By Mandy Baker, Clinical Director, Spearhead Lodge

Spearhead: A leading element, force, or influence in an undertaking or development – Merriam Webster’s Dictionary

We hear a lot about addiction these days-in the news, at our church, from our friends and family, and at our places of employment.  Stories of overdoses, crisis within the family, crime, punishment, and a host of other things that tug at our soul.  How could these things be happening?  What is causing the opioid epidemic? How could that happen to young man down from down the street? Remember when he was just a boy so full of life and hopes and dreams.  The truth about addiction is that it kills, it maims, it harms, and it takes kind, decent, loving individuals to places of darkness that we often cannot fathom. There’s another truth about addiction, though. One that we do not talk about nearly enough. The truth that addiction is treatable and people get well. But we don’t hear those stories often and we don’t know about the redemption that recovery offers, the families that it restores, and the dreams that it fulfills. These truths play out in treatment centers like Spearhead, in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, in churches, and in small quiet places where one person reaches across the bridges that divide us and helps another human being. This is the great, but often untold truth that resounds in the world of recovery. That truth comes with a burden though.  A burden that tells us we must keep reaching across those bridges to the alcoholic who still suffers.  We must create safe havens in the world where those dark places formed in addiction can begin to merge with the light.  We must take on the responsibility of a spearhead and become a force that brings about change.  It is an undertaking of great magnitude, one that we can only bear with the Power granted through a spiritual awakening, a dose of humility, and a strong commitment to the restoration of humanity in those who by all appearances have lost it. It is for that reason that we have chosen the name Spearhead Lodge for this program.  It is not enough to simply stop using drugs or drinking alcohol.  The calling is greater.  It is a calling for those young men who walk through our doors to becomes leaders, forces, influencers, and developers of the change process.  It becomes a movement of awakening that leads to the one truth know to those of us working in this field, to those of us moving with the rooms of the 12-Step fellowships, and to ones of us who lived in the darkness and found a way to merge that with the light.  We are spearheads, each of us who work in our own ways to cling to what was so freely given to us and who strive daily to attraction others to that world.  And it is the calling of recovery that belongs not only to us, but to the young men coming to this program.  They are the true spearheads waiting to be revealed.