Last week my wife started having contractions. At a future time in the pregnancy this could be an exciting sign of things to come, however, last week was too early to have contractions. Slightly panicked we rushed off to the hospital. After an initial check-up from our doctor it was decided that we needed to spend two days there under observation. During the first day my wife was hooked up to an IV to make sure she was getting enough fluids. The first night as I laid in the pullout chair-bed while we both drifted asleep I remember looking up and watching the slow steady drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . and on and on it went.
All of us are addicted to something . . .
. . . I like to call it the drip.

All of us have a drip in our life. The drip can make you feel numb, happy, safe, tolerable, comfortable, intoxicated, out of control, in control, apathetic, lethargic, anxious, insecure, secure, sad, up and down all in the matter of a few minutes or a few hours. The drip is different for everyone: your drip might be the weekend shopping you do to mask your insecurities, it might be the five dollars you spend everyday in my coffee shop to get the caffeine you need to make it through another day, or maybe it is something with even deeper roots like gambling, drugs use, drunkenness or extra-marital affairs.
We all have hang ups, hurts and habits and that includes the people who heap the hot coals on our heads when we have stumbled along the road of life. No matter who we are we all are going to face something we don’t know how to deal with: unfortunately that is the moment when most of us choose the drip. When life is at a crossroads it isn’t always obvious which way leads to the drip and which way leads to life.
Many seasoned Christians want to put the crossroads in a nice little box and say that the choice is easy, but for someone like me who wasn’t taught what to do when life gets hard it makes the choices seem all that more blurred. Many of you are in the same boat. High school, college and life in general did not teach you how to deal with the hurts, habits and hang-ups. Right and wrong are easy to teach but pain and brokenness are hard lessons to deal with and can only be learned through experience. Do you find that the drip rarely shows its ugly head in the right and wrong but is almost always present in the pain and brokenness?
What does the drip look like in your life? What is the drip covering up? The root of the drip is the hardest place to go to emotionally but if you do the work you will be rewarded. The drip seized my life for years but with hard work it makes unplugging the IV so much easier.
Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . the drip can go on and on until we unplug it.
What about you? Is it time to unplug the IV?


(borrowed from this 


