This is my story – a story of drug addiction and the beginning of recovery. It would have turned out very differently if God had not intervened. You have only to scan the papers to see how a drug addict’s story usually turns out – in jail, a mental institution or the graveyard.

This is not a spiritual rags–to–riches story. I am blessed to be alive to write it, and that is by God’s grace alone. In every other way, I am still as raw and perplexed as ever.

I was born in a small, forgettable sector of –––––––––––––. My father is a dyed–in–the–wool Hindu Brahman, and my mother a Protestant Christian. When conscious memory began for me, my father was abroad. He was struggling to set up his business, and visited us only sporadically in the eight years of my childhood in ––––––. My mother worked a day job at an air filter company to keep the family provided for.

From the start, it was understood that we would ultimately move to India. I remember looking forward to a life full of fakirs and freely roaming tigers and elephants, because my life was far from happy in ––––––. Apart from the fact that I was plagued by a variety of chronic medical disorders like asthma and eczema, I knew deep within my guts – even at the age of four or five – that my brother and I were aliens. Throughout my childhood years in ––––––, the feeling of being tolerated rather than accepted never left me.

I cannot say if my rather unusual family circumstances laid the groundwork for what was to follow for me later in life. My brother, after all, grew up in the same circumstances and certainly displayed none of the aberrations that I eventually did. But I do want to mention that we lived a life of low–grade trauma, and that the concept of living abroad is a highly overrated one in this country. The specter of racial discrimination was always evident, even though I did not understand it then. It became worse when we moved from Hamburg to Berlin, where the neighborhood’s children displayed an attitude of callous snobbishness that I will never, ever forget. To this day, I react very adversely when I become aware of somebody’s airs of superiority…

In ––––––––––––––, we finally flew from ––––––––––– to India. I have never gone back. I have no intention of ever doing so. My brother has visited there a few times, and tells me that things have changed to a certain extent. Maybe they have. I’m scared to find out that he’s wrong…that there still is a corner on this globe where people are, even now, prejudged on the basis of skin color and odd–sounding names.

New Roots in India
If I thought that the process of being transplanted and displaced was finally over for me, I was wrong. For one, I was suddenly exposed to my Hindu heritage in a very real manner. My father had often related bedtime stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata to my brother and me, but that was all they were till that point… stories. We were suddenly thrown from a non–practicing pseudo–Christian environment into a fanatically Hindu one. My father is an RSS adherent, and a member of a splinter group of Brahmans that assumes it is on the top of the heap – as does every other sect and subdivision of this religion. He takes these ill–defined memberships very seriously, and we never heard the end of Hindu doctrines and his own pet theories.

In our new hometown of ––––––, my mother apparently took to the new hardline religious environment like a fish to water. Within no time at all, our house was filled with idols of elephant gods and other good–time stuff. My brother and I just went along with the flow, accurately judging even at that tender age that passivity is the greatest virtue and the safest approach in Hinduism. However, this left us with very little to believe in. We were taught that appearance is everything, and we became adept at putting up a good front – we attended every major ‘Pooja’, did all the obligatory pilgrimages and deferred to all the right people. I can’t speak for my brother, but all this left me with a gnawing sense of incompleteness.

In all fairness, I must say at this point that it was not all despair and despondency. There were good times – times of caring, loving and emotional support. Times of family togetherness and harmony, and quite a bit of joy. But those were the earlier years, before every single move my brother and I made was dictated either by religion, paternal discipline or academic strictures.

Further down the line came a seemingly endless line of educational institutes. As my father put it, he had his reputation as one of the town’s leading industrialists to protect – his sons had to be in the best schools and amongst the best in academics. That meant, at least for me, a series of schools and tuition classes. Excellence in studies was the Holy Grail, and we were expected to attain it. My psychotic educational ‘Yatra’ finally ended in the institute that would bring the infection brewing within me to a head – Military School.

