"I Don't Know What I Would Do Without AA"

I remember hearing this phrase a  number of times in Alcoholics Anonymous:

"I thank God for AA."

"I don't know what I would do without AA."

"I don't know where I would be without AA."

I believe these people when they share that they "owe their lives" to this program.

For them, though, life and death begin and end with not drinking.

But is not life more than "not drinking"?

Many of the people in these programs remind me of the Israelites who wandered in the desert for forty years, refusing to believe God that He had given them a land flowing with milk and honey.

Like many cults, the members have been fed a lie which implies that they will go back out and drink again if they leave the program.

The same line of unreasoning also keeps patients taking mental health medications. We have become so satisfied with letting men and women define our experiences, we have surrendered our own capacity to think, convinced that the truth and error escape the minds of certain people.

For me, as well as for many people, the escape begins when we escape from the nonsense of defining our experience based on the tenets outlined in a DSM manual.

I am convinced, however, that most people do not break free of these dependency programs because the fear has brought them into bondage to showing up every week.

If they leave, they get afraid, they start becoming introspective, and these anxieties well up in a person who for so long has been trained to be dependent on a program which defines the human experience based on our feelings, as opposed to the facts or faith.s

Fear and punishment do not bring a man life. When we know the truth, the truth then sets us free. Programs like AA incline individuals to believe that they must "do something" in order to maintain their sobriety, or else. Ironically, the fear of drinking is the very bondage which will lead people to drink in the first place.

What we need is not a program of action, but life and that more abundantly. We need true freedom from self, which we find in the life of Another, one who died for us and as us, who by His death set us free from Death, Sin, and the Law (1 Corinthians 15: 56-57).

In Christ, who needs AA?