The One Day at a Time Group in Marble Falls, TX

Hello everybody, my name is Norma and I'm a grateful Al Anon

and I want to thank the Marble Club One Day at a Time Al Anon group for inviting me and for Linda for keeping tabs on me all this time. And it's a beautiful thing to be able to live just one day at a time.

I want to begin saying that our literature talks about alcoholism as a family disease. And there's a chapter in How Al Anon Works totally devoted to the family disease. And if you're familiar with the big Book, you might recognize this passage on page 22. It says years of living with an alcoholic is sure to make any wife or child neurotic.

I don't know why that's so funny

because it's really not. At the time, I was affected by the family disease

long before I left home. My mom was a blackout drinker. I think that's how our family started. My dad was a rageaholic. I remember the last year that I lived at home, I had a black eye and I wore it proudly. I wanted everybody else to feel that shame and the guilt, and it was the only power I had in that situation.

Every family, every family member I had was affected. I have a sister who seriously overweight and in an abusive relationship. I have another brother that's just emotionally divorced himself from our family. Another sister ran away as a teenager and got involved with gangs, heroin, running guns, all of that. And I have another brother who's addicted now of alcoholism dying.

There's really nothing so tragic as being alive and not enjoying their life.

In the Al Anon, we have a book called From Survival to Recovery, and it talks about what it's like growing up in an alcoholic home. And it's when you're marked by the family disease growing up, you have to try to escape all the crises that happen in the home where there's so much insanity going on. We learn how to hide, how to fade into the woodwork. Some of us learn to take on the helping role for those sick family members.

We become expert people pleasers. We become little entertainers trying to find some semblance of control in the middle of all that confusion.

We're little adults growing up fast, and the alcoholic is often unable or unwilling to assume family responsibilities. So we learn to give all, do all, and be all. That's where that sense of perfectionism comes from. It's really a method of control.

In the midst of this, we lose our sense of self.

We have to continually defend ourselves against the onslaught of the unpredictable nature of the alcoholic home. And we learn not to trust, not to talk, and not to feel.

I escaped my home environment eventually, but growing up in this way affected all of my other adult relationships. I was looking for love in all the wrong places, and I became vulnerable to other perpetrators and abuse abusers who recognized those things in me.

When I married my first husband at this time, I didn't recognize him as an alcoholic, but he knew a victim when he saw one. That was me, and looking back, I realized I had married a man who loved to build himself up by tearing others down.

My past left me unprepared to face reality, and I sought relief from my emotional pain through every method I could find. I became an overeater. I became an overachiever, an expert people pleaser. I even did drugs and alcohol to try to escape those feelings, to escape what I saw as my childhood repeating itself. And I found recovery in a lot of areas. But it was years before I found recovery for my codependent behavior through Illinois.

The day came when I had to part with that husband.

He's going one way and I was going another, and I was broken and disillusioned, but I knew I needed to move on. It was a long process I went through of learning how to live, how to let go, and how to let God, and I made a lot of mistakes.

I went through a number of points of surrender.

I've heard that surrender is not giving up or giving in, it's coming over to the winning side.

First time I surrendered, I'll never forget it.

I was never homeless, but there is a time that I didn't have a home because when I left that husband, I had nowhere to go.

I didn't have a job, I didn't have a home. I had a car and I had a baby and I had a lot of stuff in the car. So I lived on this couch for a while. I lived with that sister for a week, another friend for on their couch for a bit. You know, this person here, this person there, there's no one that can keep a woman and her baby for very long. It's a tough situation,

and you know that. I found myself once at a little recovery dance and I'm sitting on the porch of the clubhouse and I'm thinking this is my turning point.

I've I've either got to understand that God is or God isn't that what all the people in recovery have is real?

Are there bunch of fools and hypocrites?

And I somehow believe that what the head is real. So I made a decision in my heart that night that I was going to do the next right thing. And if God is who God says he is, that he's going to take care of me and my baby and all I have to do is stay in today.

Within a few minutes, somebody came up to me and they said, I hear you need a place to stay. I remember telling anybody there that that night

I said, well, I don't have much money. And I said, well, I have a little broom and a trailer in South Austin.

