Of my own devices I am powerless. When I talk about the gift of recovery, I am talking about a shared power. It is through others that I receive the power to stop drinking and using, to practice yoga and meditation, to learn of God, to sing, even to pray. When I was taken to my first meeting in recovery by someone that loved me, I found the strength to tell a room full of strangers that I wanted to get sober and didn’t know how. It is because they surrounded me with their love and guidance that I am alive today. Their strength carried me forward in times when I could not have gone on. They gave me the power to persevere. A young man walked into one of the rooms last night and mentioned that it was his very first meeting, that he did not want to keep doing what he had been doing. We came up to him after the meeting, each giving him our cards, taking his number, offering him our strength. I wondered where he had found the willingness to come into that room in the first place. I know for myself that it was the most difficult threshold that I ever had to cross. Perhaps something deep inside of him awakened and in his moment of clarity he was given the power to come in. Believe me, the power to live through all that we have survived, and to come through that door, is a gift. We don’t really know where it comes from, we are just grateful that we found it within us.
