Happy 4th! Someone brought that up in the meeting today. Freedom from the bondage of alcohol. Our own independence. Freedom from dependence on alcohol.
And all this is possible, because of the solution. The second step.
I was thinking, as the meeting went on today, that the night before my last day drinking, that I could not conceive of living without alcohol; without a drink. And, when the next day ended, I could not conceive of taking another drink. And, all because of the second step, although I had no idea of what that was. All I knew was that I couldn’t go on the way I had been living and drinking. I only knew that I ended up begging God to stop me from drinking and living the way I had been living and I would do anything he wanted me to do. And, the next day I could only think about the way of life that I had been introduced to on the day before.
The man, who had come to help me, another drunk, had made a phone call and came back and told me that there was a place, where men and women met and stayed sober together and he would take me to that place. I agreed to go there. And that’s all I knew at the time. But, just the idea of that place and those people was stuck in my mind. And the prayer I said was the solution, though I knew nothing about that.
Later on, because I awoke the next day and the mental obsession with booze was gone, I came to realize that I must have had some kind of spiritual awakening that was outside my knowledge of what was going on. All I knew was that I did not desire, I did not want to drink. That compulsion, which had ruled my life for over 20 years was gone. It had been lifted out of me.
Five days later, I attended my first meeting and was restored to hope from a state of hopelessness.
I know we all have our stories of how we came here and were restored to sanity from the insanity of having to continually take the next drink. But that’s what the man was talking about. Those moments we all experienced, when we came in and turned our lives over to the care of a Higher Power, the idea of which we were introduced to in the second step. It was enough, I’m sure, for all of us to get a beginning into this way of life. We had found a solution to what had bedeviled us for so long.
The BB suggests to us that true indepence begins with our committing ourselves to this dependence on God, as we understand Him. That, instead of a weakness, it was the beginning of true strength. That faith was not a weakness and that men of faith had proved to be men of strength down through the ages. A new concept for most of us. But one that would infuse us with strength and courage as we began to grow in this program. The promise that God was doing for us, what we could not do for ourselves.
This was what I was thinking about, as I came away from the meeting today.