I know that this alcoholic is often not able to find an answer to the question I might have. Can’t always find solutions to my problems. Not immediately anyway. And then this morning a friend sent me something I really needed to see.
He was referring to the spiritual solution. The answer this alcoholic so desperately needed. My question? Was it possible for someone like me, a chronic alcoholic, to stop drinking? The answer, the solution? Yes!
That actually is the only answer the only solution I really ever needed. That affirmative response, the “Yes!”, saved my life, freed me from the bondage to alcohol I was suffering from. Opened the door to a new way of life. As the first two promises in the Ninth Step told, me, a new freedom and a new happiness.
I was kind of thinking of this yesterday, when I met a new man in this program. He had just come out of rehab and was his first admission as an alcoholic. I went over and spoke to him after the meeting. As I was talking to him, I told him what my sponsor had said to me so many years ago. He had told me that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. I only thought I did. After I said that I saw something in his eyes which struck me. Pain.
My thought was he asking for the answer, the solution to his coming free from the bondage of alcohol? I mean had he hit his bottom and was that the pain I saw? I knew I could only hope for him. Part of the solution I know I was trying to practice at the moment. The Twelfth Step.
Later it made me stop and think, here I am sober. I have the answer to my disease of alcoholism. To me that is absolutely amazing, when I look back at how much I was suffering, when I was a slave to alcohol. I was deeply in despair. Absolutely no hope. I was thinking of only one thing. To end my life. I couldn’t go on.
And then someone gave me hope. That hope led me to seek a spiritual solution I had never thought of. Asked the God of my understanding to stop me from drinking. I surrendered. And I was freed from the bondage of alcohol. I got the only answer I ever needed. And that led me to this program.
That was the hope I was given by a friend of mine. He had told me that there was a place where men and women met and stayed sober together. I can always remember, when he told me that, a sudden light went off in the black despair within me. It took my breath away. I felt totally amazed by what he had said. And he had told me he would take me to my first meeting. Exactly what he did.
My hope today is that the new man will find the same hope and surrender and ask for the help he needs, by following what the rest of us chronic alcoholics have done in this program. The answer he needs so desperately is right here in front of him. Like myself, it begins with hope. Hope soon to be followed by faith and a spiritual way of life.
Anyway I had to put all my questions in head aside. To be grateful that I have found the solution to my alcoholism. A spiritual solution which introduced me to not just the program but the Power which helps everyone in here to be freed of the bondage of alcohol. So grateful that I have been given a second chance at life and a happiness I could never have conceived of before I came to this program.