Last night I was meditating on hope. That’s what I was thinking about when I was falling to sleep.
Hope has been so important to me and my sobriety. I had lost hope, when I hit my bottom. The truth be known, I lost it long before that, but it was so clear at the end of my drinking that it dragged me down into the pits. Everything was darkness within me. There was no light. Then a man, another drunk, told me that there was a place where men and women met and stayed sober together and he would take me there. In a flash this light went off inside of me and I could understand the blackness for the first time. I had gotten a little hope for the first time in years. At my first meeting, seeing all these sober people and listening to their stories and what had happened to them, I got another dose of hope. But there was more to come. Hope was going to have to be earned.
I discovered, as all of us must, that my spiritual “muscles” had atrophied over the years from lack of use. I was going to have to work to build them back up again, if ever. Spiritual “flexibility” wasn’t there yet. This was going to require me to persevere, to hang in there and not quit, as I went through a series of spiritual “exercises”, namely the 12 Steps. This was not going to happen over night, as Bill points out in the BB. My selfishness and self centeredness was in my way.
But over time hope became a reality. Each day that I was beginning to live this sober life was a new day of hope for me. It was then I learned the four things I must always keep in mind. That the first step is perseverance. Perseverance leads to hope. Hope leads to faith, when we see the fruits of our perseverance and continuing hope. And then hope leads to love, something which had been lacking in me all my life. Especially my drinking years, when I only loved one thing; alcohol.
I was also to learn that, if I tend to let up on any one of the four which I tend to do, that I can lose all of them.
Today I look at hope and realize how hopeful I am. I also realize, that like sobriety, it’s only for this day. One day at a time for hope. And my hope each day is that at the end of it I will have become a better person, as the result of trying to practice these principles in all of my affairs. Sometimes it seems that I haven’t reached that goal. But it’s really not the success that is important. What is important that the hope makes me try. To attempt what I had never attempted in all my drinking years.
All of this is dependent on my faith, which has come from the hope which began to grow in me, as the days have gone on in my persevering in staying sober. The result is that I’m not only sober, but I have a faith in a higher power, who has been there for me through all the trials life has handed me. It is through this dependency, not on my own strength alone, but on the God of my understanding, that I have come to know a love of one alcoholic for another, and being able to expand that to true friendship with others.
I was thinking about this this morning and hoping once again to persevere and renew my commitment to stay sober and to achieve some small measure of faith and love.