Can God help if you are living with a problem drinker? Although Beauty For Ashes has become a somewhat broader website for anyone exploring issues in times of crisis, at the beginning it was born out of our hearts to bring people towards understanding the heart of God and His desire to bring help for our Bottled-Up community.
At the beginning we wanted these (Bottled Up) websites (with one independent section for Families and one for drinkers) to be accessible for people of all faiths and people of none. In other words to be freely available to everyone. We wanted to honour and respect every journey.
We have not attempted to hide in the Bottled Up programme that both of us have active spiritual lives of our own, but nor have we felt free to go much deeper.
This has been hard. Not just because we wanted to share our faith but, more importantly, because our faith is centred around a God who loves us, helps us, teaches us and has the power to restore, free and transform our lives completely.
He is truly our secret weapon; greater than our deepest crisis, more powerful than our deepest insecurities and absolutely wanting to come and help us through into a better place.
John and I had a definite call to this work, and we can still take you to the place in Devon where God clearly spoke to us both. He told us that the cries of pain coming up to His ears from families being shattered by problem drinking had deeply touched His heart and that He was calling and equipping us to work in this area. If that sounds a bit weird we can both understand that. It was an ‘’other worldly” experience we were having, but none the less real for all that.
Both of us have been convinced since that day that God deeply cares and wants to help. In other words we are here because God was thinking of and wanting to help YOU!!
If you haven’t tried Bottled Up yet, can we encourage you to do so. This section of Beauty For Ashes was designed to go alongside the practical input of our website and if you begin to seek Gods help for your drinking family member and yourself He will undoubtedly use everything in it as a resource.
This is important!! If you are experiencing sexual or physical violence – Please listen to this first!!