All of Me. Good and Bad.

I have a friend, Joe K. who has been sober something like 38 years. Joe has worked with hundreds of alcoholics and addicts, not just here in Boise, but all over the country and continues to do so. A couple of weeks ago I was in a meeting and met this dynamite guy with years and years of what looks like, on the outside, really solid recovery. This guy works with probably ten men in Los Angeles, where he lives. He flew into Boise to meet his sponsor, Joe K. You get the point. On the topic of recovery, Joe knows what he’s talking about.

I have known Joe for a very long time, through previous vain attempts (if you can call them that) at recovery, and, because Joe is cut from the same eccentric pink cloth as I am, I have always trusted him and maintained a friendship even when I have not been able to get or maintain anything like sobriety. We had a conversation many years ago during a particularly difficult spell, a time when the consequences were accumulating and my desire to avoid them increased, but also a time when I was still in denial about the absence of willingness to do the work. Joe pointed at my head and then my heart. He said, “Chris, you’ve got God here and here.” He pointed at my gut and said, “You need to get God HERE.” I had no idea whatever what he meant and he was unable to describe it in a way that I understood. “You just have to do the work,” he said.

Well at that point I was unable or unwilling to do the work. I mean, really I was just a little drunk and high on crystal meth. It wasn’t MY fault that that really hot guy stole my car (which I recovered in Salt Lake City six weeks later). I was not looking for an answer to the real problem at that point. I was looking to dodge the consequences. Still, what he said stuck with me. Any time I approached willingness to accept spiritual help that conversation would come to mind. In this go at recovery that conversation has never been far from the front of my mind and has troubled me.

When I got here this time however, I was pretty badly broken. I didn’t walk in trying to avoid external consequences. I walked in because I wanted to die and the only people I knew who had been where I was and gotten out were people in recovery. I walked in ready to grasp on to a few tools and follow a few instructions as if my life depended on it. I got here with a first step.

I came to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity; I got God in my mind. I made a decision to turn my will and life over to that Power; I got God in my heart. Then I began the inventory process. Trudging through all of that was, obviously, painful and scary for me. It showed me over and over just exactly the extent of my condition and where I failed; how my complete inability to produce a desired effect in my life had harmed people I care about and driven me farther from the effect I sought to produce. Yet I got that all out on paper.

Thursday afternoon I sat down with Jim, the man I work with (which btw makes Joe K. my great-grand sponsor) and had a long, long . . . long talk. He sent me home to spend a quiet hour reviewing my work, looking for anything I might have left out. I did, in fact, have to call him and go over some things, things I left out and things I outright lied about. When all of that was done I got on my knees (I know usually that is a metaphor, but I did actually get on my knees) and had another conversation, this one with the God I know but don’t comprehend, and something happened. All of that pain, all of that doubt, all of that fear and the sense of unworthiness vanished. It vanished all at once and all at once the knowledge of God’s presence in my life moved from my heart to my gut.

I can’t say what it feels like or describe how I got there except to say, as Joe said, you just have to do the work.