Barriers to Entry

Barriers to entry is a real thing in life. If you want to be a doctor, the barrier to entry is long hours being educated, rotations, internships, post graduate work, etc. This can equate to years and years of work! If you want to be a teacher, there are requirements to be met as well: education, teaching internships, continuous learning, etc. Again, years and years of work. In each of these examples, and there are many others, the barriers to entry require years and years of work before you actually achieve your goal!

This brings me to a question that I was pondering this week: What are the barriers to entry to start the addiction recovery journey? As I pondered this question, I remembered a story about our Savior, Jesus Christ, in the New Testament. A father brought his son to Jesus. The father explained the son’s condition and begged for compassion and help from the Savior. The Savior response to this father was, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.” (Mark 9:23) The father’s response was “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief”. (Mark 9:24)

This father’s response can be viewed in two parts. First, the father said he believed. I can’t begin to explain the number of times I have said the phrase “I believe in Christ” and not really believed what I was saying. I was wishing it was true, but really was not sure it was true. I can imagine a lot of people have been in that situation where they want to believe but have some level of doubt.

The father’s second response in humbling and piercing. I can imagine after the father said “Lord, I believe”, the Savior gave him a questioning look of ‘Do you? Do you believe that I am the Savior of the World? Do you believe that I am the Son of God and have power over all things?’. Then after that look, the father, with tears in his eyes look at the Savior and asked for help by saying, “help thou mine unbelief”. The father, in pure honesty and a desire to believe, reached out to the Savior in the most powerful way possible: with a broken heart and a contrite spirit. After this request of pure honesty and a desire to believe, the Savior of the World, took the father’s son in his arms and healed him.

What this father experienced is the barrier to entry for addiction recovery: a broken heart and a contrite spirit. An honest desire to change. The purest form of pleading to the Savior of “help thou my unbelief”. It doesn’t require a certain number of days of sobriety or church attendance. All that is required is an honest, pure desire to recovery and develop faith in the Savior, Jesus Christ.

I invite you to develop the same honest, pure desire to recover and develop faith in the Savior, Jesus Christ. I can promise there are rewards beyond what you can possibly imagine! The most important thing is you will feel the Savior's love for you and you will develop a love for the Savior. This love will become a motivator to you, as it has become a motivator for me. It will be freeing to you, as it has been freeing to me. After some time you will look back and see the barrier to entry was simple: believing in Christ by coming to him with a broken heart and a contrite spirit.

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