Latest / Sober Readings / Came To Believe - Chapter 5 stories
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- Scott Hayes: Came to Believe, the spiritual adventure of AA as experienced by individual members. Welcome back to Sober Readings, everyone. Today is Sunday, the twenty seventh of September. My name is Scott. I'm glad you're here with me for today's readings of Came to Believe. We're picking up on chapter five where we left off last week. I think we have four or five stories to go in chapter five, which is titled A Spiritual Awakening. But before that, let's get started like we always do with the Serenity Party. 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. So the first story we're going to pick up on in chapter five is titled On a Winter Day. Nearly nine months had passed since I had taken a drink, and I was miserable. My wife and I attended AA meetings regularly, and I'd sit there cursing the happy hypocrites who were enjoying themselves and their sobriety. I felt sorry for myself because I had no job. Of course, the type I wanted was at least the vice presidency of a large firm. This particular day had dawned clear and cold. Following one of the worst snow and ice storms Atlanta had experienced in many years. Trees, poles, and power and telephone lines were down everywhere. Ice and snow blanketed everything in sight. As I moped around the house, my thoughts turned to the previous summer, when I had escaped the misery that surrounded me by helping with the Little League baseball team. I hadn't given much time or thought to my son until after AA, and I was pleased when he asked me to take him to play with the Little League. The team coach turned out to be a man I had played ball with when we were kids, and he asked me about helping out with the team. Naturally, I was delighted. That summer we lost a little boy in our league. He was cycling home from the ballpark and a drunk driver ran him off the road and knocked him from his bicycle. When his head hit the curb, he was killed. This boy so loved the Little League that his parents asked the readily received permission to To bury him in his uniform. They bought a law on a hill in the cemetery overlooking the Little League ballpark and buried Jimmy there, facing the field. This icy morning, I got into my car and drove up that cemetery hill as far as I could go, then got out and walked the rest of the way to Jimmy's grave. This was one of the most beautiful days I have ever seen in my life. Not a twig was moving, the sky was clear blue. The quiet was disturbed only when a little dog ran across Jimmy's grave, and I thought Jimmy would have liked that. As I stood there beside his tombstone, I remembered an old favorite hymn of mine, In the Garden. Standing there, I felt God's hand was on my shoulder, and we had a wonderful visit of meditation together. Then a sense of guilt and shame came over me. I had been a drunk. All I had to do was take one drink. And I could put another little Jimmy on the side of some hill like this one. I wouldn't have to stay drunk for a month or a week or a day. All I had to do was take one drink, and I would be capable of killing a child. I knew I had to have a new beginning, and this beginning had to be here. I could not start anywhere else. I had to let go of the past and forget the future. As long as I held on to the past with one hand and grabbed at the future with the other hand, I had nothing to hold on to today with. So I had to begin here, now. The next time I went back to my AA group, the happy hypocrites looked different to me. I began to see love in their eyes, a greater warmth than I had ever seen before. I mentioned it to my sponsor and he said The reason you see love in these people's eyes is because you are beginning to love them. The love that we see in your eyes is the reflection of your own love. We have got to love to be loved. And that was written in Decatur, Georgia. The next reading is titled The Belief Will Come. In the beginning, I rejected any part of the AA program that referred to God in any manner. I even remained silent when they closed the meeting with the Lord's Prayer. I didn't know the words anyhow. Looking back, I don't think I was an agnostic, nor do I think I was an atheist. But I do know this. I couldn't accept any of the God bit, nor did I want to come to believe or have any spiritual awakening. After all, I had come to AA to get sober. And what did all this truck have to do with that? Even with all my stupid arrogance, you still loved me, held out your hand to friendship, and I'm sure used cautious wisdom in trying to reach me with the program. But I could hear only what I wanted to hear. I remained dry for a number of years, and then, as you may have already guessed, I drank again. It was inevitable. I had accepted only those parts of the program that fitted into my life without effort on my part. I was still the self centered egotist I had always been, still full of all my old hatreds, selfishness, and disbelief. Just as lacking in maturity as I had been when I first arrived at AA. This time when I came to you in the hospital, I had absolutely no hope. After all, you had told me that AA was the last hope for the alcoholic. And I had failed. There was nothing else. At this very point, my sister chose to send me a clipping from a Sunday school paper. No letter, just the clipping. Pray with disbelief, but pray with sincerity, and the belief will come. Pray? How could I pray? I didn't know how to pray. Still, I was ready to go to any lengths to get my sobriety and some semblance of a normal life. I guess I just gave up. I stopped fighting. I accepted that which I did not really believe, much less