The concept of rebellion had been an alien for me till then. One of my defining characteristics had been cooperation – the all–round ‘ good boy’. You could say that I had my own reputation to protect. But that illusion came to a screeching halt after my first year of Spartan discipline, one–centimeter haircuts and punishment for the slightest misdemeanor. I was fifteen then, and increasingly aware of an individuality that existed apart from good marks, meaningless Hindu chants and a relatively upper–crust lifestyle. I had no idea of how to give expression to it, though.
The Coming of Darkness
Drugs came very easily to me – it was almost as though we were fated to meet. I cannot and will not blame my descent into addiction on ‘Bad company’ or uninformed experimentation. I was (and continue to be) an avid reader of fiction, and had a fairly good idea of what both baseline drugs like marijuana, alcohol and tobacco as well as the more hardcore substances were. I knew exactly what I was getting into, and got into it with my eyes wide open. It took me little time to find other young people who were sick of being ‘Good boys’ and who exercised the option of drugs in the sleepy little home town. I finally belonged to a group. No matter what the rest of the world thought of them – and me – we thought and felt alike. I grew my hair long, learned all the choicest slang and terms of abuse, stepped up my search for newer and more exotic drugs, and withdrew my candidature from the losing game called Life.

I won’t dwell on the finer points of my addiction’s progression – there are none. It was a headlong rush into the depths, and I went willingly and even joyfully. My family soon discovered what I was into, and I soon discovered a dark secret – as long as I was on drugs, nobody bothered me. My parents were totally flabbergasted about this unexpected turn of events, and quite clueless on how to remedy the situation. The authorities at Military School, of course, took a different viewpoint.

As soon as my regular use of drugs became known to them, I was threatened with expulsion. Since this was exactly what I was hoping for, the threat didn’t stop me. I even smuggled drugs into the school to hand out to certain like–minded students. Sure enough, I was eventually kicked out.

I want to ask a question here
If drugs could get my control–hungry, overbearing disciplinarian father as well as the cross of a school I detested off my back… if they could help me finally belong to a group of people who did not judge me by skin color, nationality or religion… if they could give me an excuse to drop out of this miserable rat race of superficial achievement and obedience to shallow, mediocre people…

Where was my sin?

No Solutions
At some point, my father realized that this was a problem that wouldn’t go away on its own. This wasn’t a phase that I would grow out of – it would eventually kill me. The prospect held no terrors to my mind. I figured that when I did finally go, I would probably not even be aware of it.

I have give my father full credit here – he tried everything. Everything that money, influence and his version of fatherly concern could achieve, he tried. And he does love me; I know that beyond a shadow of doubt. However, his efforts to rescue me from myself were fruitless for two basic reasons. One, I did not want to be rescued. Two, my addiction gave him a sense of personal failure, so he thought that the solution should somehow lie with him. As it turned out, it lay neither with him or me.

I give him credit because he brought the full weight of his resources to bear on trying to pull me out of addiction. There were no drug rehabilitation centers in that part of India at that time (1984 or ’85, if I recall correctly) and the only option was psychiatric treatment. I was duly incarcerated in a private mental hospital in –––––––––. For four months, I was totally resigned to the imagined prospect of spending the rest of my life in a nuthouse. For the duration, illicit drugs stopped and were replaced by legal mind–benders like anti–psychotics and antidepressants. Eventually, my parents discharged me. I resumed using drugs from the very next day.

Looking back, what followed was rather interesting and certainly entertaining for me. I did not have the slightest desire to stop using drugs, and defying my father and the rest of the world had never been so easy. I do not recall the exact number of treatment centers I was admitted to – to give a rough idea, I had 27 admissions in one of them, and a minimum of five in most of the others. I spent long stretches of time in between admission either under psychotherapy or in obscure Hindu ashrams.

