"Opioids" A Time of Grief in a World of Uncertainty

Turn the TV on, pick-up a newspaper, listen to commentators who daily are reporting the same unnerving pronouncements of an evil that has taken over mothers addicted to these drugs, and worst their new-born babies, also now inheriting the same addictive needs. The latest news is that a baby addicted from opioids is born every 20 minutes. Yikes! What type of life are they facing? We are in a war with the needs of far too many people who cannot cope in today’s fast and furious society.

Take the terms anxiety, depression, anger turned inward, and the inability to face a culture that holds responsibility and accountability as requirements for being mature, and the result is release from reality to a drug-infested environment that has become out-of-control.

This article is not to condemn the many thousands of people addicted to drugs or excrete their position in life from what might have been a plausible form of acceptance, but to make note of a condition the rest of us must face, in a loving and healing manner of care for them.

These unfortunate souls have fallen into the trap of the inability to find their way out of an endless spiral heading nowhere but down to the depths of internal destruction. The use of opioids, which really is used to heal and relieve pain and suffering has, like many other good-meaning drugs, become the path to permanent relief from a world that holds little hope for them. What could become a positive approach to healing has become a negative pronouncement of despair.

Perhaps this is the new evangelization for the Church to undertake; not in preaching to them, but reaching out in a way that will let them know that Almighty God has heard their silent plea for help and He has sent you and me to be their shepherd, leading them home. And like the father of the Prodigal Son, we’re not there to condemn, but to welcome them back with love and compassion.

Many have lost their way to find He who is our salvation and know that even if or when any of us falls, Jesus Christ is there to lift us up, by sending people, who guided by the Holy Spirit, are ready to do God’s bidding by extending an open sign of welcoming and caring for those who cannot stand on their own. He is Love and we must also be that same love to our brothers and sisters addicted to opioids.