Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market-place before the authorities.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, May 8, 2022
by Dr. Kimberly Leetch, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: There is so much work to be done in God’s kingdom, we cannot hover where work is stifled—we must move on to where work thrives.
As a person involved with the addiction/recovery community, this story resonates deeply. Paul and Silas were doing God’s work in Philippi when they encountered a girl with a spirit of divination, which she used to make money for her owners. She annoyed Paul and Silas, so they cast out the spirit. Here you might think the girl or her masters might have been grateful that she had been cleansed of a spirit, but they certainly were not. They didn’t want her to be healed—she brought them a lot of money. Paul and Silas were thrown in jail for disrupting the peace and for failing to follow the laws of the community.
Often when people are suffering from addiction, they do not want to be healed. Addiction is an illness of the brain. It influences a person’s thoughts and behaviors so that nothing—not family, not work, not abiding by laws—gets in the way of using. Paul and Silas had the power of God on their side—we do not have that kind of power. We cannot heal another person of their addiction, no matter how much we might want to.
Paul’s and Silas’s response to their situation is incredibly apropos to the spirit of recovery. They didn’t allow themselves to get all wrapped up in the drama of the girl or her masters. They set their sights forward and they moved on. They converted the jailer who then freed them and offered them the hospitality they would never get from the girl or her masters. They worked with the people who were open to receiving their aid.
This is the hard part. Nobody can force another person to seek help for addiction. They can offer assistance, they can set healthy boundaries, and they can be there when the person decides to seek help. But they cannot do it for them. The best gift someone can give themselves if they are affected by a loved one’s addiction is to set their sights forward and move on. That is not to say they give up on the person—just that they disentangle themselves from the person’s illness and take care of themselves. Sometimes it means they must let go.
We live in a culture that is pretty good at encouraging codependence. But we are all healthier when we work toward interdependence—working together without becoming ensnared in each other’s drama. There’s much work to do in God’s world. We can set our sights on the people who are ready for assistance, and we can also ask others for help when we are ready.
For more information on addiction and recovery, check out http://www.aa.org/ and http://www.al-anon.org/.
