This month we will have the Celebrate Recovery Graduation Service. Pam will have a great deal more to say about that on her page, but there is something about this one that I have to talk about. My wife will be part of that graduation. I am so proud for her. She will give her testimony and you should hear it. I have had the privilege of previewing it already and I was impressed. My wife entered the program because, as a social worker, she felt that she could be some help as a leader. In Celebrate Recovery every leader must go through the 12-step program so they understand it. In the process, she learned there were some things she needed to deal with. I don't want to replay her testimony here but she said something that struck me that I would like to share with you. My wife was sexually abused as a child and spent years putting it behind her. Not long ago she sat in a meeting and the lady said, “I was sexually abused as a child and spent years telling myself ‘but it doesn't affect me now'. Some of you are telling yourselves the same thing.” My wife said that that was exactly what she was telling herself.

We constantly think of Celebrate Recovery as a program for alcoholics and addicts but Celebrate Recovery's motto is “We help with life's hurts, habits and hang-ups.” Sometimes we need to be reminded that the “hurts” can affect us just as dramatically as the “habits and hang-ups” of life. Who we are is the product of all the events and experiences of our life as much as the decisions of our life. We respond to people and events in our life based on how much hurt or joy prior similar events gave us. If we have been hurt by strangers in the past, we won't be very open to receive strangers now. If we remember a particular family event as painful, we will try to avoid that event in the future. If our church experience in the past caused us pain, we may be prone to even think of church as something to avoid. Let me give you an example that seems silly in the light of my adulthood but was extremely serious to my childhood. When I was 7 years old we went to one of those big-ole summer church potluck dinners. Now many of you are too young to remember when things came in glass jugs and bottles but back then every home kept several glass gallon size jugs for storing and transporting liquids. One of the things we carried to the potluck was a gallon jug of cold Kool-aid. My mother told me to carry the Kool-aid into the potluck dinner. The fellowship hall in this church was in the basement, down what seemed to a seven year old as a long flight of stairs with a landing and a turn to the right at the bottom. Like I said, it was summertime and cold liquids in glass containers sweat in Arkansas humidity. Just as I took the first step down those steps, that wet glass jug that I was carrying slipped through my hands. It started bouncing down those steps. It bounced all the way down and as I watched it bounce my heart began to scream “Maybe it will make it all the way and not break.” What I hadn't thought about was the landing and turn at the bottom. When it hit that landing it bounced a foot up in the air and hit the concrete block wall on the other side and exploded into a shower of glass and red Kool-aid. Not only had it shattered, it shattered at the bottom where everybody in the fellowship hall could watch it and laugh at my embarrassment. For years after that I would be sick or have something else to do or just not be hungry any time there was a potluck at the church. I told you it was stupid, but we all have things that have happen to us that still greatly effect us and most of them need to be dealt with. What about you? Is there a place to forgive and accept people who have had their lives shaped by events? Is there something in your past that you still need help dealing with? Let us help.

Eternally yours in Christ,
Tommy Dame