You can have it for 50 bucks. You think you can do that? I said I think I can swing that.

And so I went to that place. I stayed there. There were a whole bunch of other people there. But you know what? I was moving on with my life. It didn't matter. And I did odd jobs. I cleaned houses. I go for it for a mechanic, you know, for three months I did whatever I had to do to feed me and the baby. And in the fall I got a really good job and a nice apartment. We moved in before the electricity was turned on. I was so glad to have my own space again,

but I'll never forget God coming through for me that night.

There was another time I began to pray about a number of things. I began to let go and let God in the area of relationships.

I played that game of Boy meets girl on Recovery Campus and I met up with a few sick people and things just weren't working out. And this happened over and over again. These relationships would fail, but it wasn't the fault of the men that I was involved in. It's just that water seeks at some level. And to tell you the truth, what did I have to offer a healthy man? I didn't know what healthy looked like coming from the kind of family I came from.

And I began to talk to God and I said, you know, I've tried to make things happen and I failed over and over again. And I just give up.

You know, I'm through the pain of having to try to do this relationship thing was too great. And I surrendered. And I said, God, you know, if there's a man out there that's meant to be my partner, you're going to have to land them in my lab.

I got up every day and instead of looking for a husband, I look for God's will instead.

And it's amazing what God took me through. He took me through a time of gaining dignity and integrity and trust.

I was also looking for some more spiritual death depth. At this time in my life, I was really hungry. I knew that other people had a debt that I lacked. And I began to pray about this. And I decided also that I wasn't going to set myself up for failure by staying home night after lonely night on the weekends, you know, while the baby was with his daddy.

I decided I'm just going to call people. I'm going to plan ahead. I'm going to see, you know, I'd call

groups of people. We'd go out together, you know, to movie or to eat or something. One of these nights I heard somebody mentioned there was a little coffee house downtown and it was an open mind

and you could take your guitar and play. And I thought, you know, I've got a guitar, I can sing. I'm going to go out there and and do that and maybe I'll meet some people. So that's what I did. I didn't stay home. I got up, I got out, took my guitar and I walk in and there's Blind Dave, he's singing and playing the harmonica. He was singing about God,

Gospel Blues

and I walked over to him later and I said do you really believe in God or do you just like to sing about him? And he said Oh yes, I believe we began a friendship and two years later we married. Met him on my birthday.

Kind of cool. My husband Dave is a man who was born blind, but he is incredible insight and a fire to carry the vision of God's will everywhere he goes. If you know him, you know that

compassion, His wisdom, his faith has brought me and many others something that the Big Book calls better than gold.

I want to back up a little bit and talk about how I got to Al Anon, What got me here. You know, I've been to Al Anon many, many times. And I'd go and I'd sit and I'd dump and I was crazy

and all the men in my life were driving me crazy and I was seeing the hymns. If it wasn't for him, if it wasn't for him.

And I wanted immediate relief and I just didn't get it. And I said, well, Alnon didn't work, you know, and I'd leave. And I did this over and over,

over the course of several years. But one time when I came to an Al Anon meeting, I'll tell you the circumstances of my life. That baby had grown up and he was a teenager and he was living with that ex-husband who had no love for me

and my

my other son. Dave son, he's my stepson, had decided that his aim in life was to be the best methamphetamine cook in Austin, TX and he actually had a meth lab unbeknownst to us in the backyard. And so the son who had left and gone to live with my ex-husband had come back. But he wasn't the same

as when he left. He was changed.

He had all the characteristics of self will combined with teenage arrogance. And, you know, he wanted everything. We gave him plenty. But, you know, teenagers demand perfection and we can't deliver. So I've got the 16 year old in one room and we got the, you know, Dave's son cooking meth in the other room. Now by this time it's it feels like World War Three with, you know, two kids out of control

and me and Dave are in the middle and

you know, I have no no way to deal with all of this. I'm just not equipped and I have been in recovery on the other side for about 17 years by now. I knew the 12 steps. I had a relationship with God. My life was full of service work and sponsoring, but I was just I'll equipped to deal with the family illness. And I showed up at this Al Anon meeting to find a woman that I was going to ask to be my A a sponsor.

