The Reason Most People Are Bad...

is because they don't try to be good. - L. Frank Baum

This is the victory that has overcome the world, even faith. (1 John 5:4)

Sobriety asks that I keep walking into life. Recovery is exactly that, the recovery of life and purpose. The life and purpose I would choose to recover are no longer available to meb. Walking into life feels more like groping my way in the dark now. To be sure, I am not alone. God is present but keeping to Himself lately. And as I grope in inky blackness I have found it to be a maze of walls and no doors. To keep things interesting, the occasional step is encountered, just enough to cause a trip or stumble, but no falls.

With so much time to feel my way through I realize I have come up on 18 months sobriety. The "gift of sobriety" it is regularly called. But the gift is not bringing the joy I have sometimes felt. I am struggling with the gift concept. I'd like to exchange it for some happiness, or an apartment and a job, maybe for the medications I have run out of and cannot afford to buy, or a tune-up on my truck.

Gifts should be practical, not abstract, but they might be both I guess. A hot shower, for example. An abstract concept as a gift, unless you have limited access to a facility, then it becomes practical. But I stay with the concept that gifts should have some practical use.

I am struggling with sobriety. I am not seeing the promises come true in my life, unless the Big Book excerpt "we are going to know a new freedom..." is considered. That's about it. Freedom may well be anther expression for "nothing left to lose."

But trusting in the Giver of all good things, even when it appears I have been forsaken; praying, even when it seems my words simply vanish in a vast expanse where no one answers; believing that Gods love is complete and that He is aware of my circumstances and cries with me; desiring only what God's hand has planned for me while seemingly starving to death; and my greatest fear being that my faith will ultimately fail - "this is the victory that has overcome the world."