Initially, we feared awakening resentments and regret, but with God at our side, we grew confident that there was nothing we couldn’t face and forgive. As much as we felt our history was set in stone and fossilized forever, we claimed the following Sacred Text over our emotional excavation:
Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me? Jeremiah 32:27
In time, we became willing to enter our valley of dry bones and speak life over what had been dead for so long.
We found the lifeless remains of enthusiasm, which had been suffocated by disappointment. We found fossils of unfinished projects, which might have been profound, had we not given up. We unearthed splintered fragments of gifts, talents, and abilities which had become casualties of our own sense of inadequacy.
Rather than viewing the carnage as evidence of a wasted life, we began to see it as dry bones coming back to life. By faith, we saw a powerful future rising up from the wreckage of our past.
In our New Normal, we spoke life over anything which reeked of death. In our New Normal, we commanded our dead dreams to rise up in service to our King. We did not think this was too much to expect, for we had been given the resurrection power of Christ. We had been urged to follow in the footsteps of our Creator, who…
Gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that don’t yet exist. Romans 4:17
They arrived in Bethsaida. Some people brought a sightless man and begged Jesus to give him a healing touch. Taking him by the hand, he led him out of the village. He put spit in the man’s eyes, laid hands on him, and asked, “Do you see anything?”
He looked up. “I see men. They look like walking trees.” So, Jesus laid hands on his eyes again. The man looked hard and realized that he had recovered perfect sight; saw everything in bright, twenty-twenty focus.
Jesus sent him straight home, telling him, “Don’t enter the village.”
Mark 8:22-26
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Like the blind man in this passage, we needed a second touch from Jesus to heal our distorted view. All we had to do was be honest and admit that our perspective was still distorted. Jesus didn’t scold the man for not having enough faith, or for being inadequate. Jesus simply asked him what was wrong and then fixed it.
At the end of the story, after the man’s vision was perfectly restored, Jesus told him to go straight home and not to go back into the village. In our own parallel stories, we heard Jesus say, “Don’t go back into….”
We each heard a different ending to that sentence, based on our own uniquely personal experience. For all of us, it was a moment of truth. If we wanted to enjoy our total Tetelestai Recovery and be comfortable in our New Normal, we would not be able to return to that person, place, or thing which was certain to pull us back into our distortions.
Based on their own personal experience, the authors openly share about their first stages of sobriety, when the clean and sober lifestyle felt awkward and overwhelming. Within the pages of this book, emotional and social dysfunctions are identified, analyzed, and resolved. Each chapter peels back a deeper layer of awareness, revealing a clear path to a New Normal where confidence and security are a way of life.
Tetelestai Recovery Volume 2: Our New Normal continues the journey of recovery, found in the words of Christ, “It is Finished.” Addiction is not a life sentence. There is hope and healing for all addicts and alcoholics, as well as for those who love them.
And the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 1 Peter 5:10
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This came as a shock to those of us who grew up in the psycho-babble era, where therapists were gods who slung letter-label disorders at us like lightning bolts. Most of us had been zapped by at least one label or another which altered our identity. Sadly, that movement brought such a self-defeated attitude; many of us doubted the power of the cross over our disorders.
Thankfully, after receiving the message of Christ’s finished work, we concluded that our dysfunctional labels need not remain our identity.
We claimed the powerful promise from Romans 8:37 concerning our sense of powerlessness:
In all these things we are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us.
We subjected our past trauma to the truth found in Romans 8:28:
We know that all things work together for the good of those who love Christ, who have been called according to His purpose.
Paul didn’t write ‘some things’ or ‘the good things’. No, he said that all things, even the least expected or most traumatic things, will work together for our good and for the Kingdom’s expansion project.
We realized that it wouldn’t benefit the Kingdom if its soldiers and ambassadors were traumatized, weak, and frail (either mentally or physically). No military unit would succeed with a platoon of disabled soldiers charging in to take a hill. Fighters in poor condition would be counter-productive to the cause. When charging into enemy territory, only the healthiest, strongest, and well-trained are called up to active duty.
