What I remember most is a desperate desire to be different. I wanted everyone and everything around me to change, first, but I also wanted to be different than I was. I was embarrassed to be me: obsessed with alcohol, frustrated and ineffectual at home, defensive and afraid at work, friendless. The outside scenery was picturesque, including a large brick home, a shiny new car, tropical vacations, and the initials V.P. in my job title; but inside, the landscape was ugly, and the boundaries between my various lives were rotting away. I was terrified that loved ones, and colleagues, were starting to talk.
At first, my prayers were very simple, “God, please protect my sons and I will do whatever you want me to do.” Later, “God, please help me be the kind of man you want me to be.” Eventually, “God, take away my sins, my faults, and my defects, let me recover from this disease, and remake me as you will.” Over months, I became a regular participant in the 4627@7 Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, journaling every morning, sharing my fears and questions with the group, and then beginning my public day with a resolution to behave differently than I had since adolescence.
This morning, in the virtual 4627@7 meeting, with some of those same friends from a decade past, I was reminded that June is “Humility Month,” a time to study and meditate on the 6th Step, which says that we “Became ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” I had no idea how God would remake/remodel me in Recovery, of what I would lose, what I would surrender, what I would gain, and what I learned to value anew or for once. I am not irreparably changed, but only for today, and those defects can return in an instant of forgetting.
“God, please strengthen me, and grant me the discipline, today, and the grace, to bend my unique talents to your service. Help me be the kind of man you created me to be, not the kind of man that my defects and challenges created. Humble me, and challenge me, but lead me to my proper, useful, place.”