It was my family’s favorite Hindu swami who first told me that the existence of sin and the need to combat it is not a medical, psychiatric or sociologic, but a spiritual problem. He had accurately identified the crux of the addiction problem. However, he had no solution.
Compounding disaster
Somewhere along the way, I subscribed to the popular school of thought that assumes that marriage is the perfect answer to an addict’s state; that marriage turns and addict’s life around and causes him or her to ‘Settle down’. I won’t belabor the unfortunate results of that experiment. I took this piece of worldly wisdom on ‘Blind faith’ and took the plunge. In the process, I jeopardized the lives of both the girl I chose to marry and the daughter we had together. This, more than anything else, proved to me that the world has no answers to a drug addict’s predicament.

We took an inordinately long time to realize that divorce was the only sane option. The trauma of having lived with an addict is not something that she can live down, and she refuses to believe that I may have changed. We were together for eleven years – hellish ones for her, she assures me, and I believe her. Also, she is a staunch Hindu, and cannot stomach the fact that I have ‘Converted’ to Christianity.

There was an unfortunate side effect to this whole business of repeated and prolonged stays in rehabilitation centers – it was a lifestyle I became used to and comfortable with. To the point, in fact, that I finally became quite insecure and ill at ease outside of an institutional setting. I would spend as much as six months to a year in any of the centers that I frequented, seeking the approval of its counselors and administrators.

Only after many years of this limited existence did I begin to understand that it was my inner being crying out for the love and acceptance of a family. This, of course, can never be found in any place that deals with emotionally sick and unstable people on a professional basis. Even today, I know people who have been bitten by this bug, and are unable to tear themselves loose from the futile hope of finding emotional fulfillment in an institution.

You might wonder at anyone harboring such a hope at all, but it’s really not too difficult to understand. You must understand that an addict’s real friends and family become alienated from and even hostile to him (or her). The measure of goodwill and ‘Last chances’ allotted to each of us is finally depleted. As long as drugs retain their deadly hold, this does not matter. However, only a couple of days of abstinence reveal the intense loneliness and hunger for companionship festering in each addict. Realization of this usually comes only after every single door to normal relationships has been slammed shut and hermetically sealed, with every bridge burnt to ashes. Without drugs, the hunger for companionship makes us look for it in the unlikeliest places.

Knocking on Hell’s Door
In my ‘Career’ of self–destruction, I had progressed from relatively low–key stuff like ‘Ganja’, ‘Charas’ and minor sleeping pills to heavy drugs like barbiturates, brown sugar and other narcotic substances. As usually happens when the disease of addiction remains unchecked, I finally graduated to the needle. Things went rapidly downhill from that point onward.

The syringe became my only friend, and the sole object of my loyalty. The last pretenses of a normal married life went out of the window – it became my wife’s thankless task to drag me from one institution to another in her desperate attempts to wean me off intravenous drugs. Within a year of continuous injecting, I found myself in one life–threatening situation after another. I developed deep venous thrombosis in both my legs, and was at constant risk of a heart or brain stroke. As a life–saving intervention, two separate doctors strongly hinted, I would eventually need to have either or both my legs amputated at the groin. I also had regular epileptic seizures, sometimes in the middle of crowded roads.

There is no end to the various theories about the root causes of addiction to lethal substances like drugs and alcohol. Psychiatrists, of course, believe that it is a sign of mental instability that can be chemically corrected. Sort of like fighting fire with fire, or trying to drown a flood. Physicians, it seems to me, attempt to treat it as some form of hormonal imbalance. Disciplinarians like my father continue to believe that it is a simple matter of willpower deficiency. Moralists say that it is a symptom of moral degeneration, while sociologists treat it as a manifesting symptom of overall sociological decay.

Religious hard–liners (those of certain Christian extractions included) have their own angle – they are convinced that addiction is the result of noncompliance with some set of ritual abracadabra or the other. In the course of being subjected to their various ‘Remedies’, it became eminently clear to me that none of them are even close to the truth. The theory that made most sense to me for a long period is that it is a disease of the emotions. However, no form of psychotherapy had ever made a dent in my craving for drugs. When human emotions are warped to a severe enough degree, reason becomes redundant.
It is always darkest before dawn
Even in my most befuddled periods, I knew that I was looking for something that the world could not provide. A series of disastrous attempts at meaningful relationships seemed to indicate that this need could not be met on the human plane. Despite the disruptive influence of drugs, I had a moderate degree of success in my chosen career fields of journalism and advertising – but this did nothing to fill the vast, empty space in the core of my being.

