When I first got sober, I couldn’t figure out why everybody was so happy and free. Why were they all giggling and laughing? Wasn’t this getting sober thing serious business?
Yes.
I was still waking from the continuous fog that seemed to hover over my life while I was drinking. When the fog started to lift, I started showing up and going to meetings where I saw people not just surviving, but thriving—even laughing.
I thought I needed alcohol for that.
Apparently not.
I found out that I could make it through one day without alcohol, with God’s help, of course. Then another. Then one more. Pretty soon the evidence was there for me to see that I could do this life without drinking. However, I wasn’t laughing freely yet. I was curious how others were doing that.
In our literature, it talks about alcoholics not being a glum lot—that there is a “vast amount of fun and joy in all of it, this business of living sober.” That’s what my grand-sponsor used to say. She has passed on now, but I still hear her voice reminding me of this.
Then, when I discovered it was not only about not drinking, but treating the thinking part of my disease, I started to get it. Not take myself too seriously and over-think things.
What?—Is that possible? Yes. Not only is it possible, it is most-likely probable, if I do the work it requires to change my thinking and behaviors—praying, step work with my sponsor, working with women I sponsor, going to meetings and hearing God speak through others, reaching out to another alcoholic who needs my help.
Now I am giggling and laughing at life, at my mistakes, at everything. And, now, I want to show others how to receive that kind of joy. I still over-think things, but, that’s why I surround myself with a community of others like myself to help with my accountability, point me back to the truth and to show me how to laugh at myself and move on to help others who might need it.
I love this quote from CS Lewis on JOY:
“On the one hand, if life is but time and happenstance, why do we laugh or wonder, or experience a desire to play, however fleetingly at all? Is the encounter of delight simply the mind’s attempt to distract us from pain? What good is joy, what purpose is humor or laughter or beauty, if life is but a series of instincts to survive and the universe at a cosmic level is meaningless? On the other hand, if we are made in the image of a holy, loving, imaginative God, how wonderful that God has made us with both logic and laughter, with intrinsic worth and immortal wonder.”
Oh, the inexpressible joy of a sober life!
Can you hear me giggling?
“Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith.”
1 Peter 1:8-9
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