understand. I started praying, not in any formal way. I just talked to God or rather cried out, dear God help me, I'm a drunk. I had nowhere left to turn, except to this God I did not know. I don't recall any immediate dramatic change in my life. I do recall telling my wife how hopeless it all seemed. At her suggestion, I began rereading the big book and the twelve steps, and now I found in these much that I had never found before. I didn't reject any of it. I accepted it just as it was written, nor did I read anything into it that wasn't there. Again, nothing changed overnight, but as time passed, I have acquired a blind and yes, childlike faith. That by accepting a god I don't understand and the program of AA just as it is written, I can maintain my sobriety one day at a time. If I am to have more than this, it will come as time goes by, just as other good things have happened. I no longer find it necessary, as I did for years, to prove my disbelief in God by my every thought and deed. Nor do I find it necessary to prove myself to others. No, the only accounting and the only proving I have to do is to myself and to God, as I understand him, or don't understand him. I'm sure that I shall err from time to time, but I must learn to forgive myself, as God has forgiven me for my past. I think I have had a spiritual awakening as undramatic as it may have been, and that it will go on and on as long as I continue to practice this program in my daily affairs. To me, there is no spiritual side of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The entire program is spiritual. In my view, some of the evidences of a spiritual awakening are maturity, an end to habitual hatred, the ability to love and to be loved in return. The ability to believe, even without understanding, that something lets the sunrise in the morning and set at night, makes the leaves come out in the spring and drop off in the fall, and gives the birds song. Why not let this something be God? That was written in Saint Petersburg, Florida. The next reading is on a big screen. I drank for about 28 years, starting out as a social drinker, becoming a periodic drunk, then a compulsive drinker. My drinking cost me my home, my first wife, my children, and just about everything I had ever worked for my all my life. I was arrested for being drunk in public. I developed TB, and I knew that my heavy drinking had probably brought it on. In four months, I was in and out of four alcoholic wards in different hospitals. On my release from the last one, I stayed drunk for three solid weeks and woke up in jail again. I thought I was there as before for being drunk in public, but after asking, I found that I had committed a felony. On a cold morning, I entered the penitentiary to begin a five year sentence. After being processed and taken to my cell in the receiving unit and hearing that iron door slam behind me, I thought this was the end for me. I had gone just about as far down as I could go, and I felt there was no hope. In the next five weeks, I sat in that small cell and blamed everyone but myself for all my past and present troubles. No one could be more full of resentment, hate, and self-pity than I was at that time. One night, While I was in my cell looking at the four walls, my whole past life seemed to open up before me, as if on a big screen. I could plainly see for the first time all the headaches and misery and pain that I had brought on everyone in the past. My mother and father, my first wife and my children, my present wife, and all my friends. For the first time I realized none of these people were wrong. I was the one who was wrong. All of the things that had happened to me I had brought on myself while drinking. I believe this moment was the first time I had been honest with myself in many years. Soon after that, I received a letter from the clerk of the prison AA group. I had a faint idea what AA was, but that was all. The letter invited me to come to the meetings if I thought I might have a drinking problem. The next Sunday I attended my first meeting, and when I left that room, I had an open mind. And an honest desire to stop drinking for the first time in my life. I have again accepted God as I once knew him, and once again I ask for his help each morning when I wake up and give him my thanks each night when I go to bed. I have my loving second wife back again, and she also is an AA member now. Last February I had my first anniversary in AA. Today, I'm living in a minimum security prison on a farm. I have a parole hearing coming up, and with the grace of God, I will be home soon with my wife and family. If it had not been for the spiritual awakening I had that night in my prison cell, if I had not once again come to believe in a power greater than myself, none of these things I have today would be possible. That comes from Jefferson City, Missouri. Next up, a testimony of one life. What a topsy turvy life this is. As a Pharisee, I used to thank God I was not like the alcoholics I met. I always tried to be a metaphysician priest. That was my line. Someone described a metaphysician as one who stumbles into a dark room to look for a black cat that isn't there. Instead, I became an alcoholic priest. The progression of this disease catapulted me into outer space. An excess of chemical propellant overworked my sensory mechanism. Like the crippled Apollo thirteen spacecraft, I was almost stranded on the dark side of the moon. I could not manage the added power. I was not able to control this by myself. I needed a helping hand, the spiritual reserve of a higher power. I felt like a man in a tunnel with no opening at the other end, or like a driver wearing sunglasses at