And they said, well, she's a double winner. You can always find her on Monday nights at Courage to Change. So I go to this album on meeting. I'm sitting there, all this

crazy stuff going on. I'm listening to their experience, strength and hope because it's birthday night and you know, it was no accident. It was no accident. I was meant to be. I was totally unprepared to deal with at this time what Doctor Paul calls control crisis that God brings about to catapult us into new dimensions. Now, I didn't feel like that. I was standing at the brink of great discovery. I felt like I was teetering on the

of a pit, a deep pit, and trying not to fall. But having been in recovery before, I knew what to do.

Get an Al Anon sponsor, do the steps, go to meetings, read the literature and dive into service. And that's what I did. Is there a clock in here?

Where did the clock go?

Yeah, I gotta have it up there. I'll. OK. OK. Thanks. All right,

so for the next year, I, I did all of those things and you know, I signed up to be the literature person. I got to meet people and shake hands. I began working the steps with my Al Anon sponsor. And when I did my 4th step, I thought it was going to be all about my two sons. But it turned out to be about every relationship I had, including the one I have with my husband. And you know, when I met Dave, he was my item, Shining blue jeans.

He came to me at a time when I was lonely and exhausted and emotionally needy, you know. But I have a little 5 year old at the time. And he swept in and he took control.

And I needed relief and he was there for me. And I leaned on him

and he, you know, he, he took care of every single aspect of our life.

But as I began to grow and mature, I began to resent these things that he was doing for me. But I never told him.

So he's managing this and managing that. And at one point I'm thinking, again, thanks for me that I don't want you to do and things that I should have been doing also because I would let him have responsibilities that I just, you know, didn't want to deal with. And I'll always be grateful to the first Al Anon sponsor I had because she was very gentle and she guided me around the things that I had built up for years inside of myself,

things that later walled me in, keeping me trapped in my own resentment. And she was patient and helping me see the problems and the realities and finding new ways of dealing with people and predicaments. And for showing me that I could build bridges instead of walls. And to learn the art of communication instead of expecting people to read your mind and being able to compromise. And showing me that there's no shame or guilt in doing these things.

And growth.

Dave and I have been together how many years now?

19 years

and you know I God's purpose between us have provided us with what I can only

described as a supernatural experience and our marriage has been awesome.

I've been grateful today for being such a wonderful father to the son that I brought into the marriage. And

he's also has a son and I want to tell you a little bit about him. I didn't see my stepson Caesar for the 1st 10 years we were married because he was a little paranoid. You know, Speedford, she just wave at him in the distance. You know, they don't want to come around. But the day came when Caesar decided he's going to take charge of his own destiny. And we were happy to participate. He was going to make some life changes and he had been in and out of jail and you know, now he wanted to start over. He was going to get a real job,

and so he stayed with us and he did get a job. You got a girlfriend, you got a car and all of that stuff, you know. But he didn't recognize the problem of alcoholism and addiction,

and that meant he needed more than what we could give. You know, family members cannot help other family members. We do not have the objectivity we need. We're too close to the problem. And so we had that long painful journey of letting go of this young man and it caused a lot of damage.

The alcoholism caused all these late night crisis, phone calls, legal problems, interruptions to our life,

many visits to jail.

Last one costed three years of this young life

when Caesar went to jail one summer. I'm still angry at him. And I knew the resentments were wrong and that they were fear based and that they would interfere in my relationship with the stepson and in my marriage. And I knew I had to do something. And I began to pray that God would give me a mother's heart for him.

So when Dave would dictate a letter for me to write to Caesar,

instead of me writing something critical or preachy or not writing anything, I started writing him notes of encouragement.

I started looking at the good things he was saying and doing.

When letters came from jail, I would read them today. Then I would not make any acid remarks or have self-righteous opinions added in. I'll just read the letter

and I started praying for him like he was my own son.

By the time he got out of prison, I was able to welcome him home sincerely.

I saw not an arrogant, self-centered young man that left, but a humble, broken child of God hoping for another chance at life.

