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We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. Hello, my name is Norma and I'm a real alcoholic and um I want to say first that I love our fellowship because it is a fellowship of the spirit and there is more than one fellowship of the spirit among us and if you don't mind if you're a member of the family of Alanon group would you please stand that we might acknowledge you Alanon if you want to know what it's like to be in the trenches stand next to one of them and we thank Thank you, Elanon, for your recovery because it has so aided our recovery. And if you're here new, welcome home.

I really like what was read today about the fellowship and about the fact that your feet are now on a path that's going somewhere. As I said, my name is Norma and I am a real alcoholic. I have been clean and sober since August 1st of 1983, which put me at 24 years last uh 1st of August.

The big book says to tell what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like now. What I was like, well, I wrote a song. being a songwriter.

I am in Austin, Texas after all. Reflective of my life experiences. And this is how it goes.

The beer has turned to wine. The wine has turned to gin. My laughter turns to size.

The good times, the good friends are memories. And all that's left to understand is the glass in my hand. My life story was very predictable.

Anybody could have written it. I was a young girl searching, frequenting the Six Street bars in Austin, depressed, at times suicidal, in and out of relationships with men of questionable character. I changed jobs often.

I had no permanent home. Seldom contacted my family. I missed work a lot.

And those periods of depression grew closer and closer together. I saw very little hope for my future. And the pages of time begin to turn.

And the writing on the wall was clear to everyone except me. Because as it says in the doctor's opinion, we are unable to differentiate what is true from what is false. My life seemed normal to me.

But my friends, my family, my co-workers, they may not have said it, but they expected a call at any time with the bad news. A car wreck, an overdose, the police, the mental hospital, or no call at all. This is what happens to most of us.

But there was no tragic ending to my life. Why? Because God wrote himself into my story.

And when he did, everything changed. The Big Book describes alcoholism as a family disease. And I was affected by the disease and its symptoms growing up long before I ever took my first drink.

Had an alcoholic mom. She always had a drink in her hand from the time I was little till the time I left home. My dad was a raaholic.

Every member of my family was affected. I have a sister who's in an abusive relationship. She's seriously overweight.

Another brother has divorced himself from us emotionally. Another sister ran away as a teenager, got involved with the heroin crowd and running guns. And I have another brother.

He's dying now. Every mark of alcoholism upon him. You know, there's nothing more tragic than being alive and not enjoying your life.

I escaped my home environment eventually, and I made a number of geographical changes. On one of these trips, I accidentally found recovery. It was a time in my life when I had hit that emotional bottom.

I was 2,000 miles away from all my friends and family. Everything looked good on the outside. I had a job, had some money in the bank, had a nice home.

But on the inside, I had nothing. When I looked in the mirror, loneliness and despair stared back. And during this time, I found a bottle of pills, fully intending to kill myself.

I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. But someone found me and they rescued me. And after that, I just went through the motions, working, eating, sleeping, but I wasn't really alive.

And it was right after this that I met a girl in a bar. It was New Year's Eve. She wasn't drinking.

And she told me her story and it really affected me because you know what happens after you hear it? You begin to question yourself. I could no longer drink without thinking about why.

And so I found an old lowbottom drunk club in Richmond, Virginia, and I became a member of AA. And that incredible journey of recovery began. But while I let go of the booze and the tequila, I still held on to some very sick ways of living.

I married my first husband during this time and I didn't recognize him as an alcoholic or an addict or an abuser. But he knew a victim when he saw one. Looking back, I realized I had married a man who loved to build himself up by tearing others down.

And he thought being an alcoholic, a sober alcoholic in recovery was okay. But he thought marijuana was a medicinal herb and I needed to mellow out. And so every night he offered me some.

And the moment came when I gave in to the pull of addiction. And soon I found myself back in the grips of obsession, staring step one in the face. Cuz you see, I had three years in the program, but to be honest, all I had was abstinence.

I had the fellowship and I had the meetings, but I hadn't worked the steps. I hadn't used a sponsor and I didn't have a relationship with God. I'd found only relief, not recovery.

