After getting drunk the faith that I’d had in God and the twelve step program evaporated like snow in springtime. I was left with the most barren and awful emptiness. I couldn’t believe that I would ever be happy again. I kept thinking to myself: can I really face going through all this again? But as a friend of mine put it: “Do you have any choice?”
And the answer is no. I don’t have any choice. Not if I want to stay sober and relatively sane.
So, last night – as I did the night before, and the night before that – I dragged myself to a meeting. It turned out to be an astonishingly good meeting; a powerful meeting; a really, really HEAVY meeting, filled with newcomers, chronic relapsers and other alcoholics of the rock-bottom variety. At the end of it, this big black guy who’d seen me pissed in Boscombe three weeks earlier came up to me and said: “I was shocked when I saw that you were drunk, but I knew you’d be ok, because of all the stuff you’ve done in the past. God loves you. God’s got your back.”
I thought about this when I got home; and as snapshots of my life flashed through my memory I realised he was right. I thought about all the desperate and dangerous situations I’ve put myself in, and from which I’ve escaped, relatively unharmed. I thought about the inability that I have consistently demonstrated in regards to managing my own life, and I asked myself: is there any time in my life that God has not had my back?
Once again the answer is no. No there isn’t. God has always had my back. And if God had not had my back all this time, I would be in big big trouble.
Right there and then my ego starts to resurface, telling me I’m special, and I have to remind it: I may be unique, but I am not special. I am nothing but consciousness expressing itself as humanity. I am the same consciousness that is expressing itself as the grass and the trees and the universe; as these words that you are reading and as you that is reading them.
To say that there is “one” consciousness is not quite right, because there is nothing else. It is the only principle operating and we are it.
God’s got all of our backs.
Couldn't agree more. My higher power lurked around in the background until I had a similar moment of recognition. Now that we are acquainted I try to stay in touch. It's better to walk beside him than to run ahead or lag behind. Love the picture btw, I feel like I'm on that tightrope far too much, but hey, that's life!
ReplyDelete