Tonight the daily reflection was called “A Design for Living,” pulled from page 28 of the Big Book. Before I even got to sharing, one phrase in it caught me: “we sought the same escape with all the desperation of drowning men. What seemed at first a flimsy reed, has proved to be the loving and powerful hand of God.” I sat with that one for a minute before I spoke.
A reed is a thin stalk that grows at the water’s edge, the kind of thing a drowning person grabs at out of pure instinct, not because it looks strong, but because it’s the only thing within reach. Calling it flimsy is the whole point. When most of us first reach for God, or for a program, or for anything resembling help, it doesn’t feel solid. It feels like grasping at something too thin to hold our weight. The line only makes sense in hindsight, once you’re already holding on and realize what you grabbed was never flimsy at all, you just couldn’t tell yet.
That image summed up my own experience closely enough that I chose to share on it tonight. I spoke up as soon as the timing felt right, the way I usually do, and I told the room that this was exactly how it felt coming into the program, desperate, grabbing at whatever was closest, with no idea yet what I was actually holding onto.
I talked about my first sponsor, the one who walked with me through all my hardheadedness, my relapses, my stubbornness, and never let go. He stuck around long enough to get me all the way through the steps. When I eventually asked him straight out if I had completed them and could start sponsoring myself, he gave me his approval, said it was safe to say I had done the work.
What I only really understood after tonight’s share is something he was doing quietly the whole time. He noticed early on that I struggled with the idea of God actually working in my life. I never had much trouble believing God existed. What I couldn’t accept was that God would take the time to focus on someone like me, that I deserved that kind of attention from something that big. So any time I shared something good happening, he’d ask me the same question: where did you see the hand of God in your life today. Every time. He was training me to look for evidence before I was ready to believe the conclusion.
Living by my own design landed me in a hospital bed with a doctor asking if I had a will written out, if I had plans for what should happen to my things after I was gone. I was forty-two. I’d actually expected that year to be one of the best of my life. In my head I was basically going to live forever, no real plan needed because nothing was ever going to catch up to me. Getting asked about a will made it impossible to keep believing that. I could see exactly where my own plans and my own design were taking me, and it was straight down. There was no mistaking it.
That’s when letting go stopped being a nice idea and became the only option left. I decided I was better off living by whatever God’s design turned out to be instead of my own. I started focusing only on getting through each day and trying to do the next right thing, without needing to know where any of it led. It’s God’s design. It was never really my business to know it, and I didn’t need to be included in the plan for it to work.
The more I gave that over, day after day, the more my life kept improving in ways I couldn’t have imagined ahead of time. When I first walked into AA, the absolute limit of what I could picture was maybe not drinking anymore. That was as far as my imagination reached. I never pictured the rest of it. It genuinely feels like a miracle looking back.
What I’m most grateful for now is that my sponsor had been quietly preparing me for this long before I needed it. By the time I actually had to let go and stop living by my own design, I was more ready than I could have been otherwise, because of a question he’d been asking me for months without me fully understanding why. That’s what let me move forward instead of staying stuck. The reed turned out to be a hand reaching for me long before I noticed I was already holding on.
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