Addiction healed through spiritual means.
It is heartbreaking to hear the stories of addiction – particularly stories of people who became addicted to pain killers in what is called a “nationwide opioids epidemic”. So Debra Chew’s July 24th article in The Jackson Sun of be healed of addition – not just learning coping mechanisms – is a particularly encouraging read. Below you will find the beginning of this uplifting story of addiction ended as a result of prayer. Be sure to click the link to read it all.
No matter where I reside, I am always happy to get news from “back home.” However, the recent news was not good. An online site listed my hometown area as number one No. 1 on its list of top 10 cities for opioid overdoses. And, it listed my current city as No. 8.
A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 44 percent of Americans know someone who is addicted to opioid painkillers. To bring more awareness to what is being called a “nationwide opioid epidemic,” CBS News started a series called, “In The Shadow of Death: Jason’s Journey.” It’s about a 30-year-old Boston man who started experimenting with the expensive painkiller OxyContin when he was in college, and soon after became addicted to heroin. The series is following him through rehab as he tries to find freedom from addiction.
Jason’s story of many attempts at recovery is all too familiar. Sadly, most people suffering from addiction only find treatments that act as coping mechanisms, helping them temporarily to avoid relapse but never really curing the addiction. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that 40 percent to 60 percent of addicts relapse from their treatment plans and recovery back into former habits of addiction.
When I hear statistics like that, I have to wonder what the statistics would be if every addict sought freedom through spiritual means. Interestingly, some people have found that, through prayer, addiction can be cured, not just coped with, and they are sharing their inspirational stories.
For example, Brian Welch, co-founder of the platinum-selling band Korn was addicted to drugs and credits God with his rehabilitation. He has been clean since 2005. He says that after hitting rock-bottom, he sought solitude, spending time alone in his hotel room for days to cleanse himself of drug addiction, felt “lifted up by Christ,” and experienced a “dramatic conversion to Christianity.”
In an interview with The Christian Post, Welch emphasized that he wants those who hear of his healing to know God is real and that God loves them, even going so far as to say he wants Christians to know God “even more.”
In the Bible, Matthew 6:6 reads: “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” Jesus’ words encourage us to pray privately, shutting the door of our thinking on everything except what the divine is telling us. And they assure us that we can be confident He is available wherever we are and that He answers our prayers, as Welch found.
Having experienced firsthand God’s ability to heal, through prayer, an apparently hopeless situation, the discoverer and founder of Christian science, Mary Baker Eddy, dedicated the first chapter of her book, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” to prayer. In it, she describes The Lord’s Prayer — the prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples (and to us) — as “that prayer which covers all human needs.”