Cravings

When I graduated from college in 1983, I took a job with Texas Instruments in Johnson City, TN. At that time, the town had a population of about 40,000, which made it about the same size as Parkersburg. I described it to my father as “Parkersburg with new cars.” Over the next ten years, Johnson City added almost ten thousand people while Parkersburg lost 7000 people. The trends continued – Johnson City has over 70,000 people today while Parkersburg has a bit less than 30,000.

One of the great things about Johnson City were the restaurants. I particularly liked one called “Fire House Barbeque”, which occupies an old fire house. It has a spicy, sweet barbeque sauce – many of my friends and I would eat lunch there. I came back in the evenings and ate there often.

But I moved on and lived in many other places. And from time to time we’d travel through Johnson City on our way to or from Atlanta – but Firehouse Barbeque was usually closed before we got there, or closed on Sundays. But I could remember the wonderful taste of the smoked beef brisket and the spicy, sweet sauce. For years afterwards, I craved that barbeque.

And so last week, when Saundra and I returned to Johnson City to bury her brother, the cravings got the better of me and we had dinner at the Firehouse. Unfortunately, now I’d love to have them mail me 25 pounds of the brisket and a couple quarts of sauce. Those cravings, when fed, only get stronger.

Do you have cravings? Are there desires or passions that tug at your heart, your mind, your body? Do some of these cravings cause trouble in your life – or the lives of friends, family, or neighbors?

James, the brother of Jesus, wrote in his letter to Christians that fights and quarrels come from the desires or passions or cravings that battle within us. He pointed out in Chapter Four that we desire but do not have, so we kill. We covet but cannot get what we want, so we quarrel and fight.

What James saw as true in the First Century AD is still true today. Cravings and passions and desires still cause trouble. How many shootings and murders do we have locally because of “love triangles”? These aren’t love triangles – there is little love there, but there is a lot of coveting. He wants her to himself – and another guy also wants her, so one of them decides to kill over this. A craving, a coveting, a desire which we cannot have – so we kill or quarrel and fight.

And if the fight is not over who is with whom, then the fight is over drugs. A craving that one must have, a desire that needs to be fulfilled. Take the drugs and/or the money – whatever the cost. The craving is so strong, the desire, the passion is so high, that quarrelling or fighting or even killing is done.

And we in the church are not immune to these cravings. Ours are just more common, and so more socially acceptable. Our morning coffee, our dose of chocolate, our ice cream, and our potato chips. A cigarette, a cheeseburger, a Coke or a Pepsi or a Budweiser. Perhaps an energy drink or a lollipop. Maybe a need to check our emails or Facebook for the third time this hour. Maybe a quick stop by the video poker shop.

Cravings can be good – they tell us when our body needs something. The pickles and ice cream of the pregnant woman is simply the body saying “I need more salt and calcium to maintain my energy balance.” The thirst for water on a hot day is the body saying “I’m dehydrated and need water so I can sweat and cool down.” The hunger of the teenager for another cheeseburger and more fries is the body saying “I am growing and need protein and calories to do that!”

And you know what? Scientists have found that the body has a mechanism between the gut and the brain to make us feel good when we need something and reward that craving with the right type of food. Serotonin is generated by the intestines, it moves to the brain and the brain releases dopamine and we feel good. Dopamine makes us feel good when we fill the cravings.

God designed our brain to release dopamine when we satisfy cravings. Cravings hit the brain as a not-so-good feeling, something is missing, something is wrong. When we drink that water on a hot day, the brain rewards us by releasing dopamine and we feel good again. Our balance has been restored – life is good.

When we run or swim or dance, it is painful. But if we run or swim or dance long enough, the brain releases dopamine and we get the runner’s high, we feel good for another hour or so. And we all know that running and swimming and dancing – or just walking – is good for us. So God designed the brain to reward us and remove the pain when we do something that is painful, but good for us.

But sometimes we eat or drink or smoke or do something that hijacks this dopamine system to make us do things that are harmful to us. When we take a drag on a cigarette, when we take drink a cup of coffee, when we have a beer – dopamine is released and we feel good. Our heart races to the nicotine in the cigarette, the caffeine in the coffee or we relax to the alcohol in the beer. We feel better than before, and our brain remembers.

And so, when we are in pain a few days later – our deep brain remembers this and says – have a cigarette, have some coffee, have a beer – and a craving is found. We want to have the cigarette, the coffee, the beer to feel good again – not great, but just back to normal, to being in balance. We begin to need that cup of coffee, that cigarette, that beer every day, just to feel normal. In fact, we feel terrible without that daily dose. This is how we know we are addicted. We have a very hard time when we miss a day. In fact, the psychologists tell us we’ll need to go a solid month to break the addiction – and we’ll feel terrible for the first couple of weeks.

When I was single and in my twenties, I became addicted to the caffeine in Coke and Pepsi. While my friends were drinking a half-dozen beers on a Friday night, I was right beside them – drinking a half-dozen Cokes a night. I’d stay out with friends until 2 am, then go home. I often had trouble sleeping until about 5 am. I’d sleep until noon on Saturday, go out again that evenings, drink more Cokes – and then sleep in on Sundays. And I’d feel rotten on Mondays. I was always tired by early afternoon. My body craved caffeine to keep the dopamine balance like it was on Friday and Saturday evenings and made me feel tired and depressed the rest of the week. I was grumpy.

