Out of a broken marriage and fresh into recovery from a broken heart, I limped into my first AA meeting on September 23, 2003, a problem with the drink too. I needed to recover from both. The latter was easy. I never missed the drink.
But a broken heart is never truly mended, yet here is the paradox I found myself in—so long as there was pain in my life, I was duty bound to recover. Pain can be a force for good, for keeping us sharp, eyes on the goal. Of recovery, that is.
I strode into that Coolbellup meeting that Tuesday night a man walking away from death into life, but the grief of change felt more like death than life because of the searing pain of loss.
I walked in and was greeted by people who wanted to see me. The hospitality was good. Attending that one meeting was itself a victory—finally I was in recovery from this thing that had kept me quietly in bondage for ten years.
The next night and the night after I attended meetings, and at times I wondered what I was recovering from most, alcohol or a broken heart. Both, if truth be known.
The most important fact of this season of my life was, as I reflect, I needed a compelling and irreversible plan to ascent the mount of recovery; a plan that ensured I could not back out. I needed a one-day-at-a-time plan and I needed to execute it every single day and every moment of every day.
With my first marriage in tatters, and every part of my life forced to change, there was no way I was going to back out of the recovery opportunity I’d been given, but I also needed more than good intent.
I – NEEDED – A – PLAN
That plan began with a 110 percent commitment to a program of recovery and that program was and still is the Twelve Steps.
Here’s the paradox, or at least one of them: you cannot recover unless you advance, and fundamental to advancing is staying grounded in recovery. Recovery required me to lead, and this was obvious to me when the spiritual leaders in my life said, “lead!” So, I did.
I wouldn’t have discovered these truths if I hadn’t have answered the call to lead:
1. Leading kept me in recovery as it kept me learning and I needed to be kept humble
2. Leading ensured I remained interdependent on others as they were interdependent on me, and this caused me to value the importance of unity
3. Leading was the direct path to its opposite—service. I only learned how to serve with a right heart through leadership. A right heart serves for the sole pleasure there is in blessing others, and when there’s no other motive, we get to serve with the heart of God.
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Let me recapitulate this.
Out of every life circumstance that brings that way of life to its end—grief outbound of loss—there’s a calling to something new, but not just any kind of new. Nestled within the new is a calling that EMBEDS the new so it will both stick and never get old. That calling is to lead.
Here’s the basic theory: we either grow or recede in life. The human life in recovery has no plateau. There is no such thing as harbouring in safety where life goes dormant.
This is because what we think is
dormancy in recovery is actually regression.
If we’re not advancing on the goal ahead, we’re slipping well and truly behind to a position where temptations can imperil us, or irrelevancy overtakes.
Nobody and nothing grows without a plan. Plans demonstrate not just great intention, but commitment to identify the work required. Plans make us accountable, and accountability is everything in recovery.
The calling on our lives to become pastors necessitates the executing of the plan. The teacher learns twice, and those in recovery must be busy in learning, but not necessarily via activity, because what needs to be learned most of all is stillness, which is borne of a confidence that can only come from outside ourselves when we have nothing left to prove and nothing left to gain.
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Every recovery journey has nestled within it, the need to lead, and that leadership is a calling to a journey of serving others and unifying with others in recovery. When we enter this journey, soon we discover that we’re all recovering from some thing or other.
Part of recovery is a calling to lead. Answering that call on our life causes us to plan. That plan assures our recovery.
By the way, for Christians, “recovery” might as well be called “discipleship”.
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