The Last Chance Texaco

Posts Tagged ‘Faith’

“Although financial recovery is on the way for many of us, we found we could not place money first. For us, material well-being always followed spiritual progress; it never preceded.”  -Alcoholics Anonymous

I’m still doing my usual routine, staying close to sober friends, attending meetings, writing inventory when it is indicated, seeing my sponsor regularly; the same stuff I’ve done for the last 38 months or so, yet I find myself in an odd situation.  As I have taken on a larger role and accepted more responsibility in the company I work for I have discovered that the reasons I have had my paychecks bounce in the past is only that my company is astonishingly mismanaged.  And that is unacceptable to me.  So I’ve written inventory about my boss and about my job.  I’ve prayed and prayed and prayed.  I’ve talked to my sponsor and with a small handful of close friends and family. Read the rest of this entry »

My sobriety anniversary is very important to me and it’s coming up here soon, but it doesn’t quite move me the same way December 13th does.  December 13th, today, happens also to be my birthday, but my God, I’m 44 years old.  My “birthday” is not really a big deal anymore.  No, the anniversary I celebrate tonight, the reason this day is important to me, is that on this night, three years ago, I suddenly saw myself clearly and suddenly had a little hope that recovery would be possible.

The first two years were easy.  This last one has been a bitch.  There have been times recently when I have wished that I had died back in May.  It would have been so much easier.  I’ve even, at times, tried to tell myself that if that illness had killed me that I would be a hero.  I would have died sober.  I would have died doing the things that I was supposed to be doing.  My family and friends would mourn me, sure, but there would be something happy underneath the sorrow; the knowledge that they had known me and that in my last years I had been sober.

Lately things have been much, much harder.  I’ve had to return to being medicated to stop the insanity that has been going through my mind.  The medicines are working, so that is good, but I still have a ton of stuff to face.

Somehow, in spite of everything, I have remained sober.  In fact I’ve been sober longer now than I have ever been since I was 14 years old and I attribute it to that moment at the corner of 6th and Pueblo, under the street lamp, in the snow, when I finally understood that the pain I was in then was the very best that I could hope for, unless I got sober, and when I suddenly believed that it would be possible.

” God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.  Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do Thy will.  Take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love and Thy Way of Life.  May I do Thy will always.  Amen”

Tonight I witnessed one of the greatest acts of faith and willingness I’ve ever seen in someone new to recovery. I don’t even know what word describes how I feel. Fulfilled. Grateful. Sruprised, Happy. Blessed. I don’t know. Full. I feel full.

I’ve been spending more time with the Cheerleader lately and I’ve been doing it because he’s been reaching out. I’m probably the only guy in town who understands about what it is to be a gay man in early recovery from crystal meth addiction that actively makes himself available to other men trying to get clean. Maybe not, but when I was trying to get clean I had a hard time even finding honest voices out in the blogosphere. Marc and Rod were the first and only for quite awhile. Read the rest of this entry »

Not because of a bill or anything. It’s included in the rent, so they must be doing some kind of repair or something, but the fact remains my water is turned off.  And I haven’t showered.  And I’m supposed to be at work in half an hour.  I just this second remembered that I have a bottle of distilled water in the kitchen so I can at least ease the pain with another cup of coffee.

I’ve opened up the faucet and I’m waiting for the telltale hiss of a return to civilized living. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote a post over at the Second Road the other day about the hurdles we face in finding the Higher Power of 12 step programs. The idea for the post came from a conversation I had with a friend a few nights ago wherein he told me that the only ‘God’ he was willing to believe in, when he got to AA, was what he called “The God of Unintended Consequences”. The conversation was interesting enough to me that I immediately started researching the 2nd step observations of the early AAs and the neurobiology of belief.

I garnered some great knowledge in this, and I gained some really useful clarity about the roles of honesty, open mindedness, and willingness in having an effective spiritual experience. I understood, as I never had before, why it had been so important for me to cling to the alternate names of God we use; Higher Power, Creator, and Spirit of the Universe. Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour?
Hedwig: No, but I… I love his work.

John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I don’t want to make this about religion because it isn’t about religion. It’s about the same thing everything else here is about. Me. It’s what it was like, what happened (and what’s happening), and what it’s like now. For me. It is my experience, my strength and my hope. It is also a place where I can sit down, slow down, cool down and give the loving Creator of my own understanding room to go to work. It is part inventory, part meditation, all reaching out.

My story is not unique by any stretch. Young men from my home town have gone down similar, almost identical paths. I don’t know all the specifics of Troy’s story but I know he grew up in a similar environment, one fought with pressure to conform to the dominant culture. I can only hope that there was more tollerance in 2006 than in the 70′s and 80′s, when I was his age. In my own case, by the time I was 14 years old I had developed a concrete intellectual bias against every system of thinking which claimed to be the only truth. I carried that bias into every part of my life, judging things which I had never examined.

