How God Heals Your Hidden Wounds

by Pastor Rick

As a pastor for many years, I’ve learned two truths about life. First, everyone has hidden wounds. Second, emotional scars can take much longer to heal than physical ones.

Chances are you know what I’m talking about.

Many of our hidden wounds are built on faulty information we believe about ourselves.

We have what I call “stinking thinking,” which means we don’t always think properly or come to correct conclusions. When you base your life on faulty data, you build a self-defeating lifestyle. You set yourself up for failure and pain. That’s why, in Romans 12:2, Paul tells us not to “copy the behavior and customs of this world” (NLT).

But I have good news for you if you’re struggling with the brokenness that comes from faulty thinking. Jesus Christ can heal those wounds. How does he do it? He shifts the foundation of your life to the truth of the Bible and that changes how you think.

Paul goes on in Romans 12:2 to describe this process: “Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think” (NLT).

Here’s how you can heal those hidden wounds:

1. Ask God to heal your memories. Those open wounds in your heart hurt. God begins the healing process when we ask him to heal us.
2. Fill your mind with God’s Word. The more you fill your mind with Scripture, the more freedom you’ll have from the old, painful memories you’re playing over and over in your mind. Make Bible study a regular part of your life, both on your own and in a group with other believers. Listening to Daily Hope is also a great way to regularly hear God’s Word.
3. Trust the truth from God’s Word about yourself. Paul teaches us that “God chose us to be his very own through what Christ would do for us; he decided then and there then to make us holy in his eyes, without a single fault—we who stand before him covered with his love” (Ephesians 1:4 TLB). That’s how God sees you as soon as you trust in Christ. He takes everything you’ve ever done wrong—all the guilt, regrets, shame, and hurts—and erases it.

Don’t let painful lies from the past continue to wound you. Choose to believe what God says about you instead.

Then watch as God mends the wounds in your life.

Our entire supply of illegal drugs contaminated

Our entire supply of illegal drugs contaminated

 It’s time to stop talking about the “opioid epidemic.” We don’t have just an opioid epidemic — and never really did. We have a drug overdose epidemic. Our entire illegal drug supply — except for marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms — is contaminated. That’s causing overdose deaths throughout the illegal drug using population, which I estimate (based on federal drug surveys) at 800,000 to 1 million residents a year, excluding marijuana.

The term “opioid epidemic” — or, even worse, “heroin problem” — has created the false belief that a horrible thing is happening to a defined population of opioid users, especially heroin addicts.

The so called “opioid initiatives” are well-intentioned responses to something real. Opioid users have died and continue to die in extraordinary numbers. And the drug doing the most damage — fentanyl and its analogs — is an opioid. Doesn’t that make what’s happening an “opioid epidemic?” No. Opiate overdoses are a heartbreaking subset of a much larger drug overdose tragedy. The full epidemic needs our attention.

To turn the overdose epidemic around, we must reconsider the idea that throwing law enforcement, treatment and naloxone at opioid users will end an “opioid epidemic.”

Opioid users are a declining share of overdose deaths. Autopsy lab results find cocaine-fentanyl combinations twice as often in the blood as heroin-fentanyl. Have you heard about the “stimulant epidemic?” Did you know more cocaine users than heroin users died last year?

Meth-related overdoses are soaring too. The drug is being cut with fentanyl. Ecstasy, LSD and fake pills (Adderall, OxyContin, etc.) all carry a significant risk of a fentanyl overdose, too. Most users of these drugs lack a tolerance to opioids, putting them at even greater risk of overdose death than a heroin user.

Did you know that fentanyl-laced cocaine is taking a heavy toll on a demographic odd couple: affluent whites who use powder cocaine and inner-city blacks who smoke crack cocaine?  Cocaine users killed by fentanyl-laced cocaine aren’t victims of an “opioid epidemic.” They’d be just as dead if the poison was arsenic or hemlock. They died of contaminated black- market drugs. The contaminant was an opioid, but the victim was using a stimulant — or at least thought so.

The Nation is suffering a drug overdose epidemic of catastrophic proportions. Opioid users are not the “cause” of the epidemic any more than being gay caused HIV/AIDS. The nation needs to focus objectively on who’s dying, why and what can be done.

Drug users don’t want to die. Drug dealers don’t want to kill them. A slaughter is underway because drug users don’t know what’s in the mixtures they are smoking, injecting and snorting. Nothing in the U.S. billion-dollar response is dedicated to helping drug users prevent their own death.

Fentanyl test strips need to be made available free everywhere. (They work like pregnancy tests.) crime labs test more than a million drug seizures a year. Make that information available in real-time on the internet! Drug users and public health authorities need to know the contents of the illegal drug supply.

Let’s create an anonymous service to test illegal drugs in a lab, just like a crime lab analyzing police drug seizures, except nobody gets arrested and nobody dies.

Dennis Cauchon works full time on drug policy reform as president of Harm Reduction Ohio.

Addiction Shaming

Addiction Shaming

Friday morning’s newspaper and television stations carried the sad story of another woman doing drugs in front of a four-year-old. “Police: Woman caught on camera doing drugs as child watched” (August 4).

If a heroin addiction is truly a disease, then why doesn’t the media make a bigger deal out of other people with diseases making poor choices? I wonder if we’ll wake up to headlines: “Morbidly obese man caught eating bacon double cheeseburgers, fries and milkshakes in front of his children” or “Elderly woman on oxygen caught smoking pack of cigarettes in front of grandchildren.”

If addiction is a disease, shaming the addict will not lead them into recovery any more than shaming the obese will lead them into healthy eating and exercise choices.

Letter to the Editor, local Newspaper