And in the middle of all of this, I had a bunch of denial, rationalization, self-justification, an unhappy marriage, a new baby I had no idea how to take care of, and overwhelming fear. and I hadn't found the solution this program offers. When I relapsed on pot, it fully opened the door to every other addiction I had.

They were all calling my name, including the alcohol. And so, I came back in and I picked up a new desire chip. Now, at this point, I'm desperately searching for an answer.

And I had failed. But I knew others had not. And I had a new willingness driving me on.

I began listening to speaker tapes. I made a conscious decision to be happy that time, no matter what it took. And it's no surprise what I heard in all those speaker tapes.

Work the steps. Work the steps. Work the steps.

I knew things had to change. So, I took my baby and I left this abusive relationship. And I fled from what I saw as my childhood repeating itself.

And the next few years was a long process of learning how to live, how to let go, and how to let God. I made a lot of mistakes. In the 12 and 12, it says, "Without some degree of humility, no alcoholic can stay sober at all." Nearly all AAS have found too that unless they develop much more of this precious quality than may be required for just sobriety, they still haven't much chance of becoming truly happy.

Without it, they cannot live to much useful purpose or in adversity be able to summon the faith that can meet any emergency. I've heard that surrender is not giving up. It's not giving in.

It's okay. It's joining the winning side. I'll never forget the first time I surrendered.

You know, I was never homeless, but there was a time I didn't have a home and I didn't have a job. I had a car, I had a baby, and had a lot of stuff in the car. And I lived on this couch for a while and with that relative for a week, this person here, that person there.

You know, no one can keep a baby and her mother for a very long period of time. It's it's a tough situation. And one time I found myself at this recovery dance.

I was sitting on the porch of this little clubhouse and I thought, you know, this is my turning point. either I was going to go back, get drunk, relapse, lose the baby, and die, or I was going to go forward into recovery. It was that point at which I thought, you know, either God is, and these people have something real, or God isn't, and they're all a bunch of fools and hypocrites.

But I somehow believed them that what they had was truly believable. And I made a decision in my heart that night that I was going to do the next right thing. And if God was who God says he was, then he was going to take care of me and my baby.

And all I had to do is stay sober that day. It's funny, within a few minutes, someone came up and they offered me a place to stay. I don't remember telling anybody there about my situation.

And I said, "I don't have much money." She said, 'Well, I have a little room in a trailer in South Austin, 50 bucks a month. You think you can swing it? And I said, 'I think I can do that.

And the baby and I stayed in that little trailer house. It was 10 miles out of Austin. There are other people staying there and some of them were drinking.

But, you know, when you've decided to make up your mind to go forward, it doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. So, I did a few odd jobs. I cleaned houses.

I goedered for a mechanic for a few months. And in the fall, I got a good job, a nice apartment, and we moved in before the electricity was turned on. But I'll never forget God coming through for me that night.

There's an old AA saying, you can take the drunk out of the gutter, but how do you take the gutter out of a drunk? That takes the grace of God. I found this out as God brought me through a number of experiences in many areas of my life.

All of them bringing me to various points of surrender. I had about five years in the program and I began to pray about a number of things. I began to let go and let God in the area of relationships.

I had played that game of boy meets girl on AA campus and I met a few sick people. Things just weren't working out. And you know, it wasn't their fault.

It wasn't my fault. It's just that water seeks its own level. And a a healthy man wouldn't have anything to do with me.

and I didn't know what a good relationship looked like. And so these relationships naturally failed. And I began to talk to God and I said, "God, I've tried to make things happen and I've failed over and over again and I'm just giving up because the pain of trying to do all this is too great.

I can't make it happen." And I surrendered. And I said, "God, if if there's a man out there that's meant to be my partner, you'll have to bring him to me. And I began to look for God's will every day and not a husband.

I was also very hungry at this time for more spiritual depth. And I asked God to lead me to people who had spiritual wisdom. I refused to set myself up for failure by staying home night after lonely night on the weekend.

And so instead of isolating, I began to call people up at the AA club and say, "Hey, let's go out to a movie, groups of people, you know, and let's go out to dinner or something." And um I just wasn't going to stay home depressed anymore. And I heard from some of my friends about a little coffee house that has an open mic. It's downtown.

