November Articles Online
Bonus Articles
from the Digital Archive
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Step Eleven: The Answer to My Prayers
For some, conscious contact evolves
I wish you’d shared that with me sooner,” my Al-Anon friend said.
“I could have saved you a lot of time and trouble.” I had just
shared with him my recent experiences and also how I had added two verses
of my own to the St. Francis Prayer, the prayer AA borrows for our Eleventh
Step and quoted in the book Twelve Steps and
Twelve Traditions.
Several years ago, after “For it is by
self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It
is by dying that one awakens to eternal life,” I had started praying,
“It is only by being empty that one is filled. It is only by having
nothing that one may have everything.” It sounded so good, I
don’t remember giving a thought to what the answer to my prayer might
look like. Then it started being answered, slowly at first and building to
a crescendo.
“God help me!” was the first prayer I ever
truly said; that one was answered very quickly. I was thirty-five and tired
of life, a hopeless alcoholic. I screamed out that first prayer while
driving around drunk one day at lunch break. Shortly after that I
rear-ended an off-duty cop. Two days later I was in treatment, and three
days later I was in an AA meeting. It was my second AA meeting. Eighteen
months earlier, I had attended one meeting — drunk. I left with the
person who twelfth-stepped me (who was the same person who would later
drive me to treatment), and I told her, “I’m not religious. I
can do this myself.” Of course, I couldn’t do it myself and
when I asked for God’s help (even though I didn’t know that was
what I was doing), God did help me. Rear-ending an off-duty cop and
spending the rest of the day in the drunk tank did not seem like the answer
to any prayer at the time, but it was.
I should have known from that experience that my
additions to the Eleventh Step prayer would be answered. Now I was telling
my Al-Anon friend that since last fall: I’d lost the business I
founded and owned for thirty-one years, I had filed for bankruptcy in the
spring, I’d lost my truck and car, I’d lost my job, I’d
attempted suicide, I’d buried my father a week before his birthday on
Memorial Day. The week after that, my wife left me and I found out my son
was in jail, and now I expected to lose my house. Shall I stop? Was my
addition to the prayer being answered? Being empty. Having nothing.
Being filled. Having everything. Thank God! A new job
that I absolutely love appeared recently. My daughter offered to take me
into her home with her husband and my two grandkids. Her caring and
compassion is truly heartfelt. My closest AA friend, who has over fifty
years of sobriety and whom I see and talk to every day, has been walking
with me through the pain. I have a used subcompact that gets two times the
gas mileage of the new truck I lost. My wife left, but we are on good,
friendly, and open terms, and I got the dogs. My life is being filled and I
have been given everything that I need.
What I have been given and what I’m being filled
with is God’s grace. It is God’s grace that I be be able to
share my life experience with people who truly care. It’s God’s
grace that I be right-sized. It’s God’s grace that I face
and live in my life’s situations without a drink. (My sponsor says
the miracle for a guy like me is that I haven’t had to take a drink.)
It’s God’s grace that I bear the pain and grow. It’s
God’s grace that I am me and live one day at a time (“Un
día a la vez,” has always been my favorite AA slogan).
The most recent revision I’ve made to my daily
prayers is to change my addition to the St. Francis Prayer to, “It is
only by living one day at a time that one may be filled with your
grace.” I also think more about what I’m praying for and try to
be more attuned to the answers that may come. Every day, I ask the God of
my understanding, “Let me be responsible, use my experience, find
balance, express your will, and help others. For it is by doing these
things and helping others that I am helped.” I pray I can stay the
course as the answers come.
Skitch F., Albuquerque, New Mexico
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