When the lights start flickering on

A year ago, I sat in a morning group at the recovery house I run with my father. A gentleman was sitting on the couch who had arrived a few days prior, only a few days sober and still in the thick of it. This particular morning, he talked about shame. About the years he’d spent trying to ‘get it.’ About the broken relationships with his family and the way he felt like he’d let his family down, and all the ways he’d let himself down.

In the midst of his processing, our counselor, Steve, offered a gentle agreement.

“We do some crazy things in our addiction, don’t we?” he asked.

Looking around the room, you could see the smirks and nods in agreement of shared experience, providing a calm antidote to the shame this man was feeling, and to everyone else who had, at one point or another, been in exactly his shoes.

“Look at you,” Steve said. “You’ve been here for three days. And throughout each one of those days, you’ve made a million good decisions. Every minute, you’ve made the decision to stay. To keep going. To show up. To be honest. These decisions weren’t easy. You should be proud of yourself for what you’ve accomplished over the last three days.”

The gentleman’s head turned slightly to the right, followed by a low chuckle, and then, a small, almost invisible smile.

It was quiet, just for a moment.

In the stillness of this moment, he was lifted up out of shame and given the same reprieve we all need deep in our soul.

Hope.

As I’ve reflected on this moment over the past year, I’ve started to become obsessed with moments like these — the little ones. The smallest, faintest, almost invisible-to-the-eye moments that have inside them all kinds of good nestled right at the center.

As I’ve observed them, I think these moments have become so important to me because the more you see them, the bigger, more profound, more poignant they become. The small moments really aren’t that small at all.

As we say here, the little things are the big things.

To anyone sitting on the outside of someone’s hard battle, especially the ones that require honest and hard change, the sight can start to feel hopeless. Whether someone’s too set in their ways or their habits or patterns, it’s hard to see how things could ever be any different than they are right now. It can feel that way even when you’re not the one on the outside of the battle — it feels that way when you’re the one doing the changing, too.

Right up until God sends us each other, when suddenly, someone is there to turn the light switch on in the middle of our dark room and light it up. It usually starts out as a tiny flicker, but that flicker is often the return of the light back into our lives.

The return of hope.

A few months later, I was sitting with Steve in this same house when another man came in, visibly frustrated. He was upset with someone else he was living with, which, I should tell you, is just the reality of human beings. Whether you’re living in a recovery house, a small apartment, or passing them on the side of the road, people are frustrating everywhere.

But when you’re navigating the early days of recovery, emotions and old coping skills and the process of re-learning yourself can make these moments illuminating and challenging. Especially when your past is filled with solving them through a punch to the face.

Yes, a literal punch to the face.

As we were listening to him process his frustrations in explicit detail and expletives, Steve offered a familiar, low chuckle and a half-smile.

“Well did you punch him?” he asked.

“Well, no,” the man answered, still frustrated.

“I’m proud of you,” Steve said, followed by a brief pause. “That’s progress. That’s recovery. Think of all the times in the past you would’ve done that. What was different this time?”

Faced with that question, the room fell silent. And if you listened closely, the kind of listening only done with your eyes and heart, you could hear the gears start to turn. The deep-in-the-soul kind of turning.

As he sat in his chair, you could see the spinning frustration suddenly come to a screeching halt, requiring a new way of thinking about old things; requiring him to see that change was happening. The moment illuminated an opportunity for him to slowly look behind him at the process, and see the starting line was nowhere in sight — the progress was already too great, too far along, and too visible to ignore.

And in the familiar stillness, there it was again— the lights of hope, slowly flickering back on.

If there’s one thing I’m grateful for it’s learned patience to listen closely in these moments. The moments that require awareness and wonder. The ones that require you to keep your eyes open in anticipation of the flicker.

Because this is the light that reminds us who we were and who we are. It brings us face-to-face with ourselves, and in the flicker of light, this isn’t scary anymore — it starts feeling like hope deep inside of us.

The light doesn’t always come back in an instant. Sometimes, it turns back on for a day, or it might flicker for a few moments, or it could switch back off for a while.

But then, someone crosses our path and flips the switch back on with a smile, a question or an observation of the good happening in us.

Living on the other side of a dark night of the soul, we’ll see it.

The hope;
The shame floating away like vapor;
The light flickering back on.