Week 12 · Lesson 1
The Triggers That Chain You
Week 12 of 23 · Substance Awareness
What is the first thing you did today that you did not decide to do?
Something you did on the way to doing something else. Reached for something, poured something, lit something, opened something.
Nobody counts those. That is the whole subject.
Key ConceptThe Ones You Do Not Count Are the Ones Running
Ask most people what they use and you get a short answer. Ask them what they had this week and the list is longer than the answer they gave.
Drinking almost never makes the list. It is legal, it is at every function, your people do it, older people in your family do it in front of you. So it does not register as anything.
Weed usually does not make the list either. It is normal, everybody has it, and it is treated like water.
This is not a lecture about either one. It is a question about accounting. If something is in your life every day and you do not even count it, then you cannot see what it is costing, and anything you cannot see runs without you.
The thing that has you is never the thing you are worried about. It is the one you would not have thought to mention.
Journal Question
Write everything you put in your body in the last seven days. All of it, including the things that do not feel like they count. Just the list, no explanation.
Teaching PointWhat It Is Actually Doing
Ask somebody why they use and the first answer is always fun or relaxing. Ask about the last five times specifically and the answer changes. Bored. Could not sleep. Something happened. Everybody else was.
That is not entertainment. That is a job, and the job is usually keeping something quiet.
It works. That is the honest part and pretending otherwise loses the room. It works for a few hours and then it charges interest, and the interest is paid in the next morning, in what you did not do, and in the mood you take out on somebody.
It flattens everything. The bad gets quieter and so does everything else, and the numbness you use to survive the week is the same numbness that means nothing gets in when something good finally shows up.
This is the part that puts people away. Most bad decisions do not happen because somebody wanted to make them. They happen because judgment got turned down, and things that would have looked crazy at two in the afternoon look reasonable at one in the morning.
Activity
Take the last five times. For each one write what was actually happening right before. Not the reason you gave anybody. What was actually going on.
ScenarioThe Man Everybody Gave Up On
There is a man in the Bible who lived in a graveyard outside of town.
People had tried to hold him. It says they had chained him more than once, hands and feet, and he broke every chain they put on him. Nobody was strong enough to control him. So the town did what towns do. They stopped trying and let him live out there, and everybody knew about him and nobody went near him.
And it says night and day he was in the tombs and in the hills, crying out and cutting himself.
Read that last part again. The man everybody was scared of was hurting himself when nobody was watching. Both of those were true about the same person at the same time.
Then Jesus got out of a boat and walked straight toward him. Not around. Toward.
Afterward the people from town came out and found him sitting there, dressed, in his right mind, having a conversation. And the Bible says they were afraid, and they asked Jesus to leave.
They were more comfortable with him in chains than they were with him healed. Some people around you will be too. That is not a reason to stay in the tombs.
Spiritual Takeaway
Nobody could hold him, and He did not use a chain
Every method anybody had tried on that man was force. Hold him down, lock him up, keep him away from people. It all failed, and it failed for the same reason force always fails. It works on behavior and the problem was not behavior.
Jesus did not restrain him. He asked him his name.
That is the first question anybody had asked that man in years. Everybody else had been managing him. He got asked who he was.
Then Jesus dealt with what was actually in him, and the man ended up in his right mind, sitting down, at peace. And when he asked to leave with Jesus, he got told no. He got told go home to your own people and tell them what God did for you. His first assignment was the same town that had given up on him.
Romans 6 says do not let anything set itself up as your master, because whatever you keep handing yourself over to is the thing you are actually serving. It is not about a rule against a substance. It is about who is holding the leash.
Seven days of writing down every time and what was happening right before. Change nothing. Do not try to cut anything. Just count it, because you cannot deal with something you have never actually looked at.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 12 Lesson