let God change you
- Marvello V
- Jul 11, 2021
- 3 min read
“Stubbornness is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because once your convinced, no one can change your mind. It’s a curse because once your convinced, no one can change your mind.”
—Marvello V
As addicts, stubbornness is inherently part of our personality make-up. It’s as if by design, we were built to be stubborn. One of the definitions of stubborn is fixed, or set in purpose or opinion. Think about how you approached your addiction—no one could stop you from doing what you wanted to do. You were determined to accomplish your goal whatever that may have been: get high ;buy your drug or drink of choice; hustle to make money so you can get high or drunk; rob, steal, manipulate to get what you want. Addicts are people of singular purpose. Good or bad, the drive is still the same. Your stubbornness drove you to act in ways to satiate your addiction. You were driven.
As all recovering addicts know, our personal drive to get high or drunk led us to places we didn’t intend to go. But along the way we didn’t care, because all we saw was our need to use our drug of choice. We didn’t care how we did it. We didn’t care if we hurt our loved ones, and we definitely didn’t care if we hurt ourselves. All we saw was we needed to get our fix, and we compromised our principles, our morals, our humanity to achieve it. No one could tell us what to do. We fully believed in what we were doing, because it felt good and we thought that’s what we were supposed to do. But something occurred during our addiction that changed our mind. Something happened that flipped our addiction 180-degrees.
If you follow the 12 Steps of Recovery, Step 7 is, “We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.” This is when we recognize we can’t continue on the sobriety journey without some help from God. God becomes our source of spiritual nourishment: mentally, physically, emotionally. We seek God’s help to remove our shortcomings so we can be better humans and to break the patterns that lead us back to our addictive behaviors.
One of the synonyms of stubbornness is perseverance. When we ask God to remove our shortcomings, its not going to be a one-time ask. You’re going to have to ask again and again.
“We must come to the place of giving up our prideful self-sufficiency; we must be willing to ask for help. And we can’t ask for help just once and be done with it. We must be persistent and ask repeatedly as the needs arise.”
Step 7 devotional (Luke 11:5-13) Pride Born of Hurt, from The Life Recovery Bible, p. 1311.
Around 2 to 3 years in my walk with God (which also coincides with my years of sobriety), I asked God to deepen His love in me. I asked that He break my heart so that I might know His love in deeper ways. I honestly didn’t know what He would do to answer my prayers. In time, I experienced life challenges that caused me to question why I was even a Christian. Why did it seem like I was never getting anywhere with what I wanted from life? Why did I have to deal with a boss who kept trying to undermine me? Why did I have to deal with money problems?
Recently, God asked me the following questions:
How do I teach patience?
How do I help you to learn how to love more?
How do you learn to be financially wise?
And I knew the answers:
By not giving me what I want right away.
By bringing people into my life that I would normally hate and want to hurt.
By making money mistakes over and over and finally turn to God to seek His financial wisdom.
God’s ways are not men’s ways. As stubborn people, the best way for us to learn anything is to go through it and to be convinced by our mistakes and failures so that we finally give up our will to God and let Him guide us in everything we do. Again, our stubbornness is both a blessing and a curse. But once we give up our will for God’s will, then nothing can stop us from living the life we were always meant to live.
So don’t give up on your pursuit of God’s will because the blessings occur while we struggle to understand, struggle to learn, struggle to figure it out. On the other side of our struggles is the blessing that God has waiting for us. But we have to go through the struggle to get there. Don’t give up!
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