Blessings gained and a new life lived through “the collective voice of AA”
More and more, I am aware that the story isn’t over until the end of the story. I am absolutely in love with Alcoholics Anonymous. Not for any one thing that has happened, but for everything that has happened since alcohol and I called it quits.
I have had great experiences watching people get sober and stay sober over time. I am grateful that AA works the way that it does and there are men and women with one day and others with fifty or sixty years and all the dates in between. I consider myself truly blessed when there are newcomers in meetings with me. I get reminded of where I have come from and it is necessary that I get taken back there.
Yet I must say that sobriety is meant to be lived out. I don’t think I could fully know what it means to be grateful for sobriety until I have lived many years sober. We must be toughened by living through a multitude of hard times sober. We need to be forged by the adversity and the versatility of life. We have been given a chance to live. If you are an alcoholic of the same nature as me, you believe too that life is hard. It has always been hard for us or we never would have taken to booze in the first place.
But now we have been given this chance to live out the hard times, of learning to love, losing love, gaining recognition, learning we don’t need recognition, putting a life together and letting God break us down again. It is about living until we become completely dependent on that Higher Power that we learned about when we first walked in the door.
Yet our conscious contact with this Higher Power isn’t fully realized until we continue to do it daily for a long time. God continues to build us every day of our lives. We need to stick around long enough to meet the person God has always had in mind for us. I am blessed to have the life I have. I was 31 years old when I got sober. I am now 64. There has been a ton of living sober in between. I am not even close to being the same person I was when I got here. I am not done yet. I love coming to meetings, sitting in my familiar chair and letting God change me through the collective voice of AA. Day by day, day after day, I get to live out this sober life.
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