Many years ago I heard an old timer, who said that the way we’re living, sober, is the most unnatural thing we can do. He said we have an incurable disease, alcoholism, and though it will kill us, the natural thing for us is to continue to drink alcohol. Then he said that it’s a miracle that we have been saved from this disease. That we have been placed in a position of neutrality by a spiritual way of life called AA, which allows us to live alcohol free a day at a time.
I was thinking about this today. That the disease I have, alcoholism, which controlled the way I was “living” my life, drinking against my will, was lifted from me by the spiritual awakening I was given by my higher power.
That brings me back to the First and Second Steps. To remember how powerless I was…and still am. When it comes to alcohol, I have no power over it. In the face of alcohol I have no will power. I never will. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Just like Bill W. and the BB tells us.
But that Second Step, coming to believe that a power greater than myself, could restore me to sanity, was not only the beginning of hope and faith in something other than myself, my thinking, and opened the door to an entirely new way of thinking and living, free of alcohol and all its consequences. Which for me was on the way to being fatal.
Why wouldn’t I be grateful for all this program has given to me? I’ve been relieved of all that awful way of life and given a way of peace and serenity. A new freedom and a new happiness of which I had no concept before I entered the doors of this program.
And yet I have to remember to keep coming back into the rooms of this program, because I know that my “natural way of thinking”, the disease, is still down there within me, under the surface. I have to be reminded daily of what it is that I’m supposed to do in order to stay sober. To maintain a spiritual condition, which I never had before I came into this program. Something which can slip away from my memory so easily, if I stay away from the people, who support me and the God of my understanding, my higher power.
In other words, to do what they always told me in here, to keep coming back. As friends have reminded me, I’m not done yet and never will be. More to be revealed.