Eventually, I began to have a pain in my stomach, an ulcer from the pressure at work, I told myself. Then I was hit with a kidney stone. The doctor told me I had to stop drinking caffeinated drinks, for they were keeping me dehydrated. I needed to drink more water. And I followed his advice. I slept twelve hours a day that week. And, believe it or not, after about 6 weeks, I noticed the pain in my stomach was gone.  I had much more energy and very little trouble getting up in the mornings. My brain had restored the old healthy balance of dopamine.

With some things, the dopamine hit is very large, such as cocaine, opioids, or meth. The drug causes twice or even ten times the dopamine rush that a cup of coffee or Coca-Cola might. We feel wonderful – for a while. And then we crash, we experience withdrawal, we don’t have the dopamine and feel terrible. We have to have another hit of the drug just to get back to normal. And so, there is a very high chance that our brain will quickly get addicted to needing the drug to stay in balance. And it might take a year without the drug before the cravings go away. And every time the cravings are there – every time the drug isn’t there, James’ words come back - 4 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your cravings that battle within you? ² You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.”

Addictions don’t have to be for hard drugs to be bad – my caffeine addiction was harming my health and my personality. I was grumpy, my stomach hurt, and I developed kidney stones. And food addictions cause many health problems – after all, would there be thousands of diet books if people didn’t have food addictions? But there are ways that we can overcome food addictions – over the last four years, I have lost almost 60 pounds. Here’s how I did it:

I realized I was drinking caffeinated sodas and tea again. Now we may not realize it, but caffeine of all forms – coffee, colas, Mountain Dew, tea, chocolate, energy drinks – what ever method we take it into our body, caffeine speeds us up. That’s what gives us the dopamine hit. What we don’t usually realize is that that caffeine speed-up also makes us just a little bit anxious, since our senses are turned up and our body is ready to react quicker to the slightest danger. You’ve heard of the jitters or the person wired on caffeine being jumpy? That happens to all of us on caffeine at least a little bit, so we grow anxious – at least a little bit.

And what happens when we get anxious? Most people want to eat, because the serotonin that the intestines release with food gives us more dopamine and makes us feel better, less anxious. So we eat. So if we could stop feeling anxious, we’d eat less, right?

So I did two things about four years ago. I stopped drinking caffeinated drinks and chocolate – and I began walking more – in my case mainly on a treadmill. And I bought a simple Fitbit – a pedometer that counts my steps and that I wear on my wrist. I began trying to set a new step record every day, starting around 1000 steps a day, until I finally was walking about 5000 steps a day – it took me a couple of months to reach that point.

And I also told myself a third thing which a wise doctor had told me several years before – I have the rest of my life to lose the weight. It took me over fifty years to gain the weight – I can take ten or twenty years to lose half of it. And that took off the pressure and so I didn’t feel bad – Feeling bad, you see, is what causes many cravings. The shame we feel when we overeat makes us feel bad, and so we eat more to get the serotonin and dopamine hit to feel better. A vicious cycle that we can break only when we realize what’s happening and stop kicking ourselves for natural behavior.

So I did a fourth thing. I asked God for help. James says “You do not have because you do not ask God. ³ When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”

I asked God to help me lose weight. I asked God to take away my cravings and to control them. I told God I couldn’t do this myself and needed God’s help. My eating was out of control – but I knew God had the power and love to help me.

And I began to lose weight – about thirty pounds in the first six months and about 10 pounds a year since then. I feel much better, walking is much easier. I can leave good-tasting food on the plate – I even leave restaurants without a doggie box. But it wasn’t anything I did except to turn to God, asking for God’s help.

For I have gained wisdom which God has sent me. As James says, “the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.” The wisdom that God has sent has helped me to conquer my cravings – and because of that my life overall has improved as I have moved toward peace.

Whatever your cravings, whatever your addictions, whatever your bad habits – God wants you to be set free, has the power to set you free, and loves you enough to set you free. So why doesn’t God set us free? Because we often don’t want to be set free.

We are in slavery to demons, addictions, unclean spirits which keep us from being free to do good. In his book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis wrote of people who were given a daytrip from Hell to Heaven. First of all, few people take the opportunity, preferring to argue with others in the line for the bus and leaving the line. Then, when they get to Heaven, a man has an evil creature holding onto him, like one of those controlling aliens we see in science fiction movies. A powerful angelic creature is standing at the entrance to Heaven, saying, “I can remove that if you will let me.” The man replies, “I’m not sure I want you to remove it.” And so it is with many of the bad habits, the cravings, the addictions we have. We aren’t sure we want them removed. We kind of like our bad habits and our addictions. And our ever-so-polite God waits for us to ask for them to be removed.

But when we ask in prayer, in truth, in faith – God will step in and break the chains. Jesus died to demonstrate God’s love for each of us – and Jesus died while we were still bound in slavery’s chains. We don’t have to be perfect people for Jesus to help us – we simply need to acknowledge that we can’t do it and ask Jesus for the help that only the Son of God can give us, bowing to His power and love. The demons use shame to keep us in bondage – opening up to God will set you free.

And these are the steps in all of the Twelve Step programs, from Alcoholics Anonymous to Weight Watchers to Narcotics Anonymous to Gamblers Anonymous. Only the name of the problem changes. These steps are listed in your bulletin. Let me read them.

The Twelve Steps

1.     We admitted we were powerless over our problem—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2.     Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3.     Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4.     Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5.     Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6.     Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7.     Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8.     Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9.     Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other people with our problem, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Based upon Alcoholics Anonymous

Whatever you are struggling with, know that this system works only as much as you desire to change your life from slavery to your habit into freedom. If anyone listening needs connection to a group for a particular problem, feel free to contact me.

May these examples and this knowledge help set you free, as well as your friends and family and neighbors who are in bondage to cravings and addictions.

Amen.