It was the old Chicago house. So I I can play a few tunes on the guitar. and I grabbed it and went on down there one night and there was blind Dave.

He was singing about God. I went over and introduced myself and I said to him, "Do you really believe in God or do you just like to sing about him?" Dave said, "Oh, I believe." and we began a friendship and two years later we married. I met him on my birthday.

My husband Dave is a man who was born blind, but he has incredible insight and a fire to carry the vision of God's will wherever he goes. His compassion and wisdom and faith have brought me and many others something that the big book calls is something better than gold. And God's purpose between us has produced something I can only describe as a supernatural experience in our marriage.

We are celebrating now together 18 years of marriage. >> 18 happy years. I've always been grateful to Dave for being such a wonderful father to the son I brought into our marriage.

He also has a son and I want to tell you a little bit about our relationship to him. I didn't see much of my stepson Caesar for the first 10 years Dave and I were married because he was a speed freak and they're always a little paranoid and you just have to we would just wave at him in the distance, you know. His aim was to be the best methamphetamine cook in Texas and he was well on his way.

But the day did come when he decided to take charge of his own destiny and to make some life changes. And of course we were happy to participate. But he was unsuccessful because he could not recognize the problem of addiction in his life.

And uh he needed more than we could give. And family members can never help other family members recover. We don't have the objectivity we need.

We're too close to the situation. So there began that long painful journey of letting go. And that addiction caused a lot of damage in our family.

There was crisises, there was late night phone calls, legal problems, many interruptions to our um life and many visits to jail. The last one had cost him three years of his young life. When Caesar went to jail one summer, I was still angry.

I knew these resentments were wrong and they were fear-based and they would interfere in both my relation my relationship with this stepson and in my marriage. And I knew I had to do something. I began to pray that God would give me a mother's heart for him.

So when my husband began to dictate a letter to send off to Caesar, instead of writing critical responses or preachy once or not writing anything, I began to write him notes of encouragement. And when I read his return letters to my husband, I did so without adding my acid remarks or self-righteous opinion. And I began to look for the good things that he was saying and doing.

and I began to pray for him as I would for my own son. By the time he got out of prison, I was able to welcome him home sincerely. I saw not the arrogant, self-centered young man that left, but a humble, broken child of God, hoping for another chance at life.

We laid out a plan of action for him to follow as he tried to begin a new. And one of the rules was he couldn't be in the house alone. if we left, he left with us.

And as it happened, the first several weeks, both I and my husband were speaking at AA clubs all around Texas and he heard our stories. You know, after one of these nights, he came up and he put his arms around me and he said, "I'm really proud to be part of who you are." And I hope one day I can be like you. It was really a beautiful moment, one of true intimacy, one that would never have occurred had I continued to harbor resentment, selfishness, dishonesty, and fear.

As it says in the 12 and 12, whenever we had to choose between character and comfort, the character building was lost in the dust of our chase after what we thought was happiness. Seldom did we look at character building as something desirable in itself. We never thought of making honesty, tolerance, and true love of man and God the daily basis of living.

I'm so grateful for the 12 steps that taught me this and grateful for the healing in my family, especially now. Things were not always perfect then, but they were a lot better than they used to be. Instead of jail and cellmates, Caesar found a family in a home.

Instead of cooking meth and selling drugs, he had his own little remodeling business. He brought us a beautiful granddaughter. She's 17 months old.

She continues to bring us all joy. Caesar told us once, "Dad, I know I'm not like you and Norma are in recovery, but my sobriety is important to me. That was enough for us." I know it was hard for Caesar to stand in our shadow.

When he was in jail out in Dell Valley, our huddle, we'd make the long drive to visit him. And as Dave sat down behind the glass, several of the other inmates would stand up and say, "Dave, blind Dave, what are you doing here, man?" And he'd say, "I'm here to visit my son." and they'd turn around and stare at Caesar and they'd say, "Blind Dave is your dad." It was during these years that as long as I continued to remember that my purpose in this situation was to encourage and help Caesar and to treat him as I would a newcomer, then I could get out of the way and let things be. Dr.

