Latest / Sober Readings / Going With The Flow
Transcript
- 11 6Reading: Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to Sober Readings. My name is Scott. I am glad you're here with me today. I'm gonna read from Daily Reflections 24 Hours, and then I'm gonna start a new series today where I start reading chapters out of my own book. It's called I Love You, Don't Do Anything Stupid. It's a memoir of addiction and recovery. So today I'll start chapter one of that series. Today is Friday. Happy Friday, everyone. It is November 6th. Let's begin like we always do with the serenity prayer. God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference. From Daily Reflections Today, it is titled Going with the Flow. And it starts off with the eleventh step, which is sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him. that is written in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions book. The first words I speak when arising in the morning are: I arise, O God, to do thy will. This is the shortest prayer I know, and it is deeply ingrained in me. Prayer doesn't change God's attitude toward me, it changes my attitude toward God. As distinguished from prayer, meditation is a quiet time without words. To be centered is to be physically relaxed, emotionally calm, mentally focused, and spiritually aware. And I love this second paragraph in here. One way to keep the channel open and to improve my conscious contact with God is to maintain a grateful attitude. On the days when I am grateful, good things seem to happen in my life. The instant I start cursing things in my life, however, the flow of good stops. And the last line is very important. God did not interrupt the flow. My own negativity did. And so I want to comment on the eleventh step. One of the most beautiful things about Alcoholics Anonymous is that we are encouraged to find a higher power of our own understanding. Those four words are very important to me. Because nobody gets to tell me what God must look like, what I have to believe, or how I should practice my own faith. That's something I get to discover from myself, and I think that's incredibly important because spirituality isn't a one size fits all approach. What works for me might not work for someone else, and that's perfectly okay. The important thing is that I recognize there's a power greater than me because relying on my own willpower certainly didn't work when I was drinking and using. I don't have to understand everything about God, and I certainly don't have to have all the answers. I just have to be honest, open-minded, and willing, and have enough faith to to trust that I'm not running the show anymore. My relationship with my HP is personal, and it continues to grow and evolve as I grow in sobriety. And perhaps the greatest gift of all is knowing that I don't have to walk this journey alone. Today's reading in twenty four hours, the AA Thought for the Day talks about fear and worry. Fear and worry had me down. They weren't increased by my drinking. I worried about what I had done when I was drunk. I was afraid of what the consequences might be. I was afraid to face people because of the fear of being found out. That's a big line for me. Fear kept me in hot water all the time. I was a nervous wreck from fear and worry. I was a tied-up bundle of nerves. I had fear of failure, fear of the future, fear of growing old. Fear of sickness, fear of hangovers, and mostly of suicide. When AA told me to surrender these fears and worries to a higher power, I did so. And the question in here, have I put faith in place of fear? today's meditation for the day, spiritual power is God in action. Whenever you, however weak you may be, allow God to act through you, then all you think and say and do is spiritually powerful. And I love the last line in this meditation for the day: God can use you as a tool to accomplish miracles in people's lives. And in today's prayer for the day, I'm praying that I may try to let God's power act through. Through me today. So for me, I've come to believe that sometimes the most powerful way God makes his presence known in my life is through the things he allows me to do for others. When I was drinking and using, everything revolved around what I wanted, what I needed, and how I could control the people and situations around me. Today, I try to live differently. I ask God to guide my thoughts, my words, guide my actions. And to use me wherever I might be needed. Sometimes that means helping another alcoholic, offering a few words of encouragement, listening to someone who's struggling, or simply being kind to a stranger. I may not even realize it at the time, but God could be working through me to make a difference in someone's life, even a stranger. And the beautiful thing is that when I allow that to happen, my own sobriety becomes stronger. I don't have to do anything extraordinary. I just have to be willing, available, and get my ego out of the way. God doesn't need me to be perfect. He just needs me to be willing. And when I stop trying to run the show and allow his will to work through me, that's when I experience some of the greatest blessings of sobriety. And so let's get to today's final reading, which as I mentioned, it is from a book that I wrote. It's called I Love You, Don't Do Anything Stupid. It's a memoir of addiction and recovery, and today I'm gonna start on chapter one. And the title of chapter one is The Gates of Hell. I've had a lot of bad days, but September 5th, 2018 may have been the worst. I didn't rob or kill anyone or go to jail or get into a horrible car accident. Rather, the