Driving Toward Recovery

I’ve been studying the Twelve Steps in AWOL meetings for 20 years. I’ve learned that the primary reason I work the steps is to build a closer relationship with God and that this relationship gives me direction to live as a spiritual being in the physical world.

In disease, I couldn’t see how God was working in my life because of my father’s death, lost opportunities, etc. I interpreted surviving severe alcohol poisoning as a teen and a suicide attempt in my 20s as proof that God didn’t care about me. I thought that if God had cared, I would’ve died and been set free from my horrible life.

In recovery, I recognize that my thinking was rooted in self-centered fear and self-pity. I am grateful that God kept me alive because I found FA in April 1998. Recovery cleared my mind and made me available for conversations about a higher power. With quiet time, I started building a relationship with God. I began to understand the importance of this relationship and how it has affected my life in so many situations. In abstinence, looking for spiritual experiences has become a habit. The more I look, the more I see God in action. I am also increasingly able to see my past through a different lens and recognize many people who cared about and for me.

In 2007, I was the youth director of my church, where I accompanied teens to work camp where we performed home repairs. As a faith-based organization, each evening there were activities for the groups, one of which was reporting God sightings. Teens would report something that had happened during the day that showed them God was working in their lives. They would stand and claim seemingly inconsequential incidents to be God sightings. As I listened, I realized they were actively looking for God every day, anywhere, and everywhere. How could I find fault in that?

This realization that I could find God at any time was evidenced by events in my life. When my husband was 38, he had a stroke. It started when he was at a pre-kindergarten activity with our son. He attributed the headache to the kids’ noise and his unsteady leg to sitting at a small kid-sized desk. He drove the ten-minute ride home before collapsing in the house; a couple of minutes earlier, it could’ve been a very different story. But it wasn’t.

He eventually needed radiation treatment on his brain. God was there throughout that experience. We couldn’t have been taken care of any better. I had worked at a local hospital and had health insurance that allowed us to go to one of the best hospitals in the area. We paid only a tiny fraction of the total medical costs. Under  our previous insurance plans, we would’ve been wiped out financially. 

I worked in a non-medical department and my manager was a nurse. In FA, I’ve learned to ask for help. I called my manager to see what questions I should be asking and followed up with her when my husband was moved to the intensive care unit. Had I not had that job, I would have done that research myself, but I didn’t have to; I just called my boss.

When I was in high school, the gym teacher recognized a staph infection in my knee, which saved me from losing my leg. When I was caught drinking on the school bus and got detention, the principal selected me to work on an academic project that helped me make better choices. When I was arrested for shoplifting food after my father died, my employer went out of her way to let me know she believed in me and would speak on my behalf, if needed.

I didn’t initially recognize that these incidents from my teens and twenties were indications of God’s care. At best, I might have thought myself lucky, but my self-pity and negativity about life prevented even that much acknowledgment. Thankfully, through recovery, the recognition of spiritual experiences is retroactive.

Portions of the AA Big Book differentiate between an “immediate and overwhelming” spiritual awakening and the more prolonged “educational variety,” noting that friends or family may notice changes first. I’ve had people comment about how I’ve changed, but I’ve also seen variations in my attitudes and behavior. I’ve witnessed uncomfortable or hostile situations resolved by words coming out of my mouth, yet the thoughts behind them really had not been my own. 

When I was new to FA, I had to depend on other people’s spiritual experiences. I heard fellows talk about God taking care of them in ways that were beyond coincidental. Now I have plenty of my own spiritual experiences that have led to a spiritual awakening of the “educational variety.” I picture it as me adding spiritual experiences, one at a time, to a backpack—God’s backpack—that I always carry with me. Each experience is a unique item that I toss in. I am grateful for each individual item and, collectively, they are proof of a God who has been taking care of me in ways I either couldn’t or wouldn’t do on my own.

How could I not decide to turn my life over to the care of a God, who’s been working so hard to provide for and protect me?