Paul in his story, Dr. addict, alcoholic reminds me that there is a good bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad and the best of us and that we are all children of God. Caesar came over a couple of weeks ago.

We had a nice visit. We talked about making popcorn balls and carving pumpkins and about looking forward to the first cool snap. Maybe having a little family barbecue in the backyard.

What made the visit nice was how normal it was. There was no crisis, no requests for money, no tension, no problems. I had just begun to relax and to believe that finally things would be okay.

Caesar had two years of sobriety and he was living a fairly normal life. Then on Tuesday, I got a call. They said Caesar had been in a car accident and his heart had stopped on the way to the hospital.

and they were unable to revive him. I'm sorry, they said, but he has died. Out of all the possible scenarios I pictured for our future, I never imagined this one.

And tragedy had cast a shadow across our path and threatened to block the sunlight of the spirit. But the arms of the fellowship reached out and embraced us. And over the next few days of this last week, God showed himself and carried out his purpose in many, many ways.

At a time of great need, I can say that God did not disappear from us, but he made himself visible through all of you. and Dave and I will never be able to fully express our thanks for the way you were there for us. And we want to thank all of you.

Now, my faith has been built most in the last few years over the slow process of surrendering to my God, my other son, Shawn. Sean was, of course, I'm gonna say a wonderful child. I am his mother.

He is too bright, too bright for me. Very strong willed. And it took a lot of consistency, encouragement, discipline, unity, and prayer to raise him well.

But when he was 12 or 13, he went home to live with his father. And of course, I had a lot of fear over that. This is the ex-husband who was still very unforgiving and bitter.

So Sean and I had a very on andoff relationship and it was very challenging for me to stick to my convictions and risk the loss of his love and affection. Sometimes he would call, he'd be rude on the phone. I would take a stand and say, "Sean, this isn't acceptable in our house." He would hang up.

Might be six months before I heard from him again. I wasn't willing to let go of my principles out of fear. So, it was touch and go during these years.

I really wanted to be there to make sure he was brushing his teeth and doing his homework and hanging out with the right friends, but proximity guarantees us nothing anyway, does it? Then when Shawn was 16, he stepped off a bus, ran out in front of a car, and he got hit. Breenidge hospital called.

They said he has a head injury. They had found a librarian card in his pocket and they had traced him back to me. We left for the hospital im immediately Dave and I did and he was still bloody and unconscious on the gurnie.

Dave and I prayed over him before they rolled him into ICU. I wanted to stay with him for 24 hours a day to help him until he got better, till he could sit up, till he could eat again. I learned I could pray for 24 hours a day.

I didn't eat. I couldn't sleep. Prayer was my main stay.

My fear was almost overwhelming. Because you see, doctors, they can't tell you when someone's head injured how it's going to turn out. They don't know.

They can't tell you from one day to the next what's going to happen. And I was facing powerlessness like I had never experienced it before. Is he going to live or die?

And if he lives, what's he going to turn out to be like? Is he going to come back with everything or will he be a vegetable? Modern science can only go so far.

The rest of the way is in God's hands. Dave continued to encourage me, saying, "Norma, God will be with us no matter what happens, and somewhere in the middle of it, we'll find a gift." Shawn was in ICU for 12 days. One day his father showed up demanding that I leave saying Shawn didn't want me there.

He told me to get out. Now imagine this picture. Your son has a head injury.

He's not out of ICU. He's not even conscious or able to talk. And the ex-husband wants his own mother to leave.

No one could believe this. I went to the head nurse into our office and we sat together pouring over every legal document I could dig up. We were looking for some loophole that would allow me to legally stay and we couldn't find anything.

When Shawn's father took custody, I didn't realize how it was going to affect my legal rights. I was allowed visitation, but nothing really covered this situation. So the nurse left saying there's really nothing I can do.

So I'm sitting in the office alone with everything I had scraped together. The divorce papers, the child custody to documents. I did every the only thing I knew to do.

