"At Least You're Sober!"

I  was not even an alcoholic!

Yet my mother made me go to those meetings, in part because she was convinced that I needed to learn more humility.

I have since learned that humility has nothing to do with what I think of myself, or even if I think of myself less, but everything to do with the amount of trust that I have in God:

"Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time:

"Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you." (1 Peter 5: 6-7)

The greater our understanding of how much God loves us, the more that we will trust Him, and this we receive as we gain a greater understanding of Jesus Christ and all that He has done for us. Thus Paul prayed the following for the Ephesian Christians:

"16That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; 17That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, 18May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; 19And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God." (Ephesians 3" 16-19)

The love mentioned here is not a warm feeling, or a welcome hope, but the warm certainty through the Finished Work of Jesus Christ on the Cross:

"Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." (1 John 4: 10)

Those were trying times in my life. I had just graduated from college, yet I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I had applied to law school, the top three schools in the state, with nothing to show for it. The three law schools where I applied had received an unprecedented number of applications.

I was down and out, mostly because I was trying to live up to standards that stifle rather than enhance life. I tried so hard to be good, to be pleasing to others, and the result: I had a miserable time established myself, the proper boundaries of a working relationship, and I did not even know what to do or how to behave.

I was not succeeding in my life, but my own mother refused to recognize that it was the dead-on-arrival AA program which was stifling her life and my growth. Because that was all she knew, that was all she gave me, and so off to AA meetings I went -- even though I never drank a drop in my life.

The majority of people in these meetings reminded me of myself, in a way. They were down on their luck, unsure why their lives were going nowhere fast. Still, I felt good, that perhaps going to these meetings, working the steps, and talking with other people would solve all my problems.

In fact, looking back on the time that I had spent in these meeting, I realized that these steps and the cult/culture of labeling and dependence were creating the very problems that I was trying to break away from.

The members of this program would go on and on about all of their problems, still unable to stand up to their spouses, still unable to make any sense in their lives. Yet for all their troubles, they would fall back on "At least I am sober!"

Sadly, life is a lot more than not drinking, and a life based on "not doing" something is not life. I do not care what the doctor on page 444 wrote or said, not at all.

Indeed, I was sitting around in the meetings, burned up about people, places, and things in my life. I still had not learned how to handle the angry feelings that were welling up within me. I was still easily hurt, easily frustrated, yet on one afternoon, when I was still down and out about many things in my life, another member came up to me, and trying to cheer me up, she said:

"Well, are you sober? At least you've got that!"

But being sober was a done deal for me, anyway! I was working these steps, and I was going nowhere! Now I realize that the whole program was based on so many false and flimsy premises, that in now way would I ever have found the relief and victory that I was still searching for in my life.

"At least you're sober!" just does not cut it in the face of so much turmoil on the inside, especially when you are working a program which claimed to set you free from all of these issues, yet never does.