The Bible and Recovery

I came across an interesting article this morning about an HBA documentary airing tonight on the life of Ted Haggard. Haggard was the pastor of mega-church New Life Fellowship in Colorado Springs, and then was accused of having sex with a male prostitute and using drugs. Haggard was let go as the pastor, and has struggled since. (A related article in Slate is here.)

The documentary is by Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of House Leader Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi (the daughter) claims that she and her husband are not religious people. However, as she interviewed Haggard and his family, she was drawn to the Bible. Here's how she puts it:

I’m not a really religious person. We consider ourselves to be Catholics, but we think of it more as a cultural thing. But what I love about Ted’s story, at least about Ted’s family, is that the Bible got them through. They read the Bible. They would read these passages, and it moved me. I went out and bought a new Bible. When I was making Friends with God, everybody quoted the Bible, but I was never inspired to go buy one. But this experience with Ted turned me onto the Bible in a whole new way, because he would read these passages and it would really inspire me.
People might come away from this movie being a little anti-church, but it makes you really pro-Bible. It makes you really pro-God in a way, because you read these things in the Bible and you’re like, wow.
Gayle and the kids read the Bible a lot, and they weren’t doing it for me. They got through all of this with the help of the Bible.

So Pelosi saw the family reading the Bible and doing the right things. And yet, she saw Haggard reading the Bible, and really struggling to overcome his "demons", and she was drawn to the power of the Bible.

Strength in weakness. Success in failure. Dying to live. Becoming interested in the Bible because of a man's brokenness. None of these make rational sense. And yet, that's the beauty of how God works. God can use even the most dire of circumstances to win people over, sometimes even people who are only tangentially related to the original incident.

It is not the parts of the Bible we get, and are sure of, that are powerful in the lives of others. And sometimes not even in our own lives. It is the wrestling with the Bible, as Jacob wrestled with the angel, where the truth and power of the Bible become most clear. Far from a static book, the Bible is "alive." The Bible is not a book of dead doctrine, though doctrine is important, but a living book, seeking to woo us, shape us, transform us. How cool is THAT? [SDG-JS]