I got down on my knees and I prayed and I said, "God, I I cannot imagine why you would not want me to be at my son's side at this time of my life, but if it is your will, then I accept it. And perhaps one day I'll know why." And I picked myself up and I left, not knowing if I'd ever see my son alive again. The next day, I got a call from the head nurse.

She said she wanted me to attend a meeting and we were going to work things out. So, I showed up and we went to this room that had this long polished walnut table. There were about 15 people there.

There was the head nurse, my ex-husband, the atrisisk nurse, the social workers, the bouncers, you know. I mean, I didn't even know who all was there. We were going to work it out.

Ever try to work something out with your ex-husband? Sean is still in ICU. And I'm so worried about him.

I haven't slept. I'm a shell of a person. My ex is spouting off lies.

I'm doing what I can to defend myself. But, you know, it's my word against his. And this is all just going nowhere.

And I really just have nothing left. And then something happened. that later I saw as miraculous.

One of the young nurses that was caring for Shawn quietly spoke up. She said, "Sir, did you know that when his mother is with him, his vital signs begin to perk up on the monitor?" He said, "No, I didn't know that." Yes, sir. And when she sits beside him during the day, he is calm.

But when she's not there, he becomes combative and we have to sedate him. He said, 'N no, I didn't know that either. Yes, sir.

And as long as his mother is beside him during the night, he will go to sleep. But when she tries to leave, when she leaves, he tries to get up and follow her. And we have to tie him to the bed to keep him from falling down and reinjuring himself.

He said, "No, I didn't know any of that. Well, I don't want my son drugged and tied up. I guess she can stay.

You know, when things were looking so dark, what caused this sudden turn of events? What made this bitter man change his mind? Who had the power that day?

It wasn't Bracken Ridge. It wasn't the head nurse. It wasn't the state of Texas.

It wasn't my ex-husband. And it wasn't me. No one here can convince me otherwise.

It was the power of God. Sean fully recovered. Well, he has a limp that excludes him from the military.

Oh well. We'll have to show our patriotism in some other way. Sean left the hospital to go live with his dad.

And of course, I had more fear around that. But one day he came back to live with me and Dave. You know, he had had a falling out with his father.

This I could predict. It's sort of like having two teenagers living in one house. And you know, to tell you the truth, Dave and I went through six months of hell because the young man that came home was not the child that had left.

The characteristics of self-will combined with teenage arrogance. You know, he wanted everything and we couldn't deliver. Teenagers always demand perfection and uh there was nothing we could do to make him happy.

The hardest moment of my life was to have to release him to suffer the consequences of his own choices. We told him to go back to dad and he didn't go back to dad. He went to a youth shelter instead.

And um since he wouldn't live with us and he wouldn't live with dad, he became a ward of the state. CPS stepped in and the next three years he was in foster care. And these years were the most difficult I've ever experienced.

Traumatic for both of us. He was transferred to numerous foster homes. He would run away.

He made some suicide attempts. The only way I survived this emotional trauma and fear was by focusing on the truth, on prayer, and on service. And to remember that just because I don't see the evidence, past experience shows me that God is on the scene working behind the wings.

Yet, I so wanted the clock to turn back and that little boy to be in his room. I couldn't accept that Shawn had grown up and that he was no longer that little boy. I wasted a lot of precious moments today looking for years I felt had been stolen, but I caused my own misery.

God didn't do it. CS Lewis says, "Pain is God's clarion call to a deaf world." The 12 and 12 says, "Pain is the touchstone of growth on which our character is carved." I can tell you pain propels my program. No one and nothing could touch the amount of sheer powerlessness I felt the next few years.

I was forced by circumstances to my knees and God came through. Because during the next few years, my faith became strong as I began to live the solution this program offers. The main stay of my sanity was to throw myself into service work.

Literally every night of the week, I was working one-on-one with a group, doing step work, speaking at treatment centers, attending meetings to share my experience, strength, and hope, actively looking for that newcomer who might still be suffering. I remember one Christmas I was trying to be very brave, but it was difficult. Another Christmas without my son.

