Latest / Sober Readings / Coincidence or Higher Power? Came to Believe - ch 7
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Hey everyone, welcome back to a Sunday Came to Believe episode of Sober Readings. I'm Scott, and today we're going to begin on chapter 7, is titled, Coincidence. And the beginning of the chapter reads, Faith in a power greater than ourselves, and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives, are facts as old as man himself. And that was written by Bill W., and it's in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, page 55. So let's get started on chapter 7. The first reading is titled, Why? I don't know. When I came to AA, I no longer believed in the God of my youth, a personal God, who would help me as an individual. After being in AA quite a while, I tried to take the 12 steps to the best of my ability, in the order in which they were written. It was a slow and painful path, but I did not give up. I kept on trying. Step 3, I now believe, was the key that opened some door within my being and allowed spirituality to enter. not in a sudden flow, but as a trickle, on occasions just a drop at a time. As I progressed through the steps, I began to see some change in my thinking and my attitudes toward people. At the completion of step nine, I now believe I did have a spiritual awakening. I came to the point where not only could I give love and compassion to my fellow man, but more important, I could receive love and compassion. Now spiritual experiences, as I understand them, began to happen. At a recent AA state convention, Bill came up and introduced himself and said that he had heard me talk at an area meeting in a small town in Tennessee more than three years earlier. That was Bill's first AA meeting. After hearing my story, he decided to do something about his drinking problem and became a member of AA. Bill has not had a drink. since that Sunday afternoon when he attended his first meeting. What did I say? I don't remember. Why was it necessary for me to be 300 miles from my home on a summer Sunday afternoon in order for Bill to get the message of AA? I don't know. One Saturday morning, I decided to go see Ken. I had known him casually for 25 years, and I knew that he had a serious drinking problem. But I hadn't seen or spoken to him. for a number of years. I knocked on his front door and asked him whether he remembered me. He said, yes, and invited me in. I asked him how he was doing and he said, fine. I asked him how he was getting along with his drinking problem and he said, ⁓ not too much trouble. I told him part of my story. As I stood up to leave, I said, how about going to a meeting with me tonight? He said he would and I told him I would pick him up. But when I returned that evening, Ken had decided not to go. I said, okay, I'll pick you up on Monday night at the same time. Monday night, he was asleep and his son said he didn't want to go to the meeting. Tuesday after work, I called Ken to say that I would stop by and take him to a meeting. When I arrived at his home, he was sitting on the front porch waiting for me. As we were about to enter the meeting room, Ken saw through the doorway a man that he had drunk with for a number of years. This man had been sober for 18 months. Ken now makes 3-4 meetings a week, has not had a drink since his first AA meeting, and in a short time will get his first year chip. Why did I decide that Saturday morning to go see Ken, who had never called AA? I don't know. Why did Ken refuse to go to the first two meetings and then agree to the third, where he would meet his old friend and so have an immediate relationship? with a recovering alcoholic? I don't know. I don't attempt to explain with reason and logic why these things happen. When they happen, I just accept them. I feel perhaps that God, as I understand him, found it necessary for me to suffer the pain and anguish of an addicted alcoholic and to go through the slow and, for me, difficult program of recovery in AA in order to be prepared and willing to do his will. I am grateful and thankful that God has given this to me. Perhaps it is because I take the third step every morning. My hopes and prayers are that each day I will be able to maintain this conscious contact with God. That's from Kingsport, Tennessee. The next short piece in chapter 7 is titled, A Rainy Night. After I had been sober some four years, there was a culmination of problems I couldn't face. I retreated from these problems without the aid of the bottle, but the reaction from this experience was severe. What many of us call a dry drunk. It was very frightening. I was motivated by all kinds of fear and I couldn't distinguish reality from hallucinations. I was living in a room in a seaside resort, out of season, while I tried different ways to straighten out my thinking. Little chores like washing my socks and shorts would take an hour. It would take an endless amount of time to dress. Many times, I didn't know whether I was dressing or undressing. I would stop, sit down, and try to pray. But I couldn't get past our Father in the Lord's Prayer. Then I would leave the room and walk 10 or 15 miles, trying to become exhausted enough to sleep. This had been going on for about a month, and during this period my family left me. My health was waning, I had gone from 170 pounds down to 118 pounds, and I was getting desperate. There seemed to be all sorts of plots against me. If I passed people on the street talking, I imagined they were plotting against me. I also imagined someone was putting hallucinogens into my food. I wasn't able to sleep at all. In the seaside resort, I visited an attorney's office to collect some money I had coming to me. As he had known me when I was normal, he tried to help me by sending me to the library to look something up for him. He