Every once in a while, I have to go back to the subject of hope. When I ended my last day of drinking I had lost all hope. Alchol had stopped working for me and I was slipping over the brink into alcoholic insanity. I was in complete despair. There was no hope for me and the only way out seemed to be suicide.
Fortunately for me a man I knew came to the rescue. A fellow alcoholic, who was still drinking, had met a man the day before who was in the program. He called this man, who told him what to say to me. He first asked me if I wanted to be sober. Then he told him to tell me that there was a place where men and women met and stayed sober together. At that point, a light went off inside of me. It was a faint glimmer of hope. Hope that I could get sober.
A few days later this man took me to my first meeting. There I met people, who told their stories and I identified immediately. They gave me hope, because they were just like me. And they were sober. My hope was that I might be able to get what they had. Since that day, hope has grown over the years. I was to learn that it was the Second Step.
Everyday I wake up, I’m restored to hope. Hope that I will stay sober today. Hope that I will remember what got me here. Hope that I might some way do God’s will for me today. Hope that I might become a better person today. Hope that I might be able to help someone like myself to achieve sobriety.
Hope that I can stay in the now and stay away from projection and morbidly wandering around in the past. Hope that I can get to a meeting and the hope that I will hear something which will wake me up and keep me going.
Like everyone else, I have my mental slips. I can get into my own head and wander down the path to self pity and darkness, where hope doesn’t seem possible. But I know that all I have to do is to make a phone call or say a prayer and start my day over. When I do, hope is there to lift me up.
I learned a long time ago that there are four stages and the second is hope. First comes perseverance, then hope, then faith, and finally love. I know when I stop and lose one of these, I lose them all. If I stop persevering, I can’t have the others. If I stop hoping, the rest are gone. So with faith, when it is achieved and the same with love. And all this comes from the application of the 12 Steps in my life. To me it is sobriety.
I was thinking about this today.