A little “thank you” prayer that it all turned out this way

It was in the early hours of the morning of the day after my birthday two years ago that I was given my first step.  It didn’t feel much like a gift at the time, but that’s exactly what it was; a gift of grace.

Out of money and out of drugs, stood up on my birthday by the boy I was obsessed with, and hurt, and more afraid than I have ever been, I had set out to hunt down the object of my obsession and get fixed.  There wasn’t anything I was feeling that smoking a gram or two of crystal meth with a handsome sociopath who called me “buddy” wasn’t going to fix.  At least for awhile.  At least through the night.

But as it happened, he was nowhere to be found.  Several days later, when he called to ask me to find his car and drive it to his dad’s house, I learned that he’d been arrested earlier that evening.  I couldn’t really break while I still had a raison d’être, and at the time it was him, and this idea that maybe if he could get brave enough to get sober then maybe so could I.  That was the first part of the gift, really, his vanishing that night, leaving me to eat a frozen pizza alone on my birthday as I started to come down.

After waiting 9 hours for him I did what any broke, obsessed, addict on the top side of a big crash would do.  I knew the places he haunted and the people he used, and so I set out on foot to find him.  At 1 o’clock in the morning.  In the snow.  By 3 AM I had looked everywhere I knew to look.  I was cold and I was tired and I knew I was in for a big crash.  I didn’t know when or how I was going to be able to get high again and it terrified me.

As I stood at the north west corner of 6th and Pueblo it began to snow.  I looked across the street at this house, decorated much as it is tonight, with Christmas lights, and I suddenly realized that, in all probablilty, the family in that house hadn’t had any advantages I hadn’t had myself.  Yet, for the life of me, I could not figure out how having a life like that has passed me by.

And I sat down on the curb.  And I cried.

I wished I could just die.  Taking my own life was too scary, and not what I really wanted.  I wanted the life I was living to end.  This was not the life I was supposed to be living, and I knew it to the very core of my being. I was not created with a purpose to suffer and die alone.

As the snow began to accumulate on my hat and coat underneath the cool glow of that street lamp I finally got it; that the drugs weren’t the problem.  The problem was within me; that I was a drug addict and that my life was unmanagable and that the way things were at that moment was as good as I could ever hope for them to be . . .

unless I was willing to do anything, anything necessary to change.

I have gone to great lengths and I have changed greatly.  Last year, on this night, I picked up a devotional candle at Albertson’s on my way to work, with the intent of visiting that corner and saying a little thank-you prayer, but last year on this night I was arrested while I was at work, largely because I was making a voluntary appearance in court the following day to ask that the warrants be quashed and to set about accounting for the reasons that they were issued.

I’ve had that candle with me all year and tonight it was put into the service for which it was planned.  But tonight I have so much more to be grateful for than I did a year ago.  And it is even more clear to me tonight, that what I thought was the most painful moment of my life, the worst birthday in a horrible life, was really a birthday gift of grace.