psalms on Rehab

Jesus–our Lord, Savior and Friend: Come into our hearts to save us and to rule. Come into your Church to direct and empower us with Your Gospel and Your Spirit. Come into your World to redeem the Lost...

Robert H. Richards and Ethan Couch illustrate how opportunity bends toward affluent white males. Richards was found guilty of raping his three-year-old daughter, but because of his connection to the D...

I see my past drinking as a behavioral problem, a learned response to dealing (or not dealing) with emotional pain and stress. Once I achieved the excavation of my wounds, I no longer lived with the s...

Ancient lens What's the historical context? Confronting the Giant Psalm 119 is the longest of all the Psalms and for this reason it has received the nickname “the Giant Psalm.” The Psalm is a...

A particularly brutal set of slave owners we recently encountered in South Asia held more than twenty slaves in a rice mill. They and their thugs beat the slaves, sexually assaulted the women, even do...

Lent 2024: Do This in Remembrance Remembering and Rejoicing in God's Word AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? Confronting the Giant Psalm 119 is the longest...

God of nations and Lord of all creation: You were there at the beginning of time and at our beginning, and You will be there at the ending and when we finally come home. There is no time You are not t...

God of wonder and strength, compassion, grace and love–all of which we see revealed through the power of a storm and its aftermath: You’re so big–and we’re so small. Your might is unlimited–ours is fi...

Faithful and Good God–our Father, Redeemer and Companion. You know all about us–and love us anyhow; nothing we are or do surprises you or puts you off. Therefore, we turn to you with assurance and tru...

Psychiatrist James Knight describes in graphic detail the experience that members of Alcoholics Anonymous experience: These persons have had their lives laid bare and pushed to the brink of destructi...

My husband, Doug, is an athlete whose body is protesting. He has had numerous knee injuries and torn his Achilles tendon twice. Doctors have operated on him, put casts on him and sent him home, thereb...

As my AA, NA, and CA friends have repeatedly reminded me, rigorous honesty is the first rule of recovery.

On retreat we stop avoiding the pain of the disconnect between our deepest desires and the way we are actually living. We have time and space to reflect on our life rhythms to see if they are really w...

Addiction goes deeper than obsession and compulsion. It is worship. It is giving my heart and soul over to something that I believe will ease my pain and provide an outlet for my fury at being out of ...

People by nature build, tear down, and rebuild. We build our hopes, get disappointed, and then search for renewed hope.

To be alive is to be addicted, and to be alive and addicted is to stand in need of grace.

The conversations that stand out sharpest to me now are those in which Dr. Brand recalled individual patients, “nobodies” on whom he had lavished medical care. When he began his pioneering work, he wa...

The bad news was that a friend’s leg was severed in a gruesome automobile accident. The good news was that it was surgically reattached. A few months later she asked if I wanted to see her scar. I swa...

God of healing, we look for you in all the wrong places. We assume we have figured out how you are at work. Because of this, we miss out on seeing your glory, and we fail to join with you as partners ...

As a young pastor, I wanted to pray for Jean, who had been sick in bed for about a week. So I took Mike, a fellow leader in the church, with me to her home. Her husband, Jim, greeted us at the door an...

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recovered greenness?

Lesslie Newbigin, the great missiologist and missionary, shares a powerful analogy of repentance from his days serving as a missionary in India. I remember once visiting a village in the Madras di...

Only one in a thousand sits down in the midst of it all and says—I will watch my Father mend this. God must not be treated as a hospital for our broken “toys,” but as our Father.”

God invites us into his healing presence with these words: “I am the Lord, who heals you.” Diseased, depressed, dysfunctional, defeated, we come hungering for health that only God can provide. God c...

Mending is an act that requires courage. To mend can be to repair a relationship, as described in the line above from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . In this splendid play, Benedick and Be...

After several years of engagement in justice work Warren says in reflection on the story of the Good Samaritan, “I realized it’s not okay to have a road that perpetuates the beating, robbing, and pote...

If you’ve decided your healing is dependent on other people acknowledging their faults you’ll still be waiting in your grave.

When we need these healing times, there is nothing better than a good long walk. It is amazing how the rhythmic movements of the feet and legs are so intimately attached to cobweb cleaners in the brai...

At their core, transitions are the internal adjustments by which we reorient ourselves to new environments, new experiences, and new seasons of life.

For generations, psychologists thought that virtually all self-defeating behavior was caused by repression. I have now come to believe that addiction is a separate and even more self-defeating force t...