by Tim » Wed Dec 28, 2005 3:25 am
Just as there are bad four-letter words, there are also good four-letter words. Hope is one of them. One of the benefits of sobriety, nurtured by AA, is hope. A capacity for hope adds joy to life. Without hope life is without joy.
In my own case, hope had been long ago abandoned when I took my last drink. At first I borrowed hope from others in AA. One day, one hour, one minute at a time, as I took the actions required to stay sober, hope grew and enlarged. As I regained my humanness, I found that my thoughts gravitated more toward becoming who I was meant to be, with God's help, rather than centered on who I had become, a caricature of a human being. Hope, which had been lost, blossomed.
Life is no different on the surface than it was when I stopped drinking and became sober. In some ways the world around me is worse with no anesthetizing agent between me and life. But that is a good thing--to experience life as it is, not as I would have it.
Because I am renewed inside by hope I am an entirely different person than I was. I can more easily face whatever music I am called to face each day (I have even discovered that I can sometimes dance to it). Hope encourages and strengthens me. It is one of sobriety's many gifts.
The biggest secret of sobriety and a restoration to wholeness is, of course, love. We learn to love, the greatest gift of all. We can love ourselves ( what practicing alcoholic can truthfully say that!), we can love others and we can love God. When we share our "experience, strength and hope" with others, what we are really giving (and doubly receiving) is love.
AA is a practical program, which is one of the reasons I practice its principles. Here is a practical definition of hope I heard that I like: "Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent."
Make of this what you will.
