept at the loss of a friend, swept money changers out of the Temple in anger, and sweated great drops of blood in the garden of Gethsemane—not because he was mildly agitated but because he was experiencing the deepest of sorrows and the bitterest of griefs.
As our feelings reawaken, we find they are manageable. We learn that feelings make us aware of all that is good and wonderful and vibrant in the real world. They also alert us to areas that need our attention. Feelings of guilt lead to godly sorrow, which motivates us to change and make things right. Fear leads us to evaluate our relationship with God so that his perfect love can cast out our fear and we can be rooted and grounded in love, not fear.[54] And our anger reveals our unmet expectations. It points us toward the bitterness that is eating us up and the resentment that is tearing us down. We feel it and we deal with it, and we learn that we are able to survive the feelings that go along with living out of our real self. There’s no need to manufacture fake feelings. They never last, never satisfy, and never leave us in a better place.
So we feel all the crummy stuff, and we get through it, but we’re also now able to feel more of the glory of God and the wonder he puts before us. The reward for experiencing the horrible feelings is that the experience frees us to be engulfed with joy over the simple blessings of life. Feelings used to be what drove us crazy. Feelings made us miserable. But they also pointed us back toward home, and they will keep us pointed toward our ultimate home
if we stay open. We continue to feel, and with each feeling we uncover the source of the emotion and pay attention to what it is trying to reveal to us.
Believing
On our journey to take our lives back, we may have been plagued by doubt as we struggled to make sense of it all. Questions rambled around in our heads about God regarding where he was and what he was up to. How could a loving God do this to me? How could a loving God allow this to happen to me? Why didn’t God prevent this horror? Now that it has happened, why doesn’t God fix what he didn’t prevent and soothe what he allowed to hurt me? We doubt, ruminate about our doubt, and leave God out of all the conversations going on inside our heads.
God was always there, but because he didn’t perform according to our expectations or on our terms, we didn’t really believe in him or trust him. Our faith was dead, or at least hindered, because we were unwilling to surrender our will to a God we could not control. But as time moved on and humility crept in, we came to believe that God is real and that he is not required to jump through hoops like a trained dog. (Yes, that sounds flippant, but isn’t that, in effect, how we often approach God?) We awoke to the startling reality that we are not alone, and we never have been. We believed.
When we started believing, we began to surrender. It was the beginning of a genuine faith that guides us each day as we choose God and God’s ways over a false image of a God who would allow us to play God ourselves. Our belief is no longer in ourselves or our ability to control our lives. Our belief is in a God who has everything under control.
Healing
We know the feelings of stagnation and sickness that accompany a rotting soul. We have maintained and wallowed in the sicknesses of our lives by allowing ourselves to be taken over by someone or something other than God. We have experienced the frustration of not growing because we could not grow under the control of our sick souls. Healing had to come first. Taking our lives back was a healing balm. Even the process of starting to take our lives back was healing, though painful. The scalpel of truth, wielded by a wise and loving Holy Spirit on a surrendered and willing heart, did its work on us so that we could heal.
Perhaps the most healing action we took was to open up to someone else about what we had done or allowed to be done to our lives. After looking for and praying for and begging for a breakthrough from God, all it took was a willingness to be honest with someone else and allow him or her to hear the truth about us. That began a healing process that continues today. Though the physical effects of aging are immutable, our healing souls are experiencing the youthfulness of eternity. We are just getting started on a path that will one day result in an ultimate and divine healing of every part of our being. For now, we patiently experience what is in front of us, and we continue to strengthen our lives by allowing God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: heal our souls and restore our spirits.
Choosing
There was a time when every decision was made for us by others. As we grew up, we began to make choices of our own. Sadly, that decisiveness did not last. Somewhere along the line, we allowed other people or things to start making choices for us again. We passively complied and turned our lives and wills over to someone who did not have our best interests at heart.
We chose that path until we reached a point of frustration and pain that made us realize we had surrendered our freedom to choose—and we resolved to take that freedom back. We began to break free, to heal, and to surrender our lives to God rather than be controlled by anyone more powerful than we were. Now that we have chosen God, we continue to choose him each day by walking along his path. We are able to stay on that path by deciding to do “the next right thing,” even when it is the toughest thing to choose at the moment of decision.
