There Is A Solution - Carrying The Message

May 26. Well I had a pretty good Tuesday & I hope everyone else's was just fine too. It's kind of hard to have a bad day these days when life is so much better than it ever was or could have been when my addiction ran rampant. It is the daily relief that the 12 Steps & all of the involvement the programs out there have to offer that makes life so "do-able", more than it ever was before. I had a delicious dinner with mom & dad & got myself moving to try & loosen up my aching back. As I moved around more & more the pain went from a constant to a faint soreness, its just proof that our bodies have the ability to fight pain on their own & if we chose not to lay down & die with a prescription in our hands we can cope with these things. After all if the pain does not kill you then its not enough pain to use a drug or drink over.. I hope that would be the general concensus. I ended up going to my normal Tuesday night meeting @ the Blue Shutters group but it wasn't a normal meeting.. there were 3 celebrants there & a celebration meeting was held. Two people were celebrating a decade sober & another her first year in sobriety. The vast gap between the collected sober time was a bold statement to me.

What I read in between the lines was this, if one person can celebrate a year in the same room as one who has ten years sober.. then this in fact can work for me & it can last. That means if I only have a day sober, or I am celebrating 2 years, that I can permanently recover from that hopeless state of mind & body called alcoholism. The 9 year gap in Sobriety got me to thinking, all of those moments between years 1 & 10 there must have been some great as well as difficult ones. Its the fact that all those moments were endured sober & to the best of each's ability also in a spiritual manner. The credit was passed on to their Higher Power, and of course to the 12 Step fellowship itself & the group they call home. Today I see in my own life how much more life means to me & I long to experience the good & the bad that will happen between now & each milestone or year of my sobriety.

In just under a year now I have gone from being a worthless, untrustworthy, desperate fraction of a man with no moral or spiritual backbone to offer to my friends, family, or anyone else who entered my life. Today & every day I stay sober I accumulate more of the beatiful qualities that a person can offer others & work steadfast at eliminating the bad that accompany. I know that I will never be perfect, but if I shoot for that mark I will fall short an ultimate winner. Can I imagine 9 years & 2 months down the road, after a decade of sobriety in my life? No I truly cannot, I can only picture what tomorrow will be like if I do what I did today to stay sober.. that is a beautiful picture. It will be the efforts & time compounded in a spiritual direction that will truly tell what the next decade of my life will be like. That is if my higher power wills it to be that I make it that long, miracles in disguise often take people from this world long before we humans believe its time. But the power to be & the one that saved my life will decide if & when that time is, until then I have a job to do & failure is not an option.

See I'm thoroughly convinced that I am indeed an alcoholic & a drug addict, they have destroyed my life time after time & I cannot control myself or them after the first enters my body. It's because of that I know I must stay sober or die, I can accomplish such by following the lead of those who celebrate yet another year sober before me. 75 years ago the solution to alcoholism was discovered & put into words & action by a small group of people. They accredited the answer that no doctor nor medicine could find to a higher power & they spread the word of a solution allowing each alcoholic to define what that higher power actually was. 12 Simple Steps & a tradition of teaching them to others was all that was required to find a solution to alcoholism. It required a spiritual overhaul & rigorous honesty, but not much else. It works, I've seen it with my own eyes tonight as two people celebrated 10 years in sobriety & yet another their first. I need only do as they have done to get there myself. If I didn't have faith that this works or it didn't change my life already you would see me with a bottle of booze & a bag of drugs, but it does, it has changed my life & for that I celebrate with everyone else.. the carrying of the message that there is a solution! Good Night.. Good Morning.. <3 Jimmy