But I thought, well, for Dave, I need to try to have a merry Christmas. And I was sitting there wiping the tears off my face and the phone rings. One of my girls called.

We talked for 30 minutes and uh I hung up the phone and I thought, "My life ain't so bad. I had a merry Christmas and I think God ordained that phone call. I was grateful for it." In Bill's story, it says, "Many times I've gone to my old hospital in despair on talking to a man there.

where I would be amazingly lifted up and sit on my feet. It is a design for living that works in rough going. You know, sometimes I'd get a call from at work and they'd say, "He's run away again.

We don't know where he is. We'll let you know if we find him." And I would have to again wipe away a tear. Go down to the AA club and do a third step or a fourth step with another girl.

I'm not sure what they got out of it, but I always got what I needed that day. I refused to sink into worry, remorse, or morbid reflection. I focused on the present.

I envisioned the good and I prayed for other teenagers. And I think I helped a few during this time when I had so much uncertainty, so much fear, and such great despair. I felt like I was the one who God carried when there was just one set of footsteps in the sand.

I was experiencing the kind of faith that works under all circumstances. And I lived and breathed the third step every day, not with resignation, but with strength. This was a time when I found I wasn't carrying the message.

The message was carrying me into a place of comfort and convicted conviction that I needed to live just that day. And through all of this, God transformed me. I remember the day I finally and fully surrendered my son.

I wrote about it in my journal. You see, another letter had come in the mail that Mother's Day marked return to sender in his handwriting. And I finally broke.

I stopped giving him the power to hurt me. And this is what I wrote. I realize how much I have continued struggling to make something happened between me and my son.

And how the failure of each effort has further depressed me and pushed me into despair. How even when I have shouted, "Oh, I have great faith that God will restore my son to me." I was still whistling in the dark, pretending happiness, but still afraid and doubtful. I realize that for me, my son is my drug of choice.

That I am only happy when he is in a relationship with me and unhappy when he's not. And that while we are on, I am still miserable and afraid that it will end if I don't do or say the right thing. and desperately trying to buy his love.

My constant phone calls and emails are acts of desperation that he may even at times manipulate me because he knows my fear will drive me to do almost anything. And I'm always searching for the right word, the right time to drop a letter, a present to induce that memory that will cause him to return to the home of his childhood. And I feel guilty for going on with my life.

My prayers are tainted with begging and pleading to God. Dear God, I hope that I can today put my desire on the altar and put first your desire and your will in my life and in my son's life. I hope I can base my future happiness on my relationship with you, not on the presence or absence of my son.

I pray I can accept this day for what it is and let you make things happen in your own time as my efforts have failed miserably. Help me surrender this. Give me strength and peace no matter what my present circumstances are.

Help me to look for your will today and not my son. And help me to be more grateful for the rich, beautiful life I have and for each person in it. Amen.

You know, never again did I return to that level of despair. I cried out in anguish and God answered me with freedom. Faith isn't really faith until it's all you've got left to hang on to.

If my response to anguish had been to sit at the door of God's purpose and enter the slow death of self-pity, I would not be who I am today. Because pain without purpose is just pain. The uncertainties and the impossibilities of my life without God is a purely human experience.

But when I invite God in and learn whatever it is I'm supposed to learn, I turn in faith toward his loving care. And then God will assign a purpose to that pain, using it for a higher good in my life and in the lives of others. When all I have is my misery and fear against life's impossibilities, I'm left with nothing but depression and despair.

But if I invite God in against the impossibilities of life, against my fear, what was merely a human experience has now become a divine experience. And I am no longer hopeless because God can weigh any balance. I heard someone say something once that I have never forgotten.

If God can accomplish his purpose in this world through a broken heart, then I have to thank him for breaking mine. Bill Wilson said, "The good is the enemy of the best." Took me a long time to understand what he meant by that. But I finally understood one day, Bill meant that what is a good thing for him may not be the very best thing for everyone involved because only God knows what's best.

How many good ideas have you ever had? When I don't have to know it all, then I can live in the present moment and trust that God will protect and provide for me and mine today, tomorrow, and in the future. Living by faith, not sight.

