Just Say No

There is a powerful story on aish.com here about a drug addict who quit his habit when confronted with the idea, "You don't have to do drugs."

 

What?! Of course nobody has to do drugs! The point is well stated in the article which you can read; it's that there are things we get involved with and they become our way of doing things and we don't even consider that there could be another way.  This can be applied to all sorts of habits and attitudes we have.

 

Astonishingly though, the former addict still referred to his condition as a dreaded disease.  What a pity to apply a word like disease to something this individual just walked away from.  Can a person with cancer tell himself, "You don't have to have cancer" and not be sick anymore? Can someone blind due to macular degeneration or someone with cerebral palsy tell themselves they don't have to have these conditions and then be cured? Of course not.  So why use a disease model when it is not taken as a mashal but as the literal truth, and it mostly certainly is not a disease?