Every Wednesday, I teach classes on addiction and mental health at a residential program in downtown San Antonio for men and women who have been recently homeless. I have the men for an hour, and then the women.
A new woman came early for class. She had picked up a copy of my book there, “Being Sober and Becoming Happy”. The book made sense to her about recovery, and AA seemed to make sense to her, but she said she had one problem: neither my book nor AA were Christian, and she is.
I said that AA is not overtly Christian because the men who started AA didn’t want to scare anybody off. I said that your own concept of God is enough to get started in AA. I said that she didn’t need to change or give up any element of her Christian faith, and she could simply do AA as a Christian.
Her other problem was that she had a set of injuries. She came to us from the county hospital. She had been found lying by a curb with a broken jaw, shoulder, and ribs. She spent many weeks in the hospital and then came to the detox affiliated with this program. She was now in the women’s addiction treatment program.
I told her that one of the things that AA says in its book is that “We will suddenly realize that God has been doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.” I suggested that God has been doing for her what she could not do for herself. Her injuries, as she described them, were bad enough to kill her. However, she had prompt emergency medicine followed by surgery and rehabilitation medicine for weeks, followed by detox for all the painkillers she had been on. She was then transferred two blocks away to the only program in Texas that has a complete, free program to get people out of homelessness with everything they need.
There are 254 counties in Texas. The curb she hit was in the only one out of 254 that has a free hospital, followed by a free detox, followed by a program with a free complete solution to homelessness. They even have free volunteer dentists who come in to restore her teeth. There, I have my volunteer classes on alcoholism, addiction, and mental health. The odds of her biting the curb in the right one out of 254 counties were slim, but there she was.
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says, “We will suddenly realize that God has been doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”
Now that God has provided all that she needs, I suggested that she “Make friends with that curb, because it will teach you everything you need to know about alcohol.” As we talked, she could realize that her religious objection to AA stemmed from a reluctance to completely give herself to this simple program.
The problem was not that AA might not work because she was a Christian; the problem was that if AA worked, she wouldn’t be able to drink anymore.
I suggested that while she was here, she could certainly take advantage of every benefit that the people of our county and her Higher Power have provided. I asked her to make friends with that curb. That curb, unyielding and unchanging, nearly killed her. It broke her bones and that still hurts her today. It wasn’t damaged when she hit it. It doesn’t hate her. It is unchanged and unchanging. The curb represents alcohol. It will be there when she completes all her treatments. If she “slips” and falls, the curb will be waiting there.
AA talks about “keeping the memory green”. We all have our own curb. We need to remember why we got sober and stay in touch with the pain that brought us to AA. That memory will keep us safe.
