RECOVERY TESTIMONY
The Last Hopeless Day F
or the first 17 years of Gloria Carney’s life, her father’s sobriety remained a distant dream. She literally described him as a “raging alcoholic.” “He was sometimes a very functioning drunk, but toward the end, he was a very broken down drunk, and he couldn’t get sober to save his life,” Gloria says. The family lived up the street from The Salvation Army in Kittanning, Pa. One day in 1986, her father said God spoke to him and told him he needed to go there. He was never a churchgoer and often cursed God, but during a Sunday night service, he stumbled into the church in a drunken stupor. Two elders helped him up to the altar. “That was the last day that my dad ever drank,” Gloria recalls. “My dad became very involved with The Salvation Army because that’s where he found God.” Unfortunately for Gloria, she had a hard time wrapping her mind around the sudden and dramatic change in her father. “When he got sober, I never wanted anything to do with The Salvation Army because I didn’t understand my dad’s
SACONNECTS.ORG
by ROBERT MITCHELL
addiction,” Gloria says. “It was just overwhelming. I’m like, ‘How can this mean man—this total waste of a life—suddenly be for real? He finds this Jesus and now everything is wonderful?’ I didn’t understand it, so I was repelled by whatever my dad found.” Nonetheless, Gloria’s parents, Ron and Barb Carney, became senior soldiers. In 2004, Ron died of a glioblastoma tumor at age 59. “He died young, but he died sober and a man of God,” Gloria said.
Her first drink Gloria didn’t realize it at the time, but now believes her repulsion came from her own demons who recoiled in horror when a sinner like her father found grace. “It took me years to understand that,” Gloria says. “I didn’t understand what God did to his life. Before my dad died, we had a nice relationship. In his sobriety, he became my father. He made
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