In my own experience, gaining hope in the second step that a “Power greater than myself” could restore me to sanity, and then gaining enough faith to turn my will and life over to the care of that power, as I understood it, was only possible because the message was delivered to me in a way that I could hear. The men who guided me left the specifics of their own conception of a Higher Power at the door, and instead shared what happened that made them willing to seek that relationship and what that relationship had done for them. At no point did they ever tell me that they had the one truth. They carried the message by strictly adhering to the instructions on page 93 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous which says, among other things, that I could choose any conception of a Higher Power I liked, as long as it made sense to me, and that there was no use arousing any prejudice I may have against theological terms. I was willing to believe in something, so long as you didn’t tell me what to believe.

The meetings I attend most regularly have now been completely invaded by a group of not very Christlike Jesus people who call on themselves to share at meeting level to watch out in the rooms of AA. “There are forces of darkness in these rooms that are marking Christians and taking them out of here.” If you point out to them that there is a way we do things in AA and a reason that we do it they just say, “Then we’ll disagree.” If you call attention to the fact that when they share the way they share, that newcomers and young people get up and leave the meeting, visibly upset; that the way they are sharing does not help to carry the message, they say that they are merely sharing the truth as they understand it.

The program, however, has nothing to do with looking at them, with judging them, and everything to do with looking at me. What part of me is so prideful that I need to be ‘right’ on this point? What within me makes me refuse to accept these people as they are? What is the origin of the blind spot in my faith that makes me think that as a group, the 2nd Tradition won’t see us through this or that the people being driven from the rooms won’t find their way back when the time is right? What am I so afraid of that I cannot seem to find it within myself to treat these people with the same pity, patience and tolerance with which I treat people who can’t stay sober or people to only identify as addicts or people who talk about taking steps they have never taken. Why do I only see that they are not helping the program rather than seeing that the program could help them?

In my 5th step my sponsor pointed out that he though I had a lot more work to do in the area of God and religion. I actually blew him off. “No. Really. I’m so completely OK with all that,” I told him.

No. Really I’m not.

“School and work are fine – and that is what we do between meetings”
Karl M., Covina, CA

“Why do we have to listen to the same people tell the same stories at every meeting?”  Norman leaned over and asked me that at a meeting last night.  He’s right, of course.  We hear the same people share the same stories day after day after day.  Particularly in a small city like mine where the fixtures at the meeting don’t really change.  It is actually one of the things I like best about blogging.  It gives me the opportunity to take a look at today and apply the lens of the solution offered in 12 step programs.  It helps me see the present more clearly.  It gives me new stories; new experience, new strength and new hope.  It gives me a constant source of new stuff to share at meetings; stuff that is already developed and grounded in the solution.  Sometimes, but not very often, it works the other way around; I find information about what I’m living by listening in meetings.

The collective experience, strength and hope shared by sober members of 12 step recovery is much bigger than I can avail myself of in local meetings, though, and my own answer to the problem at the root of Norman’s question has led me not only to the blogs my colleagues write, but to podcasts of AA speaker tapes.  (You’ll find a link on the sidebar, or you can search for “AA speaker tapes” in the search field of iTunes.”  I load my iPod up with these.  At some point every day I’m listening to the experience, strength and hope of other people on this path; other people that I am unlikely to ever meet or hear otherwise.

The problem and the solution are the same, of course, so I’m probably simply hearing new information because the voice is different, and that is a great thing.  Everything that I can add to my recovery is a great thing, and I’m grateful today to have been shown an answer to a couple of my questions about my recovery by Karl M. of Covina, CA in a speech he gave at the Denali Workshop.  I’ve listened to that podcast three times in succession now.

I’ve decided I am absolutely returning to school and that I’m returning to learn a trade, rather than a profession.  I just don’t think I have it in me at the moment to remain in a job that takes up all the psychic and emotional energy I have that I would rather commit to recovery.  I need to double my income fast and I need it to leave my mind and spirit free to give to AA.  Karl talks about how grateful he was that he visited AA before he visited the counselor at the school he was going to attend.  “School and work are fine, but we live in Alcoholics Anonymous and we visit the world.  We don’t live in the world and visit AA.”  I felt that.  I suspected that.  But I didn’t have an adequate way of stating that so clearly and I didn’t have any validation of that in the recovery community around me, at least not so that I could understand.

The other thing I gleaned form this particular tape was the answer to a question that I didn’t even know I had.  How do you know that you’ve given your will and your life over to the care of God.  I’m not going to repeat the explanation Karl gave.  You can learn that well enough on your own, and I would encourage you to, but the answer is absolutely yes.  I have definitely turned my will and my life over to the care of God.  That answer struck me to my core and validated everything that I am doing today for my recovery.  Like finding a landmark on a seldom traveled path at the point you’re sure you’re lost, this bit of information, delivered clearly and specifically and in a way that I could understand, has given me a much needed dose of faith and hope.

It’s fantastic to be sober.  It’s fantastic to have been given a life and a purpose, and it’s fantastic to be able to share it.