thought this might help me forget my troubles. I walked into the library and, due to the death, I suppose, of one of the town fathers, the walls were all draped in black. In my mixed up mind, I thought that the morning was for me and that it was some kind of directive. In other words, I had come to the end of my time. At 6 p.m. the library closed and I had to leave. It was a cold and rainy night in March, yet I started up the boardwalk for my nightly walk. I believe that the seeming directive had told me to walk into the ocean. There was a deserted pier about a mile down the boardwalk and I planned to walk out on this and step off. Full of fears, I walked along, worrying that I wouldn't have the courage to fulfill the directive and asking the higher power for strength and help to do what I thought was required of me. Only a block or so from the pier I saw a man approaching from the opposite direction, with his head down, walking into the rain. When he came to me, he stopped and smiled and I recognized him as a priest I knew from home. I told him I was very ill. He then sat on a bench with me in the rain and assured me that in time all my troubles would pass and the day would come when I would understand them. He said I was not to do anything foolish, but I asked God's help and somehow everything would work out. The feeling that I had to destroy myself vanished. Although I remained quite ill for several months more, the thought of self-destruction never again entered my mind. Quite some time passed. Once again, I was well and an active member of AA. One night I attended a meeting and there was that same priest as a guest speaker. I decided to ask him whether he remembered me that March night while walking in the rain. By this time I was convinced that it had been a hallucination. But he told me that he did remember and was very happy that I was well and back on the beam. He explained that he had gone to the seaside resort to address a convention of educators. He was sick of sitting in the hotel room So rain or not, he went out for some air. I believe now that the one taking care of me must have given him a little push. Since then, almost 13 years ago, I have been a successful member of the program. And that's from a member in Spring Lake Heights, New Jersey. The next writing is titled, God Was the Postman. It began on a somber October day when I awoke with memories of Pat, my second wife. As I reflected soberly on our 20 months of marriage, I remembered her charismatic ways, her striking mind, her quiet charm, and her repeated futile attempts to stay sober in AA, where we had met. I had been sober for three years then, but I suppose that I had not truly experienced a spiritual awakening in AA. For that basic reason, most likely, I returned to drinking after Pat died, and I plunged to a terrifying new bottom. There's always a new bottom, you know. On that October morning, the second anniversary of her death, I was in my third week of renewed sobriety. I became more depressed as I recalled our life together, and I bolted to an AA meeting, where I described my returning grief and loneliness. There, I was given understanding and passion that lifted my lagging spirits. For almost a year, absorbed in my alcoholic oblivion and shame, I had not written to my two teenage children. I refused, in my irrational thinking, to admit that they could be aware I was drinking again. But now I had written to them twice, letters I had been capable of writing solely because of rejoining AA. I had asked the kids to forgive me, barred my drinking, admitted my self-indulged negligence toward them and prayed they would somehow respond. For days, I had kept my eyes on the mailbox with anguish and fear. Fear that neither of my children would reply. On that October day, the mailman arrived with a letter from my 15-year-old son, who had had to undergo psychiatric treatment after his mother left. His words are particularly thrilling when you realize that he hasn't been exposed to allotine, but rather to the bitterness my first wife, his mother, still feels about me. His letter reads, I received your second letter today. I got your first letter a week ago, but I didn't get down to writing you till today. I'm very sorry. I love you very much. You don't know how glad I was to hear from you. I don't believe in condemning people. I have never condemned you, and the day I do will be the day I die. Condemnation is for people who are so small that they put other people down to make themselves feel big. I love you and I forgive you. I'd be a liar to say I wasn't disappointed. But that's all in the past. The past is gone, it's dead. We can't relive it or bring it back. I know how you must feel. Guilty and ashamed. Don't worry, I'm on your side. You can count on me to try to understand and help you." As I read the letter, I cried softly and gratefully. Yes, Pat was dead, but her death was, like my drinking, a matter of yesterday. My son's simple, love-infused letter had not reached me on that heart-trying day through coincidence. God was the postman. He made sure I would receive this inspiration, which in turn became my concept of his revelation. And he delivers each day, if I look for it, a fresh message of love, forgiveness, mercy, hope, and opportunity. The message that thousands like Pat cannot or will not see. That was written in Southgate, Michigan. The next story in chapter 7 is titled, Mathematical Miracle. Some years ago, I heard a story which has been making the rounds in Midwest AA circles for years. I don't have any names to back up this story, but I have heard it from many sources and the circumstances sound believable. A man in a small Wisconsin city has been on the program for about three years and had enjoyed contented sobriety through that period. Then bad luck began to hit him in