insanity of my life had all come to a head. My head. I was sinking deeper into a dark and bottomless depression while drinking my way into another blackout. And to put the cherry on top, that day I hurt the people I love the most, and I knew it. What I didn't yet know was was that it would also turn out to be one of the most important days of my life. Sobriety was right around the corner. I just didn't know it yet. When I woke up that morning, it took the usual two mason jars of red wine and three swigs straight from the bottle of Jim Beam that I kept in the freezer, just to get me moving. The hangovers were crippling those days, and I couldn't see straight until I got that first couple of drinks down. To combat the headache, I crushed up a couple of Percocet, pushed them into a line, and snorted the entire thing. Today was Mia's orientation for kindergarten, and I was meeting her mother and her at the bus stop to get her on the bus. I showed up drunk and high on Percocet. It was eight in the morning. Mia, my third child, was five years old and the sweetest thing in the world to be around. Those big hazel eyes melted my heart when she looked at me. She was so excited to be riding the bus on her first day of school and for me to come with her and walk her inside. Half a box of tic-tacks, crunched on the way to the bus stop, would hide the alcohol in my breath, and the percocet would straighten me out so I didn't seem drunk. I had it together. As I followed the bus to school, I was terrified to go in and face people, fearing that someone would know I was drunk and high. I don't know how long I was supposed to stay, but And I don't remember much about being there. What I do remember is leaving after a short stay, maybe thirty or forty-five minutes, and heading to the liquor store that was on the way home. I lied and told Mia that Daddy had to go to work now. After picking up two bottles of red wine and a fifth of whiskey, I walked into the house that once was my family's home, now vacant except for me. I was alone, just how I like to be when drinking and using drugs. I had forced everyone out of my life and out of our house so that I could drink as I wanted to, so that I could be free to destroy my life as I saw fit, with no one to tell me to stop. Michelle, my oldest daughter, had left the day after graduating from high school a year earlier. She didn't just move out of the house, she moved across an ocean, 3,500 miles away to Hawaii to live with her grandparents. Tall, lean, and stunning, Long blonde hair, she looked like a model. She would fit in perfectly there. The latest to go was my son, Joshua, still in his senior year. He loved fishing and hunting, working on cars, and responding to calls on the local volunteer fire department. Every bit of a country boy, as I was at that age. Fed up with my drunken rages each night, he left home to live with a friend. Ava, my girlfriend of eight years, Had taken Mia and moved out two years earlier. I had told her to leave on several drunken occasions. Then one night, two-year-old Mia stepped between between us and said, Stop. The next day, they left and never came back. I had put Ava through hell the past few years, stealing prescription pills from her medicine cabinet almost daily, going off on drunken tirades that often ended with something broken or a hole in the wall. And in general, tearing apart our house and our relationship one day at a time. As I sat on the couch that day watching old Western movies and drinking myself into oblivion, contemplating my ruin of a life and how I could end it, something shifted. I had reached my breaking point. To say that I found God that day would be overstating it. But I believe there is something on the other side of pain and suffering, and for me, that something was a willingness to want to change. And the humility to admit to myself that I was broken and needed help. The suffering that came daily with the intense hangovers and physical sickness and the mental and spiritual suffering of knowing deep down that I was meant for more than the grim life I was living caused a change in me greater than anything I had ever felt. I became willing to do anything to change my life, to stop drinking and drugging. I was powerless over drugs and alcohol. It was impossible for me to stop on my own. I was never able to admit to myself that I needed help, but on september fifth, twenty eighteen, I finally asked for it. And that's the end of chapter one titled The Gates of Hell from my book. It's titled I Love You, Don't Do Anything Stupid, a Memoir of Addiction and Recovery. And you can find it on Amazon. You can also find it if you go to my website, soberreadings.com. So that's all for today's episode of Sober Readings. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you heard something in the readings or something I said that helps you along your way today. If you'd like to be a guest on Sober Readings and share your experience, strength, and hope, do a reading with me. give me your take on today's readings. That would be great. And there's a link down in the show notes to to send me an email. And if you enjoyed today's episode and want to help support Sober Readings, please subscribe to this podcast and give this episode a like because it really does help a lot of people find the episode better. So thanks for spending a few minutes of your day with me. Be good to yourselves, be good to others, and remember we only have to do this one day at a time. So just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day, everyone, and as my friend Larry says, best day ever.