"I do not do want I want" -Rom 7:15

It's been great to have a friend here to reminisce and have some fun. I've been working since Holy Week on social media and a new website for the parish, and trying to balance work and recovery, so much so that it's presented the first real challenge to my eating and workout efforts. I've been going on a clip of about 6 workouts a week and 2000 calories a day for the past 5 months. My weight loss had been pretty steady during this time, about 3-5 pounds a week. Since coming home from treatment at the beginning of April I've lost 12 lbs, so the weight loss has been on the lower end of this. It seems in the last week, though, that I am starting to plateau. All this is to say that I had a day yesterday where I didn't want to do anything in the way of recovery. I wanted to stay in during the only reasonable time I could go to the gym.

Luckily, my friend being here, I said "tell me to go to the gym....now!" I can intellectualize the fact that you need motivation sometimes, and that these kind of moments come. Those that continue to recover are those that make the critical decision to do what they know they need to do when they don't want to do it. Here's the rub, though: if your will can kick in right then, this is obviously the best case scenario. You just get there. Once you're there, you will just do it. They say getting to the gym is 75% of the battle. The rest is "easy."

Yet I was reminded in that moment of the intensity of the struggle, and how I have struggled in the past. It wasn't always as simple as just going. If we're gonna be honest about addiction, it's not simply about saying to people "you just gotta get there," or "you just have to eat this," or "you just have to stop eating so much." The problem isn't a problem of will power. In fact, most of us that struggle with addiction have excellent will power. That's why the power of the addiction is so strong. There are times when I know what I need to do, including knowing that I know what I need to do means that I should do it right then.

Whether or not St. Paul actually struggled with addiction, he captures this idea well. In his letter to the Romans, he writes:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am!
(Romans 7:15-24a)

Depression and despair could follow all this. I've tried. I just can't right now. What am I to do? St. Paul continues: Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:24b-25) The process of surrender here is crucial. It's not your own power that continues your recovery, or your "deliverance", but it is a higher power which enables you to do what you truly wish you could do. Surrendering to this power is more essential to the struggle than just getting there.

I'm thankfully at a point where the "just get there" is the result of this surrender. It may sound a little crazy to attribute the main cause of my getting to the gym to God, especially when all the external signs looked like a friend telling me what I needed to hear and looking a lot like my will was what got me there. Without this surrender, though, I don't know if I could keep telling myself "just get there" everyday. With an addiction, for human beings, it is simply impossible, but for God all things are possible. (cf. Mt 19:26)