DEC 29, 19 .. TO A FRIEND .. NEXT TIME TRY GOD

The below suggestion came from the AA Grapevine Magazine, November 2019, A Wind of Spirit, pages 26 to 30.

With regard to your relapses over the years, both of us know this for certain : YOU, and only YOU, have to want this thing we call sobriety.

Given that you do indeed want sobriety, this story is about a member who was suffering relapses.

From the Grapevine story:

Very shortly, on a morning in late July as I got out of bed with the sweats, the shakes, the terror and the obsession, I realized that if I took another drink, I was going to die -- not in a week or a day or two, not on the way to the hospital, but right then. And I thought, in an instant, it seemed, of the one great thing that everybody at the meetings had talked about: God. All the talk about God this, God that, God the other thing, and all the things God had done for those people seemed to flash through my mind, and I cried out,

"God please relieve me of the terrible obsession to drink."

And it was gone in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. I did not have to drink anymore. I felt clean inside and out for the first time in my life, as if a wind of spirit had blown through me; and I knew that all was well, right now and forever, both here and hereafter, and it didn't really matter whether I lived or died. I just didn't have to drink again -- by the grace of God.

If just one time you can stop short of picking up that first drink, then you can do it again.

Rooting for you!