Sober: The Unveiling of My Broken Hallelujah

 Today’s post is part of a link-up sponsored by Prodigal Magazine and SheLoves Magazine. So often we know our cracks; we’re familiar with the brokenness. On this journey, by writing through our stories, we hope to let in more of the light and find more of the Hallelujah. Add your story or read the broken hallelujahs of others here.

"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship." 
— Louisa May Alcott 

I remember my last taste of beer. It was with my then roommate. I was warily learning to navigate the world of sobriety and had set in place rules and boundaries so that I would be able to drink, safely. For some people this would be sufficient, but for me as I tentatively sipped the frothy dark, chocolaty, brew, I realized that my relationship with alcohol was over. It wasn’t because I behaved uncontrollably in that moment. Or that those few sips were sinful, or that those moments were held against my rules of accountability as a broken contract.

This season marks four years. Four of the hardest years of my life. Four years of growing and shaping. Learning to face the pain head-on that I had tried to tuck so deeply inside of the muted superficialities of my addiction. Four years of sobering realities. Four years of learning to be vulnerable, to love deeply, to show up in my own life and to be known. Four years of learning to navigate self-control. Four years of learning to navigate life with restraint. Four years of learning that limits are sometimes more freeing than unlimited possibilities. Learning that parameters allow my heart to beat rhythmically. That the quiet muse of creativity is borne out of the moments when the screaming hag of addiction is quelled.

I never finished that beer. Halfway through tipping the glass back, the realization hit that there was no room in my life for both addiction and creativity. I found the numbness overwhelming my senses and realized that everything inside of me was screaming for clarity. That my heart was beating out of sync as the claustrophobia of this moment continued. I noted that there was no longer any room in myself for dampening or muting or hiding. I realized in that moment that I had always been hiding. Hiding behind the folds of my mother’s skirts, hiding behind my siblings’ big personalities, hiding my truest nature in the oddity of my homeschooled ideations. I have always hidden. Sobriety is unveiling me.

I imagine God to be a bit of an extremist when it comes to rescuing people. Through the Gospel narrative, I find hope and healing bound in radical ways. Jesus sought out those who weren’t worth much in the eyes of the religious norm. So it was in my story, God swept me off my feet in the darkest night of my soul. I had forgotten what it meant to be loved. I had forgotten what it meant to be alive. There I was at the bottom of the pit, that I had deliberately dug, so far down, I had forgotten what it meant to be a child of the day.

In THAT moment. He came. Jesus fully garbed with climbing gear and ropes to spare, found me shivering and loveless. He wrapped his arms around me, resuscitated me, breathed life into my weary threadbare soul, and sobbed with me. Then he fitted me with a harness, and rigged me up to a rope of hope. He rescued me, but his rescue did not just mean an easy fix. I had dug myself a hole, and restoration meant climbing back out of it. God and faith are not a quick fix. There are days that I feel this climb has more backwards regression than forward momentum. True. Honest undoing has called for a real look at painful realities.

Sometimes I wonder what progress actually means. Is it forward motion or does that even matter? Because sometimes I feel like simply I’m spinning my wheels, that I’m only repeating patterns, that I’m incapable of loving rightly.  Sometimes I still feel more broken than whole and that balanced wholeness is just a myth. And that sober minded means more than refusing alcohol.

This journey is harsh and I’m in the arduous middle parts. The unfulfilling padding thud of redundant and ominous realities that Tolkien paints in the tale of  Two Towers. It’s the weighty sigh of a woman learning to live uprightly. Not that I think my life compares to the epic nature of Middle Earth, but I do see the similarities of my plodding monotony. Truthfully, I see that God is here. He is with me in every redundant failing, in every labored leading, in every painful fatigued and broken hallelujah.

“Maybe there’s a God above, but all I’ve ever learned from love, was how to shoot someone who outdrew you. It’s not a cry you hear at night, it’s not somebody who has seen the light. It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

Hallelujah—In all my broken wanderings.

Hallelujah—through every pieced together beat of my broken heart.

Hallelujah—in every whispered cry for help.

Hallelujah—in every day faced with a fully-present mind.

Hallelujah—with every sorrowful realization of my own incompleteness.

Hallelujah—with every cracked cry I make in my daily living out understandings of worship.

Hallelujah—for grace that covers every inadequacy, and every half attempt at love.

Hallelujah—for the beautiful moment that Christ incarnate, burrowed into my hole, and rescued me.

Hallelujah—for the day when all the sorrows of this broken cry, will be made new.

Hallelujah—for undeniable hope, and relinquished control. For a sobering courage to try again. For the strength to sing once more. Hallelujah.