Am I ready to do this, really?

 

This is a central question and
a key to our sobriety, our ability to get clean and sober and stay that way.

Several years ago I took a
friend to Charlie Street, an alcoholism recovery program in Newport Beach. He
had been injecting heroin for 11 months and told me he hadn’t had a drink in
all that time. I pulled over at a liquor store and bought him a Budweiser. I
told him to just say he was an alcoholic, because the program he was going to
wouldn’t take an addict.

He said the beer “sure tasted
good” and we drove over. He managed to stay about a week of the ten day
program. During that time he called me and asked me to get one of his expensive
tools out of hock. I refused, telling him to just let go of it and to
concentrate in staying clean.

He was still holding on to his
old life, unwilling to let go and concentrate all his efforts on the program of
recovery. Despite being a complete mess, he had reservations.

He went back to using and died
several months later. We had been friends since childhood. He was a loving,
funny, happy-go-lucky man. He was hard-working and smart and losing him was
awful.

Ours is radical program aimed
at overcoming a cruel, destructive and cunning disease. A transformation, a spiritual
awakening, must take place. But how? From the outset it seems impossible to
bridge the distance from addiction to sobriety. An addict’s mind can’t solve
the problem of addiction.

I had the same problem my
friend had when I arrived in recovery. My extra baggage wasn’t holding on to
recovering a valuable tool. It was my attitude toward religion.

“Spiritual experience” to me
seemed to be a con concocted by some religious fanatics. These people were
going to try to shove religious doctrine down my throat! That was not going to
happen.

Still, I had fresh memories of
doing insane, violent things while drinking. I was at the Big Book’s “turning
point.” I didn’t want to drink, but I knew for sure that I would. A kind man
volunteered to be my sponsor.

So it was sheer desperation
that kept me in meetings. I saw that there was a solution and these people had
it. They had what I wanted. They had accomplished what I could not do by
myself.

I became willing. I had no
reservations.

Doug Green

05/12/2016