When I was high in drugs, nothing mattered. However, there were brief periods of time – sometimes lasting as long as two or three months – when I did manage to temporarily loosen their bonds. This would usually happen after a prolonged stay at some rehabilitation center or the other. During those infrequent intervals, my sense of personal worth depended on the acceptance and approval of others. To attain these, I looked for well–paid jobs, the company of socially esteemed people, and the kind of possessions that others respect and envy.

Nothing lasted – the jobs, the cheap approval, the exalted company, the accessories…. I could keep no job for longer than a month or two. The acceptance I sought sooner or later proved to be conditional, shallow and fake. And possessions, to me, had only one real worth – eventual resale value.

I had to discover, over and over again, that there is nothing but superficial, temporary fulfillment to be had from these. Achievement of any kind rang hollow and false to me without the context of a deeper purpose. I had never been a very spiritually insightful person, but the gnawing suspicion that I was looking in all the wrong places was almost constantly with me.

I occasionally sampled religious and pseudo–spiritual ‘Remedies’ to discover that meaning. But apart form the fact that drugs were the only religion I knew and respected, I labored under some common misconceptions. Firstly, I was looking for a way to give spiritual meaning to worldly things. Secondly, I was unable to let a single of these things go for the sake of a spiritual life. In the end, I would give in to the irresistible urge to use drugs again. It was the only means of filling the void, even if only temporarily.

Surrender
The turning point came quite unexpectedly, and I had no idea that it had arrived till maybe half a year later, in retrospect.

I have mentioned that hopping from one rehabilitation center to another had become a way of life for me. In the inevitable course of events, I found myself at one of these again in the middle of 2003. I was in pathetic and almost terminal shape. Doctors had declared me incurable and on the verge of death. Discharging myself from a hospital in –––––– advice, I returned to this ‘Rehab’ with no idea of what to do next. Even the most depraved drug addict retains a spark of his instinct for self–preservation, and the notion of losing an entire limb or even dying did not appeal to me.

The course of treatment at this center was really no different from all the previous times – I was immediately locked up to prevent me from escaping while I underwent the inevitable ‘Cold turkey’ (addict slang for the crippling physical and mental symptoms that accompany withdrawal from narcotic substances). I weathered this phase the best I could, receiving limited medical assistance and with my basic needs provided for. As usual, it took me more than a week to start eating anything. However, I continued to spend my nights wide awake, unable to sleep because of the sudden deprivation of drugs and the relentless craving for them.

In the month that I spent in the ‘Lock–up’, a couple of fellow addicts with whom I had shared similar stays in the past came and went. Their tenures in the ‘quarantine’ room were shorter than mine, but I didn’t care much about that. Something had happened that hadn’t happened to me before – I had finally reached my wits’ end. The end of my physical and intellectual resources – there were no spiritual ones to speak of then. If something didn’t change now, I’d either die or spend the rest of my life as a crippled freak. In the language of the NA Fellowship, I had reached rock bottom.

I guess that the most important facet of this situation was that my ego had reached its lowest ebb, too – which meant that I was finally teachable. It was at this point that a person who played a significant role in bringing me to God began looking in on me…. not often, but I learned to look forward to his infrequent visits.

He was the rehab counselor, and this was by no means the first time that I had dealings with him. However, we had developed a sort of understanding in the past – that I thought he had nothing worthwhile to say, and that he thought that my mind was as closed as a tomb. I don’t know if he sensed that something in me was different now, but he did spend those occasional few minutes talking to me about a God that I had not suspected existed.

You must understand that, in almost every addict’s mind, God is either a vengeful or unconcerned Being who has power to punish or ignore. Sure, we’re often told of a loving and personally concerned God, but it makes less than no sense in the light of what is happening in our lives. Every now and then, some pompous preacher will come along and rain either scriptural fire and brimstone or sickly sweet spiritual nothings down on us. Alternatively, we will be told that God has forgiven us, and that makes even less sense to someone who cannot forgive himself.

