Take Your Junk to Prayer: Letting God's Light Transform the Darkness

Many sins are easily identified, and there are plenty of excellent resources available to help you prepare for confession, find a root sin, or identify patterns or circumstances that contribute to stepping away from God.

Yet inside all of us is a kind of raw material that is not necessarily sinful, but has the potential to turn into something nasty. This spiritual junk is like an evil yeast, and once fed, it grows quicker than that sourdough starter you overfed.

We learn about sin, about good and evil, and about behaviors or actions that separate us from God. But what about the darkness where those actions are birthed from? What about the muck we pick up, or gather on our own, by virtue of being fallen beings inhabiting a fallen world?

I'm a recovering alcoholic, and I can very comfortably rest a good portion of the blame for that on my genetics. I come from a line of prodigious drinkers, and most professionals agree that there is often a genetic component to addiction or addictive behaviors.

However…

I have also been deeply wounded over the years. I won't get into the gritty details of those wounds, but I'll share that I picked up a few as a child, a few more as a teen, and more as an adult. Alcohol proved to be a reliable medicine to cover those wounds.

I was recently diagnosed with ADHD, and although I had strong suspicions, having a diagnosis allowed me to begin making connections to past and current behaviors that, over time, were not positive forces in my life. I've described my ADHD-addled brain as having a “head full of bees,” and that doing normal, everyday tasks that other people simply accomplish comes with all the anxiety and uncertainty of doing something for the first time—every single time.

While I consciously medicated my emotional and physical pain with alcohol, I was unconsciously taming the raging beast of undiagnosed ADHD with vodka and cranberry juice. Mix it all together and you have a concoction that, over time, morphs from medicine to a harbinger of destruction, chaos, and even death.

Crushing anxiety from hangovers immobilized my mind and body, while every single dark thought I worked so hard to keep locked in deep places seemed to have acquired a spare key and were running amok.
In the few hours between the alcohol wearing off and when I started drinking again, my soul felt like the final form of Lord Voldemort Harry encounters in his ethereal King’s Cross vision.

What does this have to do with being Catholic and following Jesus, you may ask? For a long time, I thought the answer was “nothing” or “very little.” Yet as I mark more days of sobriety and more days attempting to manage issues like ADHD, I see that these weren't answers, but the type of lies Satan specializes in.

You see, I am well aware of the sins I struggle with. What I wasn't aware of was that something deeper and darker lurked underneath those sins. My spiritual junk was feeding the yeast, and the devil was more than content with me trying to manage that—manage my behavior—so long as I did not dig any deeper.

He was content with letting me busy myself with mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, and keeping the weeds out of the garden, provided I never noticed the house was on fire. If he controlled the raw material that birthed those sins, he couldn't care less how often I ran to the confessional.

A developing theme in my prayer life and time with the Lord has been reverse engineering my sins back to their origins. When I say sins, I use the term broadly and in the more literal sense of the translation: “to miss the mark.” Because some of these behaviors and patterns may not sound like sins as we typically think of them, that is due in no small part to a very active, very successful campaign the Enemy has been waging for a long, long time.

Let me give you a real-life example. I struggle to discipline my kids. Authentic discipline for children is one of the chief acts of love a parent can provide and show their child, but it is a narrow and hard road to walk for many of us.

I struggle to discipline my kids because I want them to like me. To be honest, I want people to like me, but if my coworkers don't, it doesn't keep me up at night.

I want my kids to like me because I've been hurt by the people I thought were right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it), and I don't want to be disliked or abandoned. That sounds heavy, but it's the truth God has been showing me.

I haven't been totally unaware of those wounds or that darkness. I've been through a lot of therapy, and it's helped me tremendously. I credit therapy for helping me become the person my wife married and for the father I'm trying to be to my kids.

Yet it was not until I began letting God into those parts of me—those dark, dirty spaces I had kept locked—that I actually began to heal.

That is the abundant life Christ is referring to.
Sure, He wants to help you quit smoking and swearing and whatever else is on your list to take to the confessional. But what He really desires is the junk.
Because He specializes in turning junk into something of worth and value. That’s what the Cross is all about.

It’s hard to let the light in. It's hard because wounds hurt, and we don't want to reopen them. It's hard because we might feel the presence of those wounds, but we lack the language to articulate what they are. It is also hard because of Pride.

Pride can turn us into Gollum, desperately grasping at our garbage as if it were something glorious and powerful, even though we know how destructive and corrosive it is. The Devil whispers, “That's part of you, what would you be with it?”

Many people in recovery talk about the process of rediscovering themselves and how difficult, uncomfortable, and even terrifying that experience is. Letting God shine His light on our darkness is the same.

Because I may know and recognize that drinking is destroying my health and my family, but it's familiar. It's a piece of me. And who would I be without it? Do I want to know that version of me?

We used to brag about our scars as kids, taking pride in their uniqueness and character. Does it make sense to take pride in the wounds on our souls in the same way?

The saying “Hurt people hurt people” sums up the essence of my message. God wants those hurts and all the garbage that comes with it—the pain, shame, guilt, anger, sadness, whatever. God wants it. And the Devil wants it just as much, maybe more.

Because if he can convince you to keep the doors shut, if he can convince you that it's best to let the darkness stay locked away—because at least if it's locked away, it isn’t running wild—then he doesn't care how many Rosaries you pray or how often you go to Confession.

He has seized the means of production and convinced you that your job is quality control for malformed, disfigured products when what you really need to do is hit the Emergency Stop on the factory wall and shut the whole thing down.

But you can only shut it down with God’s help. Therapy can help get you close, but it is not until you allow the Divine Physician to see your wounds that they can be transformed into agents of grace for others.

Because that's what this is all about: giving God’s gifts away. You should be grateful and celebrate your healing, but it isn’t yours to hold on to once it is given. That is the light we're meant to let shine before the world. That is the salt we are called to be.

So take your junk to prayer. Open the vaults and let God's light shine on the things that squirm, crawl, and squeal down there. It’s uncomfortable, it might be painful, but it puts a stop to some of the Enemy's most elaborate and long-term plans.

What's more, you will be transformed in Christ, just as Scripture has promised.