Knowing that God has called us up to active duty, we also trust that He has given us health, strength, and solid training. We have discovered the spiritual law of the Kingdom where trauma turns to triumph and frailty turns to strength.
This book is dedicated to the members of Tetelestai Recovery who meet every Friday evening in the Lansing Correctional Facility.
The profound insights and personal experiences shared between inmates and volunteers in this lively discussion group have been the inspiration for this sequel to the original Tetelestai Recovery text published in 2019: Tetelestai Recovery Finding Total Recovery in the Words of Christ, “It is Finished!”
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.
John 14:27
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Jesus gave us this promise of peace, translated from the original word shalom, meaning: wholeness; nothing missing; nothing broken. Therefore, if we failed to experience it, we needed to know why.
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Was He a liar? Did He tease us with hope and then pull it away like Lucy holding the football in the Charlie Brown cartoon?
We developed resentment toward this Higher Power who seemingly yanked away our hope, time after time. If He controlled the universe, why didn’t He just snap His fingers and make all our misery disappear?
We questioned Him and His ways. We saw other people receive deliverance and healing from their dysfunctions and we were jealous. We finally concluded that the odds of a miracle landing on us were about the same as a rose petal falling from the sky and landing on our heads.
We knew we couldn’t raise our hopes for a miracle of our own if it was simply a cosmic lottery. We were driven to figure out what we could do to make it happen. We had been taught all our lives that a person gets what they deserve. We feared our relapses and failures had deemed us unworthy.
We knew how to work in the natural realm to get what we wanted. We worked hard. We had built personal empires and seen our own efforts succeed in other areas of life. This made it extremely difficult to understand why we couldn’t succeed in our efforts to maintain consistent sobriety.
We wanted to work for recovery and thus, control the results. We wanted to work for it, so we could own it. We wanted to know we had earned our sobriety. We wanted to receive accolades for how courageous we had been. We wanted to know it had come to us honestly, through hard work and perseverance.
Tragically, we discovered that our work just didn’t work.
As we leveled up in our new normal, we had to adopt the same type of mindset with our life choices as we did for driving on muddy country roads. Our decisions and actions needed to be precisely calibrated in order to achieve the results we wanted. Just as it would be foolish to see how close to the ditch we could drive without sliding off the road, it was also foolish to see how close we could get to temptation without giving in.
In our leveled-up position, we learned that every action started with a choice. And every choice carried an equal and opposite result. In other words, every choice carried both a yes and a no decision.
If we said yes to sobriety, we said no to the chaos and destruction we once lived. And visa-versa. If we said yes to a drink or drug, we said no to hope and sanity. When we said yes to thinking out our choices, we said no to making the same dumb decisions over and over, expecting different results.
To level-up, we had to accept our own responsibility for the choices and events of our lives. We had to realize that our decisions, even in little things, mattered. Whether it was getting a good deal on a laptop we suspected was stolen, or working the system to get benefits we didn’t really qualify for, every decision set off a chain reaction of negative results and consequences.
We evaluated some of our individual experiences and shared them with the group.
One member who had been an addiction to porn, shared his decision-making process when it came to watching television. He knew which shows would trigger lustful thoughts, so he simply chose not to watch them. He chose instead to watch sports, cooking shows, and educational programs like Nova. He said yes to living free from his addiction which meant he said no to shows that triggered him. Each time he made that choice, he placed himself into a position of freedom. He continues to pursue his destiny using the wisdom God has given. He has leveled up into a mature, godly man who demonstrates great leadership skills.
Another member of the group shared about self-esteem issues. From childhood, he had been trying to cope with the confusion of trauma, unaware of what to call it. He struggled with feelings of unworthiness and was unable to feel a sense of value. That all changed when he made the choice to learn about trauma and its effects. He chose to develop a relationship with Jesus, his Healer. He made a choice to forgive and move away from the pain. Because he said yes to openness, and no to suffering in silence, he now operates in a position of power and serves as an advocate for others. He has the wisdom of God and the heart of a servant.
