my legs above my knees, then my arms above my elbows.
I thought, “This is it!” I turned to the one source I had been too smart (as I saw it) or too stupid to appeal to earlier. I cried out, “Please, God, don’t let me die like this!” My tormented heart and soul were in those few words. Almost instantly, the numbness started going away. I felt a Presence in the room. I wasn’t alone any more.
God be praised, I have never felt alone since. I have never had another drink and, better still, have never needed one. It was a long way back to health, and it was quite a while before people had confidence in me. But that didn’t really matter. I knew I was sober, and somehow I knew that, as long as I lived the way I believed God wanted me to live, I never need feel fear again.
Recently, I was told that I had a malignant tumor. Instead of being afraid or depressed, I thanked God for the past sixteen years of borrowed time He had given me. The tumor was removed; I feel fine and am enjoying every minute of every day. There will be many more days, I believe. As long as God has work for me to do, I will remain here.
Lac Carré, Quebec
A NEW MAN
I tried to help this man. It was a humiliating experience. No one enjoys being a complete failure; it plays havoc with the ego. Nothing seemed to work. I brought him to meetings, and he sat there in a fog, and I knew that only the body was present. I went to his home, and either he was out drinking or he sailed out the back door as I entered the front one. His family was beginning to enter a period of real hardship; I could feel their hopelessness.
Then came the hospital episode, the last in his extraordinary record of hospitalizations. He went into D.T.’s and convulsions, so violent that he had to be shackled to the bed. He was in a coma and being fed intravenously. Each day that I visited him, he looked worse, impossible as that seemed. For six days, he lay unconscious, unmoving except for the periodic shakes.
On the seventh day, I again visited him. Passing by his room, I noticed that the restraints had been removed and the intravenous feeding tubes had been taken away. I felt elated. He was going to make it! The doctor and the floor nurse dashed my hopes. He was slipping fast.
After I had arranged to have his wife brought there, it occurred to me that he was a Catholic and certain rites should be observed. It was a Catholic hospital, so I wandered down the hall and located a nun (the mother superior, it later turned out). She notified a priest and, with another nun, accompanied me back to the room.
While the priest entered the room alone, the three of us decided to sit on the bench in the corridor. Without any prearrangement, all three of us bowed our heads and began to pray—the mother superior, the nun, and I, a Presbyterian ordained deacon.
I have no way of telling how much time we spent there. I know the priest had left and gone about his other duties. What brought us back to the immediate present was a movement we heard from the room. When we looked in, the patient was sitting on the side of the bed!
“All right, God,” he said. “I don’t want to be the quarterback any more. Tell me what You want me to do, and I will do it.”
The doctors later said that they had considered it physically impossible for him to move, much less sit up. And before this, he had not uttered a word since entering the hospital. The next statement he made was “I am hungry.”
But the real miracle was what happened to him in the next ten years. He began helping people. I mean helping! No call has been too hard, too inconvenient, too “hopeless.” He founded the A.A. group in his town, and he is embarrassed if you mention this to others or comment on the amount of A.A. work he is doing.
He is not the same man I was trying to twelfth-step. I failed in all my efforts to help the man I knew. And then Someone else provided a new man.
Bernardsville, New Jersey
FIGURE OF EVIL
It happened about three in the morning. I had been in our Fellowship slightly less than a year. I was alone in the house, my third wife having divorced me prior to my entry into A.A. I awoke with a frightening sense of approaching death. I was trembling and almost paralyzed with fear. Although it was in the month of August in Southern California, I was so cold that I found a heavy blanket and draped it around my shoulders. Then I turned on the floor heater in the living room and stood directly over it, trying to get warm. Instead of getting warm, I began to feel numb all over and again felt death approaching.
I had not been a very religious person, nor had I become affiliated with any church after coming into A.A. But suddenly I said to myself, “If ever I needed to pray, now is the time.” I returned to the bedroom and fell to my knees at the side of the bed. I closed my eyes, buried my face in the palms of my hands, and rested my hands on the bed. I have forgotten all the words I said out loud, but I do recall saying, “Please, God, teach me to pray!”
Then, without raising my head or opening my eyes, I was able to “see” the entire floor plan of the house. And I could “see” a giant of a man standing on the other side of the bed, arms folded across his chest. He was glaring at me with a look of intense hatred and malevolence. He was the epitome of everything evil. After about ten seconds, I “saw” him slowly turn around, walk to the bathroom and look inside, turn to the second bedroom and look into it, walk to the living room and gaze around, then leave the house by way of the kitchen door.
I remained in my original position of prayer. Simultaneously with his departure, there seemed to be coming toward me from all directions, from the infinite reaches of space, a vibrating, pulsating, magnetic current. In probably fifteen seconds, this tremendous power reached me, stayed for some five seconds, and then slowly withdrew to its origin. But the sense of relief given me by its presence beggars description. In my clumsy way, I thanked God, got into bed, and slept like a baby.
I have not had the desire for a drink of anything intoxicating since that memorable morning twenty-three years ago. In my years in our Fellowship, I have had the privilege of hearing one other member describe an experience almost exactly like mine. Did the departure from my house of the personification of evil symbolize the departure from my life of the evils embraced by alcoholism, as some think? Be that as it may, the other part of my experience symbolizes to me the all-powerful and cleansing love of a Higher Power, whom I have since become happy to call God.
San Diego, California
DROWNING
Before my commitment to a state alcoholic center, I had had a dry stint in Alcoholics Anonymous. I know now that I had gone to A.A. to save my marriage, job, and liver, though no one could have convinced me at the time that I hadn’t sought A.A. with all the proper motives. In seven months, my liver got well, and I got drunk for six weeks, winding up at the center.
On my eighth night there, I knew that I was dying. I was so weak that I could hardly breathe; my breath came in little gasps, quite far apart. If a drink had been put within an inch of my hand, I wouldn’t have had the strength to take it. For the first time in my life, I was backed into a corner that I could not fight, cheat, lie, steal, or buy my way out of. I was trapped. For the first time in my life, I uttered a sincere prayer: “God, please help me.” I didn’t bargain with Him, nor did I suggest how or when He should help.
Immediately, I became calm and relaxed. There was no flash of lightning or clap of thunder, not even a still, small voice. I was scared. I didn’t know what had happened. But I went to sleep and slept all night. When I awakened the
