“Grateful To Have A Life”

Sitting cross-legged on my back porch this morning, smoking a cigarette and downing some bold and bitter iced coffee I’d made up last night, I read the NA ‘Just For Today’ and almost laughed out loud. It was about having a full, busy life. I thought to myself, “hmm, this sounds familiar; wasn’t I just writing about this… yesterday?”

Indeed I was. Those of us who follow the JFT have all noticed an eerie prescience to that daily meditation. Whatever it is that we’re experiencing in our lives, the ‘Just For Today’ meditation has an amazing ability to hit us spot-on for what we’re going through. It is timely in a way that is almost psychic. My Friday night homegroup is a JFT meeting, and I have shared many times about what a coincidence it is that the reading talked about exactly what I was going through at that moment.

Of course, it’s not really a coincidence at all. The issues the ‘Just For Today’ talks about are things all us addicts deal with. Of course the readings are going to hit home, they discuss the issues we face living life in Recovery. The feeling of wonder we get at the JFT ‘knowing’ what’s going on in our lives is no different than the feeling we get when we hear a chairperson or a speaker tell our story. We are not so different from each other as we would like to believe. That is one of the great lies the disease tells us--that we’re unique, alone. We’re not.

Today’s meditation made a point that I didn’t yesterday. How many times have we been in a meeting and heard someone complain about how busy or full their life is these days? They go on and on about everything that is happening. Maybe it’s ourselves who is doing the complaining. The thing we can so easily forget is what a miracle it is to be sitting there complaining about having a life!

How many of us were homeless before we got clean & sober? How many of us were unemployable? Or in a mental institution? Or in prison? Before we started Recovery, we weren’t capable of having lives, it wasn’t possible. Working the program, doing the steps, being of service to others, we find our way back from the edge. With patience and dedication, we can be restored to sanity.

Having lives becomes possible. We become employable. We learn how to handle life on life’s terms. We learn how to handle it so well that we take on too much life and have to first-step ourselves again--remembering our powerlessness; recognizing once more our unmanageability. If we find ourselves thinking how insane our lives are getting? Time to apply the steps, the spiritual principles of the program, in all our affairs.

We always need to be restored to sanity. As people who suffer from the disease, our natural direction is going to be towards being insane. That’s where the disease is always trying to take us. We don’t get to stop working the program. The good news, as ever, is that there is a solution--if we keep on working the program, we will keep on being restored to sanity.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Recovery didn’t so much as save my life, as it gave me one. Complaining about actually having a life? I’ve been guilty of it. But I try my best to be in a state of gratitude that I even have a life at all. It truly is a miracle.