bunches. The firm for which he had worked for some 15 years was sold. His particular job was phased out of existence and the plant moved to another city. For several months he struggled long at odd jobs while looking for a company that needed his specialized experience. Then another blow hit him. His wife was forced to enter a hospital for major surgery and his company insurance had expired. At this point he cracked. and decided to go on an all-out binge. He didn't want to stage this in the small city where everyone knew his sobriety record. So he went to Chicago, checked in at the Northside Hotel, and set forth on his project. It was Friday night, and the bars were filled with a swinging crowd. But he was in no mood for swinging. He just wanted to get quietly, miserably drunk. Finally, he found a basement bar on a quiet side street. practically deserted. He sat down on a bar stool and ordered a double bourbon on the rocks. The bartender said, yes, sir, and reached for the bottle. Then the bartender stopped in his tracks, took a long hard look at the customer, leaned over the bar and said in a low tone, I was in Milwaukee about four months ago. And one night I attended an open meeting. You were on the speaker platform and you gave one of the finest AA talks I ever heard. The bartender turned and walked to the end of the bar. For a few minutes, the customer sat there, probably in a state of shock. Then he picked his money off the bar with trembling hands and walked out, all desire for a drink drained out of him. It is estimated that there are about 8,000 saloons in Chicago, employing some 25,000 bartenders. This man had entered the one saloon in 8,000, where he would encounter the one man in 25,000. who knew that he was a member of AA and didn't belong there. And that is from Chicago, Illinois. And I just have to say that that's amazing that things like that happen. And I personally have had something like that happen to me. That is unexplainable. Alright, onto the last story in chapter 7. It's titled, Something Was Wrong. Let me stress straight away that, although I come of a family with strong religious beliefs and attended church in my youth, I had no idea what it was all about and wasn't really concerned. I attended church merely to keep my parents off my back. When, as a teenager, I began to drift away from my parents, I also began to drift away from the church, and I don't recall ever again going on my knees to pray. until I was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous in a mental hospital in Glasgow after 18 years of sick drinking. In this hospital, I begged God for help. My tormented mind would not allow me to pray for it. Each day, I asked God to ease this endless torment, only to awake each morning with the same pressure and endless despair. But I kept on asking God for help, and slowly my mind began to unwind. I realized that something wonderful was happening to me. As a person with little or no faith, I wasn't sure whether I was being helped by the hospital treatment, the AA meetings in the hospital, or God. So I clung tight to all three. As time favored me, I began to realize that a power much greater than anything I had known was helping to restore me to sanity. I put myself in the hands of this great power, now known to me as God. Shortly after this, I was released from the hospital and I was at home when I experienced a very close but frightening conscious contact with the divine power. It all started one Sunday afternoon as I was sitting reading the newspapers. For no apparent reason, I got a very strange feeling that something was wrong with an AA friend who was in hospital after a slip. I went to the hospital right away and found my friend crying his heart out. He had just received the news that his brother had died two hours earlier. On leaving the hospital after consoling my friend, I was walking down the road when I was suddenly filled by a very moving and frightening power, which seemed to take me over completely. I stopped and looked up into the night sky. I felt that I was up in a cloud and God was inside me. I couldn't sleep at all that night. I was in very deep thought. The next day, I felt completely at peace with the world. After a time, although I still maintained my peace of mind, I began to experience a feeling of emptiness which I could not understand. It wasn't until I tried to be completely honest with myself and to practice the AA principles in all my affairs that this emptiness was replaced by joy. It is my belief that the feeling of emptiness was my own doing. I had been so elated by that wonderful experience on the road at night that I wanted to stay up in a cloud with God. But this was not to be. It was my place to be down among the suffering alcoholics, not up in a cloud. As long as I keep my feet on the ground among the suffering, God will come down and remain always with me. It is not my intention to reform anyone or to pretend to be a holy Joe. I'm just a grateful soul. who hopes to help someone find peace and happiness and then share it with someone else. Glasgow, Scotland. And that brings us to the end of chapter 7. Those were some powerful stories. I hope you all enjoyed that as much as I did. So next week, next Sunday, join me for chapter 8, which is titled, A Higher Power. And I'll quickly read the intro to that. Our concepts of a higher power and God, as we understand him, afford everyone a nearly unlimited choice of spiritual belief and action. And that was written by Bill W. in a grapevine article from April of 1961. So tune in next Sunday as I start reading from chapter 8 from Came to Believe. Thanks everyone for joining me. Until next time, remember, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Hope you all have a great Sunday. And of course, as my friend Larry always says, best day ever.