All You Need is Love | 愛はすべてあなたが必要です | Totus Vos Postulo est Diligo

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"OUR VERY LIVES, AS EX-PROBLEM DRINKERS, DEPEND ON OUR CONSTANT THOUGHT OF OTHERS...”

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"...AND HOW WE MAY HELP MEET THEIR NEEDS"...
-Alcoholics Anonymous, p20

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|... Today I was told I'm sick; not just a little sick but very sick.  I found out yesterday at the Doctor’s office somewhere between my cholesterol report and the vitamin shot and I'm having a little trouble getting my head around this particular piece of news that is coming, as always, on top of a million other things that have gone haywire this month.

     Let me give you a little background first... 

     About fifteen years ago upon becoming sober and having been fortunate enough to have had a sponsor who got me to step nine immediately, I started to muse on the nature of God.  Specifically, why I had fought His Grace for so long, and when and how I had been fortunate enough to get it.  Our Book tells us that somewhere in our Fifth step we begin to feel His nearness, and so it was with me.  My experience with the steps went like this:

1. Step One:  Lost everyone and everything; I really am powerless after all.  Got it.
2. Step Two:  Come to believe in a God that wants to kick my ass.  Got it.
3. Step Three:  Pray to a God that wants to punish me when I sober up for help in getting sober so he can kick my ass later when I’m strong enough to take the beating.  Got it.
4. Step Four:  Write an inventory about stuff I really didn’t think was all that wrong for a man I didn’t like to be read aloud to him and a God I didn’t trust at all – got it.
5. Step Five:  Read a Fifth Step to a man I don’t like about stuff I didn’t….wait….this is about where the magic happened...   

      Right about here – in between my sponsor showing me that I wasn’t 'Hagar the Horrible' after all and that 99% of my woes was my of my own making that maybe, just maybe, I had some divine presence looking over me.  It was then that I began to feel HIS divine presence, the ‘nearness of our creator’, as the Book says.

     Shortly thereafter,  right around Step Nine I realized that really the only cure for alcoholism is love – that is, we are for lack of a better word ‘doomed’ to a life of service to AA and it’s membership if we want to live as free men.  However, if we look more closely on page 20, it say’s that we MUST CONSTANTLY think of OTHERS – that is – everyone – and how we may meet their needs.

     Then it hit me – I’ve got the only disease in the world that can only be cured with love.  How wonderful it is to be afflicted with such an illness?  I – who reveled in isolation his whole life – was sentenced to a life of companionship and service if I wanted to live a free man.

     Just like our Book promises us.

     Which brings us to today; I’m sick.  And I have to give a lot of blood to stay alive.  Enormous amounts of blood – and I have to start right way.  In fact, and I intend no pun here – I have to literally give till it hurts.  My blood is in fact healthy in and of itself; I have nothing contagious; it just contains too much metal.  Metal which can then be centrifuged out so that the blood may be given to blood banks that need my (very rare) blood type.

     Anyone else see the hand of God here besides me?

      For the second time in my life, I’ve caught a disease, the only cure for which is that if I want to keep it I’ve got to give it away.  In other words - all I need is love.

     I’d like to say I’m grateful but I don’t think I’m there yet.

     And so it goes.

COG, 1st Cl.|