In aligning our wills with God’s, we recapture an essential part of our purpose and design, and we rediscover a dream that we may have thought had passed us by. It is a dream of choosing our own path and destiny in accordance with God’s will for us. It is the dream of choosing what is best for us rather than what is merely permissible or expedient. It is the dream of living one day at a time, not in the mire of our past or in fear of an unpredictable, uncontrollable, and unknowable future. It is the dream of choosing to live in the most manageable present we have ever known.
Searching
As victims, we looked for a way to survive, and we survived. We made it through and made it out, and now we have begun to take back our lives that we once thought were lost forever. A nobler search has now replaced our search for survival. Now we search for truth and wisdom from God that will guide us in all we do. And more and more, that wisdom and truth will come to characterize our lives. We’ve also become empowered to search for the truth about ourselves. We look for why we choose what we choose and why we allow what we allow. We search for the feelings behind the feelings we experience each day. We search for truth without distortion or manipulation. We never stop searching for the truth that guides us toward making our story part of God’s Kingdom story.
Every day, as we search for truth, for what’s best, for God’s will, and for God’s redemptive purpose for all we’ve been through, we’re searching for wisdom that will make sense of it all. And as we search for and find ways to mend the brokenness that has controlled too much of our lives for too long, we become able to help others in their brokenness. We have found others who need us as much as we need them.
Connecting
Isolation, detachment, and lonely darkness have been eliminated, eradicated, and swept clean from our lives. Anytime we have been tempted to fall back into their discomforting familiarity, we choose instead to connect. We once felt unworthy of connection and feared that rejection would be the outcome. We were told that we were not entitled to connect with God or anyone else. We survived all alone inside our heads and hearts.
Now life is different, as we connect in ways we once thought were impossible. We bond with others out of a true desire to know them and care for them. We also connect because we want to be known and we have nothing to hide. Our connections are mutually beneficial and give us a delightful sense of what it means to be an adult. We love finding new ways to connect more deeply with those who are close to us, and we connect more regularly with those who are not as close.
Connection has turned our painful suffering upside down. We participate actively in groups with people who understand how we have suffered, who know how easy it is to fall back into needless suffering, and who accept us because they know we deserve to be on equal footing with our fellow strugglers. Our connections enrich us as we share with others, hear their stories, and learn from their sources of strength and discoveries of hope. Our past refusal to connect and our unhealthy connections used to be destructive to us. But connecting now brings us life, strength, hope, and the surprising element of reasonable happiness right where we are. We did not find this by withdrawing or moving on. We found it by connecting with other people, often one person at a time.
Belonging
We were outcasts, rejects, and abandoned souls who drifted in darkness under the influence of dark and evil forces. We belonged to no one, yet we allowed outside influences to control us and destroy us. The things we belonged to only hurt us. Now we belong to God. We belong to God’s people. We belong to Life Recovery groups. We belong to healthy families, or we create healthy families to help us heal from our sick families of origin.
God set a place at the table for us. We belong to healthy groups of people living out their purpose and being fulfilled as they help and are helped by others. We are no longer an adjunct to someone else’s life. We belong. We deserve to show up, and others deserve to have us there. We are included, and we love being part of something far greater than ourselves.
Receiving
There was a time when we gave everything we had to whatever or whoever demanded it. We began our lives with such drive and power, and all of that was stolen from us. We worked hard to please people or meet their demands, and we used ou
rselves up. Acting under our own power, we ran out of gas.
Now that we have taken our lives back, we have the power we need to live life with purpose and meaning. We feel God’s love in intimate times of connection with him, and we feel it in the hugs and handshakes of his people. We are able to receive from others, rather than always trying to produce, perform, or please. Our relationships are mutually beneficial as we speak truth and life to one another. And we experience the joy of pleasing God while receiving his nurturing care.
Agreeing
Rather than always defending our actions, we are free to agree when we have done something wrong to ourselves or to others. But we no longer agree to live in shame or under the control of another person. We do not agree with things that are untrue merely to keep the peace. We affirm truth and everything that brings life. We are honest about our lives, and when the Holy Spirit pricks our conscience, we agree, confess, and repent from our shortcomings and do what we have to do to correct our defects of character.
We agree with God every day that our lives are a gift from him, and we are committed to live in his truth. When we are tempted to attach half-truths and toxic distortions to our reality, we choose not to. We agree only with what agrees with God, and we are free to admit that we are in alignment with truth.
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