This guy, however, did not preach – instead, he told me of his own struggle with his emotional and physical aberrations, and with belief in God. He did not advise. He did not expound. He did not try to spoon–feed me chocolate–sprinkled Bible truths. He described to me a God who is well aware of man’s struggle with sin, and sympathizes. He believes in a God who is victimized by man’s constant misrepresentation of Him.

He told me of how he delved into the study of the occult in order to find spiritual enlightenment, and how that, paradoxically, led him to Jesus. He had been what is commonly known as a ‘born Christian’ – in other words, the most ignorant and complacent of the entire bunch – but his own search had taken him beyond the illusion of a birthright on Salvation. Like me, he had been fed various extremist ideas of God till he couldn’t believe in anything anymore.

There is an interesting song, written by a rock band from the early Sixties, that accurately depicts the result of such a glut
“Open up the gates of the church and let me out of here
Too many people have died in the name of Christ for anyone to heed the call
So many people have lied in the name of Christ that I can’t believe at all….”
(‘Cathedral’ by Crosby, Stills and Nash)

His journey of confusion and doubt rung responsive bells in me. Finally, I asked him why he was suddenly sharing all this with me. Wasn’t a counselor supposed to be strong, all knowing and infallible? He sort of laughed at that notion, and then told me that he felt that I was, at long last, ready to surrender my life and will to the care of God.

I balked at that notion, of course. Surrender? Surrender and lose even the illusion of control? But when he asked me what I thought I really had to lose, I had no answer. I was a week into enforced abstinence from drugs, and without doubt on the verge of yet another relapse. I had no family that wanted to have anything to do with me. I had no job, and no prospects of keeping one even if I did find employment. I had lived off the streets, begging from and conning friends and perfect strangers alike. I had stolen, been locked up and only providentially escaped having a criminal record. Looked at squarely, the notions of ‘self respect’ and ‘dignity’ were absurd.

He took me through these stark and painful truths one at a time, and not all at once. Over the stretch of approximately one–and–a–half months, he laid the sum total of my life situation bare before me. I would spend sleepless nights desperately trying to think of one single redeeming factor in my life. There was none. I was not on my knees yet, but I was on my back with all pride’s wind driven out of me. And that, I now see, was how God needed me in order to work with me.

Eventually, I did turn to this guy for advice.
“What do I do?” I asked.
“What can you do that you haven’t tried a thousand times before?” he would counter.
“How can God help me?”
“How can you help yourself?”
“How do I know that God REALLY cares about me? Never mind the Bible promises – how do I know he cares about ME?”
“There’s only one way of finding out – ask Him yourself…”
Finally, I did.
An Answer
Despite my many character defects, I have some inborn traits that have stood me in good stead in my life. One of them is dogged persistence when I really need to do or understand something that I realize is important. At that point in time I didn’t have much, but I did have a mind unclouded by drugs. When I picked up the Bible this time, I did so with the intention of learning; merely reading it had been an exercise in futility so far. Also, I had all the time in the world, and nothing else to do with it.

My Hindu upbringing rebelled every step of the way. My cynical mind attempted to punch holes into every second precept I came across. My unschooled instinct for logic and coherence refused to correlate the things I read with my actual life experiences. I had zero faith. And yet, I had no choice, either – it was either attempt to understand the God who could save me, or die an addict’s death.

I was not without human guidance. Some of it was extremely helpful; some was completely harebrained and biased towards the personal wishful thinking of my instructors. But I had understood that I needed to find a God of my own understanding, and so I sort of filtered the wheat from the chaff as I went along. The one hope that kept me going was to discover In Jesus Christ a personal Savior – one who knew and understood me and cared for me intimately, and who would help me make sense of the debris of my past. I desperately needed to believe in the unbelievable promise of unconditional forgiveness, and my heart ached for a sense of personal worth.

