Tonight the topic at the meeting was self-reliance. It came from the reading at the start, and it stuck with me enough that I wanted to share. I sat there calmly and started to express myself, speaking clearly and loud enough for the whole room to hear, in hopes that sharing my experience, strength, and hope might help somebody else along their own journey.
I started the way I always do. My name is John, I’m an alcoholic. Then I told the room that my self-reliance led me directly to the hospital, over and over again. I had spent years trying to do things my way, by my own design. I started in AA that first time, but I never really got the principles and the steps into my head. I wasn’t working any of it the way I was supposed to. Giving things over to God, to a higher power as I understand him, none of that had actually landed yet.
So I kept ending up back in the hospital. The whole reason I first tried to get sober wasn’t really about getting sober. It was about keeping my wife. I was trying to fix my life up fast enough to hold onto her, and that was still self-reliance. That was still me doing things my way, for my own reasons, on my own timeline. When I failed at it and kept drinking, kept lying about being drunk, she got tired of watching me black out on the couch every night, never knowing what she was coming home to. She left.
After she left I drank harder than I ever had. That’s what finally brought me to my last major hospital visit, the one where they told me I had six months to live.
At first I was okay with that. I remember thinking, I put this on myself, this is where I ended up, and this is where I deserve to be. Then my mom came in and cried. She asked me not to leave her. That’s the moment I saw how selfish I had actually become.
I decided to try to do the things that had been laid out for me all along. But I found out fast there were things I could do and things I could not do, and I had to learn the difference. The things I couldn’t control, I had to hand over to God and trust that he would take care of them. When that happened, and it worked out better than I could have managed on my own, something in me finally believed it. If I do the right thing each day, live it day by day, try for the next right thing, God will take care of the rest and keep me moving forward.
I’ve applied that to everything since. I don’t live by my own will anymore, my own plan, my own design. It’s God’s design now, and I don’t need to know what that design is. That’s not my business to know. God knows the plan. I just have to trust it.
Action, Not Results
My sponsor gave me two things that changed how I carry all of this.
The first is that I’m in charge of taking the action, but God’s got the results. I have to keep reminding myself of that line. My job is showing up and doing the next right thing. What happens after that isn’t mine to control, and it never was.
The second one changed how I see almost every day now. After almost losing my life and somehow surviving it, he told me I get to start doing things over. I remember complaining once about having to take my mom to the doctor the next day. He stopped me and said, no, you get to take your mom to the doctor tomorrow. He kept talking that way, and eventually it started sinking in. Now I catch myself seeing most things that way. I get to do this instead of I have to do this. I wasn’t supposed to survive as long as I have. So every day I get now is a day I didn’t technically have coming. My only goal is to get through it and try to do the right things, and trust that God keeps me moving forward.
So far he hasn’t let me down. That’s why I keep coming back, every single day, and why I stay close to the things that got me here.
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