Light Does Not Need a Chain

By Chuma Nwagbogu

What if almost everything that could possibly trigger addiction,
happened to you? What if you convinced everyone including
yourself that you were happy for a long while until in an instant,
your life became a futile daily quest to trap joy?
What if every time darkness subsumed you, a divine memory
bolt pierced through and the lesson from it became your
immediate deliverance?
This is my story. In my journey through addiction, I discovered
that the power to move forward existed within events in my past.
Every story I remembered in bondage, opened a new chapter in
the book that wrote me to freedom.
It is my ambition that everyone who reads the stories in this
chain, will first of all laugh, and then recognise the transformative
power in telling our individual stories with vulnerability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chuma Nwagbogu
• Release date: Oct 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005607722

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Patrick Nwaobu Nwagbogu. Ká vá vú!

We have walked through the darkness of this world, that is why we are able to see even a sliver of light.

Gaara of the Sand.

Preface

Introduction

Metanoia

Ziemife

Dustbin

Miracles

Integrity

Ignorance

Friendship

Failure

Race Card

Megeme

Denial

Vex Money

Ike

Genjutsu

Ányá Fụlụ Ugò

Chizoba – God Rescues

Steps

11:34

1.1

Onochie

Preface

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Light does not need a chain.

God drops a trail of crumbs that if you follow, will lead to your loaf of bread.

The mystery of remembering contextually relevant stories, sustained my hope as I retraced my steps through the woods, following the humble crumbs of my life. Each memory left me with apt life lessons which led me one step closer to my loaf.

The branches that had previously been blocking the son were woven into baskets to collect the leftovers.

I went into the darkness with pockets of crumbs, God led me back home with overflowing baskets of bread.

Chu Nwagbogu

July 2020

Introduction – Into the Woods

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The lessons God worked together for my good existed within events I had already experienced personally or vicariously. The stories in this collection took me several traumatic experiences to recall, and through conversations with diversely gifted men and women of science and religion, I finally found the thread that connected my stories. I have subsequently concluded each unique story from my past with a relevant lesson for today, and connected these lessons in a chain that clasped me to freedom. I often need to be reminded of most of these lessons, and I am still finding new lessons from old stories. So I suggest that you do not focus on absorbing every lesson immediately, but rather trust that an open mind will connect you to at least one lesson applicable to your own journey.

See each lesson as a crumb in a trail—a nugget of dawning and learning. Do not focus on when you will get to your loaf of bread. Focus instead on understanding, translating, and implementing the crumb from each story. I have been told, and I am working on accepting that God doesn’t directly hand us our loaf of bread when we think we should have it, but rather leads us through our experiences to its location. God gives us the crumbs that lead to the loaf of bread.

The very first crumb God dropped on my trail was an awareness of the ineffectiveness of random rituals. These rituals, which I usually performed in spontaneous desperation are actions and pronouncements used to commemorate my numerous, yet insincere, decisions to quit using drugs. My rituals usually had spiritual symbolism, and were meant to remind me of who I was and what I believed in, through ceremony. I therefore, incorporated rituals into my self-prescribed recovery plans as a means of dealing with the dissonance; I enjoyed the high but I could not tolerate the accompanying regret, disappointment, self-loathing, hopelessness and exhaustion that flooded my mind in overwhelming waves.

Randomly initiating rituals perpetuates the false belief that freedom is hinged on the strength of the addict’s will. The addict often assumes that the more spontaneous and complex the ritual, the more effective it is likely to be. It is therefore not surprising that I, like most addicts, randomly used rituals to display my desperate desire to be free, while still holding on to the one thing standing in my path to total freedom—my will. In my randomly initiating these rituals, I hoped to bridge the gap between my reality and the most positive self-image my mind could conjure, jumpstart hope and commemorate what I resolved to be yet another new beginning in one miraculous swell swoop.

While rituals play a vital role in centring our lives, using a ritual like a talisman to solve a spiritual problem like addiction is futile. A singular external ritual cannot solve a complex internal problem. Rituals must follow cosmic order and as we get increasingly frustrated with our ineffective rituals, we become more creative. Some of the rituals I randomly initiated included, but were not limited to, bloodletting, general obsessiveness—counting, bathing, cleaning, and chanting mantras while oscillating—and establishing dubious chronological patterns. The consistent use of ineffective rituals, with the irrational hope of a miraculously different result, was evidence of my insanity. Clinging to the mental stronghold, that change requires ceremony to establish and a strong will to sustain, was evidence of my fear and ignorance respectively. I abandoned the hope of magically being free, when God revealed