Blind faith. When I can get to this place in my heart and mind, it is a place beyond acceptance of life's uncertainties, beyond surrendering. It's a place of total abandonment.

abandonment of all of me, all I have, all I am, and all I know. My husband calls it free falling into the grace of God. Can I let go of all I wish to happen in my life for what God wants to happen instead?

In believing this, can I understand that if it is God's will, it is better than anything I can possibly dream up? The big book says this that when we look back, we realize that the things which came to us when we put oursel in God's hands were better than anything that we could have planned. Follow the dictates of a higher power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world.

No matter what your present circumstances, if I can accept joy in life, can I not accept sorrow too? The answer is yes. Because you see, God and only God can turn what was meant for bad into something good.

So what if things don't turn out the way I hope? Then I truly believe that because of God's will fully operating in my life, I will still have purpose, power, and peace. That my happiness can never be dependent on something or someone outside of me, but only on my relationship with the Almighty.

What about you? Did you hope to end up here addicted and afflicted? Perhaps in the long run, it is the best thing that has ever happened because without it, you may not have found this road to happy destiny.

What God has made crystal clear to me today is that there are no shortcuts to spiritual growth. There is no softer, easier way to the land of enlightenment. God's way is frequently, if not always, the long road home.

The serenity prayer says that that accepting hardship is the pathway to peace. Why? Because if I had not gone through those years of sorrow and despair, I would have not have had to turn to God with it.

I would not have learned compassion for others who are suffering now. I would not have understood the meaning of true acceptance, the joy and release of surrender. I would not have sought the mind of God through prayer, the heart of God through comforting others, or seen the hand of God as he demonstrates his omnipotence.

I would not have come to see that my recovery was not only for my personal peace and happiness, but for yours as well. God could have handed me everything I so desperately desired on a silver platter. I would have been happy.

But the loss would have been the depth of an intimate relationship with God. My success today is not based on the absence of problems but on the presence of power. And now my joy is in the journey.

I'm intoxicated with a desire for God. There's not enough money to match the treasure that God has given me through all of this. There are not enough words to say thank you for your prayers, for your tears, for your hugs, for your love.

And there's simply never enough time to give back in this life. All that has been given to me. St.

Augustine said, "If we but turn to God, that in itself is a gift." Aren't we all poppers sitting outside the door of God's mercy? Today's heroes, they're not the gifted speakers or the outstanding personalities in AA. No, they are the simple people who have discovered God and discovered themsel again.

people who have found that wonderful mixture of the majestic and the ordinary, the human and the divine, intertwined as they rise above their circumstance and meet God through it. This program is not just about saying staying sober. It's about the super supernatural transformation of lives and being a vehicle of God's love and carrying our vision of God's power and understanding that we may be powerless, but we are not choiceless.

The big book says, "Showing others who suffer how we were given help is the very thing which makes life seem so worthwhile now. Cling to the thought that in God's hands, in God's hands, the dark past is the greatest possession you have. The key to life and happiness for others.

With it, you can avert death and misery for them." As we continue in prayer and in service and as we continue to do the next right thing, we watch God make miracles out of mistakes. And through this, we become more conscious of his awesome power. Page 25 says, "If you are seriously alcoholic, as we were, we believe there's no middle-of the road solution.

We were in a position of life where life was becoming impossible and we'd passed into the region from which there is no return through human aid. We had but two alternatives. One, go to the bitter end, blotting out the consciousness of our intolerable situation the best we could, and the other, accept spiritual help.

This we did because we honestly wanted to and were willing to make the effort. When therefore we were approached by those in whom the problem had been solved, there was left nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet. We have found much of heaven.

We have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed. We are a people who do not just believe in miracles. We depended on them.

>> And today there are certain things I have come to know and that I will never forget. It is beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can tell you. God hears every prayer.

God keeps every promise and God is always present. He was here for me the day I arrived. He is here for me now 24 years later and he is here for you today.

I'm deeply grateful to you who have come before me to you who come after me and to everyone here today for the greatest treasure we have together her recovery. Thank you and may God bless you all. Thank you for listening to Sober Sunrise.

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