Authenticity

“Why do you want this so bad, Rudy?”  Coach Parsegian asked.

“Is this for you?”  He continued.

“No!  It is for everybody that said I wouldn’t play football at Notre Dame.”  Rudy replied.

“OK!   You have earned it…I wish your heart could be put into some of my players.” Coach Parsegian remarked as Rudy left the office in a hurry.  Moments later…on the phone to home…

“You have to come Dad; Coach said I would play…Yes… I will let you know…promise me you will come…”  Rudy had invited his entire family to South Bend for the game in which he dressed out with the team.  If he dressed out and got onto the field, he is recorded as actually, being on the Notre Dame Football team.

Rudy wasn’t an addict, but he understood the mountains that we addicts climb.  Just like us, his family didn’t believe in him.  In fact, his dad told him that following his dreams only cause pain for yourself and those that love you.  “Just let them go.”

Rudy refused to let them go…he pursued his dream.  In the end, he did play for Notre Dame.  He went into the game with seventeen seconds left and helped on a kickoff return.  The last play of the game was his swansong as a football player at Notre Dame, Rudy sacked the quarterback.  The crowd went crazy; his father’s chest protruded with pride, his teammates carried him off the field on their shoulders.  Rudy Rutiger is the only Notre Dame Football player to be carried of the field in the history of the university.

This is another image I have of recovery, actually, what recovery will lead to…being carried off the field because I am so valued by the people in my life.  That one day there will be a celebration in honor of me for the good things I do.  A celebration honoring how good a person I have become.  A celebration because I am special…I know that sounds silly…but it is true.  Especially, when recovery is the big black suburban of God’s grace.  The success to give me my dreams.

If you truly want a glimpse into my soul then you have to see me revealed in my recovery. It is there that you get the true man…my true identity.  The wit and charm and humor and intelligence all meld together with the arrogance, shame, humility, guilt pretentiousness, confidence, sin and the wickedness of a human heart to form the man I so desperately attempt to be in every other arena of my life.  I am the man you see there. 

Completely exposed in my recovery…the gut wrenching honesty that is required there is real…untainted…unaffected by the past…not influencing the future and at the same time thriving and living off the past and forging the future.  The real man, Logan, is only as real as the authenticity of his recovery.  It is in that place that value is intrinsic and not extrinsic.  The moments of clarity become for me, the diving board to my soul…the starting place for the real man in recovery…the potential to become the man I was intended.  The place where all dreams are filtered through the love and acceptance of a man bigger than all my addictive behaviors, thoughts, and desires… I huddle in my recovery like a man lighting a fire in the wind with his last match…life and death depend on it!

To know me truly is to love me completely.  In the completeness of your love, I blossom.  In the complete love and acceptance of who I am and not who I want to be, there is power.  Power to be exposed…power to love…power to trust…

To understand me is to see all the nakedness of my soul…when the darkest place of my soul are exposed to the light of another’s love, the dust and cobwebs of a place forgotten, disappear in the light.  At that precise moment the wind and waves shift direction and become the assets of a life being fully lived.  The rudder of my heart turns to a new course…the intended course!

To desire me is to understand my glaring weaknesses and subtle strengths.  In reality, the glaring weaknesses are pretended to be subtle and played down, yet are on display for everyone to see, only I think they are somewhat hidden.  That is uncomfortable, scary, and an insidious poison to the soul.

My strengths, I tout so boldly, are actually, subtleties of a man in the shadows…my inner world boasts my strengths until I believe them stronger than they actually are.  I look with a piercing eye only to see my glaring weaknesses. To see passed the smoke and mirrors require a prescription for vision that does not come from this world…it is only through the relationship God has with me, and I with Him, that I emerge with a sight beyond this world.  In fact, to see inside the human heart at all requires celestial vision.  Otherwise, you get blurry preconceived notions of a life that only exists in the dreams of a fool.

All I want is to be what I have tried so desperately to be all my life…the man I was created to be…to live from the center of my heart…from my core!  My addiction is the product of an empty soul…a soul so dark and hollow, so dark, not the remotest flicker of light can escape into it.  The light bearer searches out the darkness to expose what is hidden.  The lost soul wants to be left alone in his darkness.

The recovery process is that search for darkness and the subsequent exposure to the light.  There are days when I prefer the darkness…will purposefully seek out the darkness…I want to be in the dark…I refuse to be in the light.  In the light I am forced to see the glaring weaknesses of humanity in me.  In the darkness, I know they are there, but I do not have to see them…I can continue with the cotillion of existence that eludes the depth of my heart necessary for recovery.

I sit!  Anxiously waiting for musically induced coma to engulf my soul…waiting for the exact moment when the music has taken over and I am at once at the mercy of the song.  It is there…I can see clearly with my ears…where the inner world becomes both visible and audible…the moment of truest clarity.  The night is all around and I sit, unafraid of the darkness.  What am I doing?  Sitting in the night exposing myself to the possibility of light for another day…thinking all my insights and musings will somehow miraculously turn on a light, or turn it off for that matter…the darkness is as comfortable as my favorite pair of Levis…at what point do I trade the old worn out life for a new one?  At what point do I value the light as I do the darkness?  How can a rational, intelligent, albeit. Slightly tainted man value the non-existence of a life as opposed to the truth of a life of light? Even on the darkest days, there is light…just because I do not see it does not mean it does not exist…I have to choose to live in the light…in the light there is freedom…freedom to love…to receive love…to trust…to be trusted…freedom to become…IT is in the light that I AM!!!

I realize some this may not make sense to you, and that is ok…It is not for you…maybe not for you…it was for me…enjoy…

~L

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