night. Today, I My brain has cleared with the grace of clarity. I am more than clay, more than earth. In the liturgy of the Eucharist, I daily read that he first blessed this bread, then he broke it. He tested me with a personal affliction, a recognized disease. The sheath of a seed must be broken to open it to the nurture of the good earth and the warm sun. So I must lose my old self to grow into another, must die in a former life for a renaissance to a new future. Sometimes I have failed, but I am not a failure. I have made mistakes, but I am not a mistake. This, then, is a testimony of one life. I must amend crucial chapters of an inner odyssey never written, never expressed. A vision cleared of fumes and foam can now choose the contents of the next chapter for this human envoy in the service of others. I must give to keep and never take back. Now I can dream. After each of us completes his given time here on earth, we will all gather together round the Lord's table in heaven. No one ever returns too late. That comes from Worcester, Massachusetts. And the final reading for Chapter 5, An Open Heart. One of those rare moments of insight came to me one Sunday afternoon as I was trying to read the paper. I was terribly hungover from a week of round the clock drinking. Suddenly, the words on a page hit me. The number of times that you win or lose is not important. The only thing that matters is the number of times that you try. For several years I had tried to get someone else to solve my problem for me. But I had not realized I was doing so until that moment of insight. That you try. I was exhilarated. Now I knew that I was an alcoholic and that I had the only qualification for membership in AA a desire to stop drinking. It seemed that I could see a wall crumbling before me, a wall that had separated me from other people. I had never known it existed until I saw it crumbling. Even though I had been considered friendly and gregarious, now I saw that I had really never had a close relationship with anyone. I was not unhappy about this revelation because, now that my attitude was different, I could remember things people had said at the AA meetings I had been attending off and on for three years. And for the first time, they had full meaning. Mainly, I remembered and came to understand the words, keep an open heart. Prior to this gift of insight, I had not known that my heart was closed. Now I knew, because it was opened. I could now ask and receive help, and I hoped that someday I would have something to give. I felt free and light and good. I would no longer block out love if I kept my heart open. The next evening, I went to an AA meeting with an open heart and a desire to be sober, life's two greatest and most valuable gifts to me. I became a part of that miraculous stream of living known as the Fellowship of AA. True friends, always available for help, relieve the tensions of my everyday living with myself. They help me, not always with a pat on the back, but sometimes with a warning, like, take it easy, and always with a sharing attitude, not you do this, but I'll do that. Many spiritual insights have come to me through AA since the rare, beautiful moment on a Sunday afternoon, but that was the gift that made it all possible. Each day, I try to have a desire to be sober and to remember to keep an open heart, love, and help flow into me. These bounties are unlimited in AA if we are fortunate enough to have the desire. After several years, that moment is still vital, the most vital in my life. And its effect is growing to include non-AAs as well as AAs in my world of help. I had nothing to do with this gift coming to me, so my gratitude is beyond description. It did not take me back to the person I was before drinking or in my active Sunday school days. It gave me a new life, rather life itself, because I had attempted suicide and had been hospitalized in private and state mental hospitals. It must have been spiritual. It was neither intellectual nor physical, that's for sure. I believe it was God as I understand him, working through the love and understanding available in AA. May I keep my heart open. The joy which can come to an open heart is unlimited. New York, New York. And that's the end of chapter five from Came to Believe. Join me next Sunday for the beginning of chapter six in. Which is titled The Search. I'll read the intro now. You are asking yourself, as all of us must, who am I? Where am I? Whence do I go? The process of enlightenment is usually slow, but in the end, our seeking always brings a finding. These great mysteries are, after all, enshrined in complete simplicity. That was written by Bill W. in a letter in 1955. So we'll begin that chapter, chapter six, the search, next Sunday. I hope you join me. And if you'd like to be a guest reader and help me read chapter six, I would love to have you. Just scroll down to the show notes and find the link to my email. Or you can go to my website, soberreadings.com, and go to the Be a Guest page, where you can leave your thoughts in your comments with me, or you can request to become a a guest reader. And I'd love to have you next Sunday to help me read Chapter Six from Came to Believe. If you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket for today's readings, just scroll down to the show notes and click on that donation link. Or if you're at the website, click on the support page and you'll find a button that says drop a dollar in the basket. So thank you for that. I really appreciate it. And that's going to do it for today's Came to Believe episode of Sober Readings. Thank you for joining me today. As always, 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.