How Drunks Converted Me

I read this article last fall and have shared it with many of my friends. Talking with a friend about it this morning I decided to share it with my numerous (tongue-in-cheek) blog readers.

Originally Published at The Ooze, September 18, 2008 by Aaron Plum

HOW DRUNKS CONVERTED ME

by Aaron Pluim


Thursday September 18, 2008
I grew up thinking alcohol was from the Devil. Or at least evil. Or at least as bad as dancing. No, wait, it was worse than dancing, but not by much. It was a land of strange logic in which I was raised. For instance, the abuse of many good things often led to the denunciation of the good thing abused. Now I realize it makes sense to denounce the abuse, or misuse of good things and not the good thing in itself. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t grasp this concept. The perversion went further unfortunately. Not only was the good thing often denounced to varying degrees, but also the person or people who abused the good thing. So when I say I grew up thinking alcohol was not a good thing, you can bet I grew up thinking Alcoholics weren’t good people.

That all changed when I actually met some Alcoholics.

We met in the basement of an old church in a small Georgia town. I don’t remember many details about the room itself, but the company and conversations I shared there were unforgettable. There were about twenty of us. Some were younger and working, some were old and retired, and others were going through a mid-life crisis. Bill was one of these people.

Bill was an older man with a larger physique, full beard and raspy voice. I never got to know him well, but he seemed like the kind of man who wore his heart on his sleeve and refused to wear masks. As coffee brewed in the kitchen, Bill began the meeting by introducing himself the same way he always would when we met together:

“Hi everyone, I’m Bill, and I’m an alcoholic.”

I was in my senior year of college and attending my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In the next several meetings I attended as a requirement for a counselling course, I listened to men and women chronicle how their addiction to alcohol had taken over their lives and stolen much of who or what they loved. They openly exposed the rationale they would use on themselves in order to have, “Just one more drink.” They would exchange phone numbers, offering support to each other in times of temptation. As I listened to those broken, honest, courageously dependent people, I thought, “This is what the Church, the Bride of Christ, is supposed to look a lot more like.” Broken. Honest. Dependent.

At the time I attended the AA meetings and for the past several years before that, I had my own addiction. Not to alcohol, but to something potentially destructive as well. I was addictively committed to appear to be a “Good Christian.”

While attending college, I earned the reputation with most people that made my acquaintance of being a “Really nice guy.” Yet the reality of my private life was far from nice. This disconnect between who I appeared to be and who I really was, completely frustrated me. On the one hand, I wanted to be honest with people, ask them to stop calling me nice and tell them I was really struggling with a bunch of stuff. Yet on the other hand, I was immersed within a cultural environment that valued dutiful Christianity; and so, lest someone saw me as a spiritual failure, I thought I had this "Good Christian" image to uphold-an image that seemed to be embodied in everyone on campus. I was fortunate to have a few close friends with whom I felt safe confiding in. I expressed to them how much I felt like a fake. Yet, I often concluded those discussions with renewed determination, thinking if I only “tried harder,” things would get better. Things never did get better or issues go away. Things got worse the harder I tried in my own strength to be good/better/obedient/mess-free.

What was so refreshing about the community I encountered at AA was that, unlike me at the time, they didn’t wear the proverbial mask. They didn’t pretend to be someone they weren’t. They openly admitted that their lives were, or had been, in shambles because of their addiction. They didn’t judge each other when confessions of failure were made, but encouraged each other to, “Work through the steps.” Alcoholics Anonymous promotes a recovery program called, “The Twelve Steps.” These steps are guidelines for recovery based on the foundational principles that an alcoholic is powerless in their own strength to overcome their addiction, and the need for reliance on a Higher Power’s strength to stay sober. The first three recovery steps read as follows:

1. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

2. “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

3. “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

The Twelve Steps mirror well the Christian worldview that likewise admits we must come to an end of ourselves and rely on God to live the kind of life we were originally intended to live. Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous once said, "How privileged we are to understand so well the divine paradox that strength rises from weakness, that humiliation goes before resurrection, that pain is not only the price but the very touchstone of spiritual rebirth."

It has always been an engrained belief: that my spiritual salvation has been provided and guaranteed by God’s grace through faith alone. All those years of sitting in the pew, hearing sermon after sermon, not once did I ever hear the pastor say I had to earn my salvation. Yet, in regards to sanctification- becoming more like Jesus at our core, most Christians, like I did for far too long, believe our sanctification matures by our strength and determination in addition to God’s grace. The unspoken message I accepted growing up, and at times find myself still embracing, is that salvation is God’s job but sanctification is mine.

Jesus seemed to disagree with this thinking. He once encouraged one of his early disciples during a hard time, saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." If the grace Jesus provides is sufficient, that means nothing more is needed. It truly is a divine paradox: that by fully embracing our absolute weakness, God gives us his strength when we trust him for it.

This is good news. Especially for people like me who often equate personal worth with personal achievement. Especially for me, for whom it is so difficult sometimes to trust Someone I’ve never seen. Especially for me, who often relies on control and careful calculations to journey through life and for whom surrender of any sort feels like an agonizing death that I must escape from in order to survive.

Maybe spiritual healing would occur within us and in Christian communities like the Bible college I attended if we realized how powerless we are in our own strength to live a holy life. Perhaps then, we could start living like those honest, broken, courageous people I met at Alcoholics Anonymous. Maybe if we gave up on our own strength and stopped trying to fix ourselves and gave God a chance, He would be seen through His broken and surrendered bride. No more reliance on our cute and clever Christianese clichés, fist-clenched, teeth-gritting determination or pre-planned, pre-packaged goals and strategies to be a “Good Christian” in order to display to the world the strength and beauty of Christ. Simply a completely abandoned trusting-reliance on the Holy Spirit to do what only He can: conform us into the image of Jesus Christ, one day at a time.

I grew up thinking Alcoholics were failures. And then I met a few who had given up on their own strength and determination, and were trusting God to stay sober. It's then that I realized they were the wise ones. They were the victors. And I want to be just like them.


"The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners." ' But wisdom is proved right by her actions." -Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in Matthew 11:19

"Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: 'Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.' " -Paul of Tarsus as recorded in 1 Corinthians 1:26-31