Hitting Bottom

     This about not about my discipline methods, it is about addiction.  I believe there is some fallacy in the idea of letting an addict "hit bottom".  Certainly those who love an addict shouldn't intervene to separate the addict from the negative consequences of their addiction, calling in sick for them when they are drunk or hungover for example.  The negative consequences are what give an addict incentive to stop, the more the not merrier.  There are times when someone steps away from a loving family and all they once valued to pursue drugs or alcohol.  The perverse pervasiveness of sin is powerful enough to do that to any of us.  Those individuals can "hit bottom", come to the end of themselves and realize they need to return to what they had before everything went wrong.
     Where I think the idea of letting an addict hit bottom goes astray is in assuming they have something else to go back to.  When all a person has known is instability, immorality, amorality or abuse, hitting bottom is more likely to lead to suicide than sobriety.  You have to have somewhere to go besides the bottom and many have no idea where or what that may be. That is why it is vitally important that Christians don't ignore the "riff raff" we see living in the streets.  They are already close to, if not at, the bottom.  They need to know there is somewhere to go from there, that there is hope in Christ.
     They may know, if only from watching television, that there are people whose lives are very different from their own, but we don't behave like people we have heard of; we think, speak and act like the people we know and grow up around.  For example, I know from television what a southern or English accent sound like, but I speak like a person from the western U.S. because that is where I grew up.  Even if I moved to the south or England, I would still speak the way I do now.  Addicts at the bottom will not automatically know how to change their lives.  The default setting of their lives is still set pretty low.  Even knowing Christ does not make an immediate change in that default setting.  Knowing how to show love to a person even though they are still an addict requires patience and wisdom.
     I have had opportunities to experience this with some of my spare sons and discovered that the main thing God gave me to help these young men was not spiritual strength and wisdom, it was the humility that came from my own failures and love.  Fortunately, God  not only called me to love them, but gave me the love to do it with.  God is good that way.  He always equips those He calls. And now He has given me the love to let them go and trust God to finish what He started, which is the same thing I do for all my children.  Few addicts need assistance to get to the bottom, many of them started there.  I want to let help them  hit "the top"--heaven.