I did a lot of Bible reading before I actually got down on my knees to pray. When that eventually happened, I began an extended wrestling match with God that has not really ended to this day. For instance, I still find it impossible to reconcile the story of Creation with physical evidence to the contrary that abounds in museums of Natural History. But that did not matter then or now (except as ammunition in one of those pointless pseudo–intellectual discussions I occasionally allow myself to get involved in).

A few months after I began my struggle for faith and belief, I stayed up the better part of a night and recorded its milestones in the following song. I sang it in church once, but could not convey its background of spiritual struggle in the few minutes I was given:

Morning had broken, I had awoken
Full of myself and my human pride
If I had faith, it was but a token
My field of pain was ten acres wide

No way of knowing where I was going
I questioned God and called it a prayer
Then I was told that His plan unfolds in
Man’s deepest, darkest night of despair

When I first knelt my aching pride felt that
This was my most pathetic defeat
But I was seeking a guiding Beacon
I would not find it while on my feet

I’d heard that Jesus came to release us
I said, “Redeemer, I live in sin
Show me the way, for I am astray, Lord
Life is a war that I cannot win.

Heaven’s own Savior, I heard You gave Your
Innocent life for people like me
Make me believe so I can receive you
Into my heart, Lord – please set me free.”

There was a silence, and my heart’s violence
Stilled when He said, “What you cannot do
I do with pleasure, for you are My treasure
Here is your peace, child – I am with you.”

Now morning has broken, and I’ve awoken
With an assurance deep in my heart
His hand’s in mine, this day will be fine, for
Jesus is with me right from the start.

The last line of the second–last stanza is based on an almost audible message that I received one early morning two years previously.

At that time, I had relapsed into drug use after my umpteenth admission in the same rehabilitation center I finally wrote this song from. I had made up my mind to leave the place, fully aware of what would inevitably happen after that. My bags were packed… but something had prompted me to turn to God in prayer and ask Him what He thought of it. I needed to know if there was the slightest chance that there could be a good ending to this story, after all. There had been a long silence as I stared into the slowly reddening dawn sky – and then I heard it in my heart, loud and clear:
“I Am with you.”
That was all. Even in my relative spiritual ignorance, I found it immensely comforting. I’ve never had a similar experience again. But then, in the light of how Christ turned my life around a couple of years later, I didn’t need to.
Turning it over
I will not go into the intricacies of Narcotics Anonymous (NA), the spiritual 12–Step fellowship run by and for recovering addicts that I am a member of, but I would like to mention one of the Steps here. This is because taking this Step was the launching pad for my own recovery –
“We turned our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

It was not good enough to mutter these words with a pious inclination of the head – I had to mean it. And believe me – that was tough. No, let me correct myself – it is IMPOSSIBLE for an addict (or, I believe, anyone else) to turn his or her will and life over to anyone at all, especially an unseen Agency. It goes against the very grain of human self–sufficiency, because it relinquishes control. At best, I can turn over some unmanageable aspect of my life to Him –but the whole shebang? Forget it.

I had to undergo a process that starved my ego almost to death. And though a large chunk of it is alive and well even today, enough of it died to admit God into my life. The process involved the removal of every crutch that I had grown to depend on – personal freedom, a face–saving job, the survival of a doomed marriage, the fulfillment of my constant craving for attention and approval… the list goes on. One after the other, these were revealed to me as insubstantial straws.

This did not happen in an abstract way – I could relate actual, repeated instances in which I had to let them go. It took me a while to understand that I had inherent worth and value in God’s scheme of things. For a long time, this fact was just something I nodded my head to without actually comprehending it.

The scriptures
I was fortunate enough to receive a rather detailed, step–by–step induction into God’s Word. This was carried out by the director of the rehabilitation center, and at my request. She is a deep believer in God’s written Word, and I found her belief as infectious as that of my counselor. We eventually had some major fallings–out over matters of fanaticism and other religious extremes, but she showed me the beginning of the path.