Another member shared about his past life of uncontrollable rage. He spoke about feeling as if he had no choice when it overtook him. His experience with rage was like driving on a slippery, muddy road at full speed, headed straight for the ditch, and unable to stop. It was hard for us to believe he had ever struggled with rage. This was a man who carried the joy of the Lord on his face. His smile was contagious, his demeanor was gracious, and he radiated positive energy whenever he walked into the room. He often spoke of love and forgiveness as if it were his lifeline. He had made a conscious choice to forgive whenever he was wronged. He refused to carry a grudge, but instead, chose to walk in love. He said no to rage and yes to compassion. Forgiveness and joy were no longer second nature to him; they were his new normal.
As we opened our minds to sacred text, the revolution began.
We discovered new parameters for our belief system.
I Corinthians 2:16 stated, “We understand these things, for we have the mind of Christ,” so we released our mental constraints and became aware of our new understanding.
2 Corinthians 5:17 told us that“Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” Therefore, we resisted the temptation to dwell on the past. We had become a new creation in Christ, so there was no past to lament.
We believed that our feelings were fickle and could not be the focal point of our attention. We did not regard our feelings as a reliable source of information. The Word of God became our compass, and we only said of ourselves what we would say of Christ. We professed that we were in Christ and have inherited the privilege to participate in a life of His perfection. We were the righteousness of God, even when we felt like we had failed. The cross inverted all our wrongs and made them right. Thus, the rightness of Jesus outweighed the wrongness of our misdeeds.
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We began to thank God for His provision, even when we felt needy.
We praised God for deliverance, even while feeling imprisoned by the past:
The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 2 Corinthians 3:17
We believed God for His righteousness, even when we felt wrong.
We believed in ourselves as new creations, even when we felt damaged.
We stopped living in regret, even when we felt as if we should.
We no longer identified with who we were, but rather, we identified ourselves as who we became at the moment, we received our tetelestai revelation. We had come to know love which we had never known before. We had received a personal pardon from the King of Kings and according to Ephesians 3:19, we were becoming filled with the fullness of God, which was gradually squeezing out our tendency to be full of ourselves.
Tetelestai Recovery – Finding Total Recovery in the Words of Christ, “It is Finished!”
Although our spirits were reborn and our bodies were clean from mood altering substances, our minds were contaminated with cognitive distortions. Our thought processes had become corroded with bitterness and disappointment. The original shine of innocence had been dulled by the storms of rage and the heat of humiliation. Our minds were splattered with the dirt and grime of the past. The good memories were cluttered with grief over what we ruined or what we lost. The bad memories made us cringe and flooded us with waves of nausea. Our heads were filled with regrets, resentments, and realities that we wished we could change.
Our minds, once fresh and innocent, had gradually become a gurgling caldron of foul emotions, which continued to bubble up at the worst possible times. Most of us couldn’t even remember what a fresh, clean mind was, nor could we identify exactly when we lost ours. Clever coping mechanisms had served their purposes for a time, but we were tired of being covered in the dirt and grime of resentment, guilt, failure, fear, intimidation, and regret.
Our minds needed to be scrubbed clean if we were ever going to have the confidence and clarity to move into our destiny. So, we looked for answers in our Sacred Text…
We are damaged humans who have been damaged by other humans. Our only hope of recovery is to submit our claims to God and wait for Him to reimburse us for our loss.
We finally understood that when Jesus instructed us to forgive, He was not telling us we had to sustain damage and accept it as okay. He was also not telling us that we didn’t have a valid claim. In fact, He was stating the exact opposite.
The fact that forgiveness was necessary, meant a loss was incurred and damage sustained. He was not denying our claim. He was validating our loss and confirming its legitimacy.
He never suggested we just get over it. He wasn’t instructing us to learn to live with it and then congratulate ourselves on taking the high road. He instructed us to forgive because he wanted us to access His full coverage comprehensive plan. In other words, Jesus was telling us, “Submit your claim to me, and I will handle all repairs and collections.” He knew that the process was too exhausting and complicated for us to deal with on our own. He also knew that when two humans try to settle, they rarely get it right and they seldom get it done.
Finding Total Recovery in the Words of Christ, "It is Finished!" 