How a sponsor’s suggestion to meditate on a prayer led him on a path to peace, love and a sense of belonging
I remember when my sponsor gave me an assignment for Step Eleven. After we reviewed the Step in our book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, he told me to read the Eleventh Step Prayer every day for 30 days and develop a routine for daily prayer and meditation.
I had been sober for approximately nine months at that time. I was going through a divorce and I was an assistant manager of a sober living environment, but not fully employed.
During this time, I had visitation with my sons every Sunday for a few hours. Just about every week, my soon-to-be ex-wife and I would engage in a heated argument just prior to my visit with my boys, which created a cloud that dampened our visit. To be clear, the cloud quickly disappeared once my boys and I got busy visiting, but they could feel the tension when I picked them up and dropped them off.
But one day, when I made the usual call to my wife to make sure that we were all agreed on the hand-over process (the time the argument usually would start) something really strange happened. Without any forethought or plan on my part, I asked her what she meant by something she said. I was not being sarcastic; I really wanted to understand what she meant, and she could tell I really wanted to understand. As you might imagine, she was a little skeptical, so she was cautious with her response. I restated what she said and asked if that was what she meant. She said yes and I told her that we agreed. We did not argue. In fact, I have found that this technique works well with most people most of the time.
Then it hit me. The Eleventh Step Prayer was taking hold of me. The prayer says, in part, “Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort, than to be comforted—to understand, than to be understood.” The lesson here is that prayers must be followed by action. The prayer taught me to give others what I want for myself, and then I will receive. This is consistent with most things in AA. We have to give it away to keep it, we pray for the people we resent to have everything we want for ourselves and we sponsor others so we can stay sober.
Going through the divorce made me feel very lonely, but attending AA meetings helped. I eventually took a service commitment as a greeter, which required that I arrive at meetings early to greet people at the door. That’s when I made another discovery. I noticed that I was not lonely anymore after the second or third handshake.
My conscious contact with God is the biggest thing in my life today. I am never alone. I have a friend who absolutely loves me as I am, but has the power and cares enough to take me to better things, if I let him. My only dilemma is who to thank. Do I thank God for bringing me to AA or AA for showing me how to develop a better relationship with God?
I told a very dear friend of mine in the program that I knew that God has been doing his best to help me, but sometimes I could not see how exactly. Eventually, I realized that God had removed everything that was distracting me (job, family, etc.) so I could focus. Left with nothing, I was desperate and had nowhere to go. So he put a few others in my life who showed me to AA. And it was there that I learned how to communicate with him, when I “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”