How to love someone with an addiction | with Logan Cain from CAIN

“When she gave her life to Jesus, alcohol didn’t just go away.” – Logan Cain

Logan Cain, of the Christian band CAIN, shares the testimony of his and his wife’s battle through an “irregular relationship with alcohol.” For every person who is battling an addiction, there is someone who loves them and is battling with them. What does healing look like for a couple who are walking through a journey of sobriety together?

In this one-of-a-kind Healing Out Loud video Logan not only vulnerably opens up about his wife’s addiction story. But he also shares how God transformed his own life and how he saw himself as a husband.

View this video with Logan Cain and other Healing Out Loud videos in this YouTube Playlist.

An irregular relationship to alcohol

Before my wife was my wife, all the way back when we dated, my wife went to church some. But it was everything… it was all we did. Both my parents were pastors. And easily five out of any given seven days were spent in a church on godly things.

So, to meet somebody who had a more casual relationship or rather kind of not one, but I could tell right away she had the fruit of the spirit in her personality. She just didn’t have the Christian needs to define it. I say all that, just to give you the context that we dated for about a year. And then got into conflict with each other. I knew that I loved her and wanted to marry her, but had big reservations about marrying someone who didn’t just profess to be a Christian, certainly at the level that I did.

After about a year, we split up. And in the three months apart, was when my wife realized that she had an irregular relationship to alcohol.

That really came to a head for her. During that summer she had an incident with alcohol where she blacked out, and woke up in the back of an ambulance. They found her outside of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and took her to the hospital. And that was a big wake-up call for her.

After that experience, she was just driving down the road one day and cried out to the Lord. And God met her in that moment and she gave her life to the Lord right there in the car. I mean, it’s the car that I now drive her and my… I got dropped off at the airport this morning in that car. To think that that is where she was…

Three months later, Logan was working an event in Lexington, Kentucky.

And I hadn’t seen her or spoken to her in three months. I didn’t know that she was going to be there, and she walked in. In Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, there are about 15,000 seats. I bought a ticket to go and watch a basketball game, and in she walks. She had the ticketed seat next to mine. I was seat 24, she was seat 25.

I could have melted into a puddle and I could not have disappeared fast enough, because I’m thinking, “Oh, my gosh, here’s this person. We split up in not good terms.” And in she walks and she says, “I think we need to talk.” And I was like, “No, I was not a good boyfriend or husband. I don’t want to talk to you. You’re right. Whatever you have to say, you’re right.”

And we talk and she tells me a story about how God’s changed her life.

When the problem doesn’t just “go away” after being saved

And in October of this year will be my wife’s fourth year of sobriety. And I think that growing up, not wrongly believing in that miraculous delivering power of the God that we serve. That is some people’s story. But for us, when she gave her life to Jesus, alcohol didn’t just go away.

When I think about what walking out sobriety from alcohol or from any substance, what does that look like on a daily basis? When somebody’s struggling, after a while, your care starts to wear thin and you can start to get a little impatient with people. I think this is what Jesus was talking about when he was saying, when somebody asks you for your shirt, give him your jacket too.

You hear people when they talk about struggling with substances of any kind referring to it as a disease. And as somebody who didn’t struggle, I was so at an arm’s length with that sort of terminology.

But when you realize someone that you love is maybe as often as every minute in a fight and that fight is life or death. I feel like it just changes your perspective versus, “Well, why wouldn’t they just give this up? Don’t they just love me? Don’t they love their kids, their wife?” It’s easy for me on the other side of the fence to think, “How can you not just give this up?” And this thing sits in the driver’s seat of someone’s life.

And it’s like, this isn’t them choosing something over you. Once I was able to get there mentally, you’re so much more likely to lock arms and walk through this thing together. Because it isn’t personal. This is someone treading water and me standing there with a life preserver like, “Well, if you love me I’d be glad to throw it to you, but you just seem to like treading water more.” It’s like that person is drowning, why don’t you get in and go with them?

Who’s in the driver’s seat of your life?

There’s a whole nother video that we can make about my personal struggles. Because the thing that was sitting in the driver’s seat of my life was me. Whether it was lust or it was acceptance, or it was pornography, I don’t feel like I ever had one consistent thing. But that driver’s seat is supposed to have Jesus sitting in it.

Why do I struggle with fear and anger as a Christian? with Hope Darst

And I know that, but it’s just easier for me to be critical of someone who just puts one thing there, versus me sitting myself in that seat and saying, “I know what’s best.” Just like I’m asking them to remove themselves from the driver’s seat of their own life, I have to be willing to take how important I am to their recovery out of the equation.

What we truly have to hope for is that, that person falls in love with Jesus and ends up looking more like Jesus, not more like me. The temptation is to feel like you have it together and that was not the case for me. Just because my troubles are private, doesn’t mean that they’re better.

That we truly have to hope for is that, that person falls in love with Jesus and ends up looking more like Jesus, not more like me.

Logan Cain

And I think once I was able to humble myself and like I said, realize that the best thing I can do for someone that’s drowning is to get in and swim with them, then it was no longer about me. Their recovery was not about me, and that was when the switch flipped.