It was a journey of discovery in which I was very glad to have a guide. I had read the Bible before, but without comprehension and with a lot of confusion. Had she and my counselor not been there for me at the times when my mind balked or seized shut at a hard scriptural truth, I would certainly have abandoned the whole thing. The mind of an addict is extremely limited in emotional range – in the initial stages of recovery, it does not include much more than guilt, resentment and defensiveness. In such a state of mind, reading books like Isaiah or Jeremiah can provoke some rather dramatic and inappropriate reactions.

Romans, she told me, is the perfect ‘Addict’s Bible’, and it did not take me long to appreciate her point. The book talks extensively about the turmoil of guilt and hopelessness that comes from temptation, and obsession with the deceptive pleasures of this world we live in. I am still fascinated with the timeless insight that Paul demonstrates on these subjects. His own admissions of vulnerability are in perfect accord with the NA principle of sharing one’s hurt, and the healing that comes from it. To this date, it remains my favorite book in the Bible.

Other books like Ezekiel and Revelation are still hard for me to swallow. I will confess here that they still come across like wild opium dreams to me (a frame of perspective that I have some experience with). This, I know, is because it’s still early days for me with my walk of faith. My comprehension of deeper scriptural intricacies has yet to evolve.

I have been accused of being simplistic in my approach to God’s Word. Maybe I am; but those who know me well will appreciate that this is actually a priceless compliment to pay to someone who has, in the not–so–distant past, majored in making things complicated for himself. I do know that most of what I understand from the Bible edifies and uplifts me, and that it speaks straight to my heart. By this, I do not mean that I’m comfortable with it all. More often that not, I’m confronted with some hard–hitting stuff that assumes different dimensions as my life situation changes. What I really mean is that nothing that makes me too comfortable could possibly have the power to change me.

What really matters is that Jesus Christ has become a very real and present Savior for me. Even my skeptic’s mind cannot refute or explain away as coincidence the wonderful miracle of recovery from addiction to drugs. I had tried everything before, and absolutely nothing lifted the obsession to use drugs for more than a few days. Getting down on my knees and confessing utter helplessness was the only thing I could finally do, and it was the only thing that worked.

I am, and will remain, forever grateful for what Christ has done for me. In every sense of the word, I have been given a second chance. I have been restored, and given a reason to live – to do God’s bidding to the best of my limited understanding and ability. That’s all He asks of me, and he has given me a new life in return.

I have a firm, personal belief in Jesus’ directive of not making a public spectacle of my faith and prayer life. It is alive and well behind closed doors, away from everything that distracts me from the time I spend alone with God – most especially prying eyes.
The present day
As of today, I am gainfully employed, and rejoice in the fact that I am not financially dependent on anyone anymore. I still struggle with the after–effects of my past. Guilt, anger and mistrust of others still threaten me at every turn. I took the decisive step of being baptized three years ago, but to say that this was the end of my struggle for spiritual understanding would be very far from the truth. Many times, it seems to me that Satan didn’t really take me too seriously till I declared my faith in Christ publicly – and has now really opened up his arsenal. But I have weapons of my own now.

I have been off drugs for over a year now. True to the only workable fundament of addiction recovery, I have stayed ‘Clean’ one impossible day at a time. It appears the days add up somehow. My marriage, as I’ve already mentioned, is nevertheless in its death throes. That’s sad, but not the end of the world.

I’m afraid I cannot claim that I have overcome the demon of addiction, much as I would love to. Both my own experience and that of countless others tells me that recovery is an ongoing miracle, requiring daily sustenance of submission and prayer. I know of many others, many of them close friends (some of who finally died of overdoses or addiction–generated complications) who committed the mistake of believing that the problem was permanently licked.

I cannot take this gift for granted, or ever grow too confident about my ownership of it. I have learned of the concept of stewardship – I have been entrusted with the priceless treasure of a sane and meaningful life on a sort of recurring deposit scheme. What I put in is daily prayer and an admittedly imperfect dependence on Jesus.

What I take out is Eternal Life, one day at a time.