A long time ago I heard one of our members speaking, who said something with which I can now agree. A man with over 35 years sober, he said that the longer he stayed sober the less he knew about how this program works. Amen to that.
In the BB in How It Works it states, here is the how and the why of it. First we had to stop playing God and next we had to get a new manager in our lives. Sounds simple in the writing, but it’s something else in the living of this program.
By all rights, I should either be still drinking or already dead from the results of my drinking. Logically there is no way I should be sober. But here I am all these years later still sober.
Up until that last day drinking, alcohol occupied my whole life. All my thinking revolved around alcohol. I was so consumed with this way of thinking and drinking that I put alcohol over everything else in my life. My wife, my children, my working life, my friends, everything. No matter how I tried, I was powerless to shake the hold alcohol had over me.
Nevertheless somehow I was struck down, and as the literature states, I was left in terrifying loneliness. After turning on me, alcohol failed me. One of the best things that ever happened in my life was the overwhelming insanity I was to endure that last day.
All I can do is go back to that statement in How It Works. I got that higher power in the Second Step and then moved on to the Third and then the rest of the Steps. Whatever it was it worked for me. I got sober and through the grace of this program, all the support from all the people I have known in here, the God of my understanding and have survived all that life has given to me.
I still don’t know, but I’m grateful for all that’s happened.