This photo was taken on a street corner in Zambia, Africa. Our bus was speeding by as I saw all of these mops, brooms and websters. I immediately thought of this phrase: Clear away the wreckage.
When I got sober, I thought it was just about stopping the drinking. It was so much more. I thought that I wasn’t hurting anybody, so what did I have to work on or clean up?
A lot.
The drinking is but a symptom of a much greater problem—me.
No more alcohol. Withdrawal. Fog lifting. Thinking clearly now. Noticing more around me. Engaging with life again. Reaching out. Community. Connecting to God and to others—oh yeah, now I’m back. I get to start looking deeper into the ME that I had avoided. And that was just the first 30 days of sobriety.
Then the real recovery process started. The journey. I started working the 12 steps with my sponsor and never looked back. The peeling back of layers in my brain and heart that I hadn’t dealt with as an adult. All good. Growing. Healing. Kinda painful at times. Therapeutic. Cathartic.
When I was ONE year sober, my sponsor gave me a special coin commemorating my first year of sobriety. And then she read this to me on page 164 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous:
“Abandon yourself to God as you understand God. Admit your faults to Him and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find and join us. We shall be with you in the Fellowship of the Spirit, and you will surely meet some of us as you trudge the Road of Happy Destiny. May God bless you and keep you—until then.”
I wept.
I still shed a tear 5527 days later when this passage is read—every time.
That reading is the essence of my sobriety.
I pray it for you.
“...And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.”
1 Corinthians 10: 13-14
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