We laid out a plan of action for him to follow as he tried to start life anew. One of the rules was he couldn't be in the house alone if we left. He went with us. And as it happened those first few weeks, Dave and I were speaking at, at clubs all over, you know, recovery places all over Texas. And he heard our stories. And one night he came up behind me and he put his arms around me

and he said, I'm really proud to be part of who you are.

I hope one day I can be like you.

It was a beautiful moment, one of true intimacy, one that would never have occurred had I continued to harbor resentment, selfishness, dishonesty, and fear.

I began to see my problems. Are not these other people in my life my fear and my pride?

We have the three C's in Al Anon. You can't cure the disease. You can't control the disease. You didn't cause the disease.

Tell you one more thing you can sure contribute to the disease.

How Al Anon works is our changed attitudes, aid, recovery

and it talks about that in the big book. In the chapter that arrives it says this. We have elsewhere remarked how much better life is when lived on a spiritual plan. If God can solve the age-old Riddle of alcoholism, he can solve your problems too. We found that we wives who are afflicted with pride, self pity, vanity, all the things that go to make up the self-centered person and we were not above selfishness or dishonesty. As our husbands begin to apply spiritual principles in their lives, we began to see the desirability of doing so too.

You know, I can be a solid insult or I can be a solid compliment

to someone in my life.

Doctor Paul loves to talk about acceptance. He speaks of being in the palm of God's hands and he spoke of writing 3C's. He said today I will not condemn, I will not complain, and I will not criticize anyone or anything

I know about you, but that's the tall order for me,

he writes in his story, in the Big Book, Shakespeare said all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. He forgot to mention I was a chief critic.

I was always able to see the flaw in every person, every situation. I was always glad to point it out because I knew you wanted perfection just as I did. Acceptance has taught me that there's a bit of good and the worst of us and a bit of bad and the best of us, and we are all children of God

and we have a right to be here.

When I complain about me or about you, I'm complaining about God's handiwork, and I'm saying that I know better than God.

I remember this passage when I think about the people who are still in the disease.

Step one for me says that I'm powerless over someone else's alcoholism.

Step 2 insanity for me is that I think I can control the alcoholic and make him behave.

That is obsession. Because if I'm thinking about his drinking or if I'm thinking about his not drinking, I'm still in the problem, right?

And how Al Anon works, it says, developing an ability to see things as they really are and to find healthier, more appropriate ways of dealing with the people and the circumstances we encounter is not always easier. Comfortable.

Most of us had good reasons for hiding certain information from ourselves. It hurt. It probably still does. It isn't easy to see the suffering of a loved one. To admit even to ourselves that a close relative has sexually or physically abused us. To come to grips with the fact that people we have turned to for love and acknowledgement are incapable of giving it. Or to recognize that we ourselves have become narrow minded,

vindictive, pessimistic, fearful, submissive, despondent, despondent,

nagging, petty, shrewish, controlling, narrow minded, or overbearing.

Those are al Anon slips,

it goes on to say. We may be dismayed to find that the negative thinking and behavior that we had developed to protect us from the painful experiences of our life have in fact seeped into every corner of our world. It's as if we allowed our defense mechanism to protect us from all of life, and trying to avoid the unpleasant aspects of our lives, we've also missed out on many of the joys. In short,

I've found

that a clenched fist cannot receive the grace of God

and I'm really grateful for the principles of our program

taught me this and grateful for the healing in my family, especially now,

you know, with my step senses or things. We're not always perfect then, but they were a lot better than they used to be.

And time. Instead of jail and cellmates, Caesar found a family and home. Instead of cooking meth or selling drugs, he built his own business.

He brought us a beautiful granddaughter. He continues to bring us joy.

During these years, As long as I continue to remember that my purpose in this situation was to encourage and help Caesar and to treat him as I would a newcomer, then I could get out of the way and let things be. And remember that there is a bit of good and the worst of us and a bit of bad and the best of us.

This last September,

Caesar came over and we had a nice visit. We talked about making popcorn balls and carbon pumpkins and maybe having a little family barbecue in the backyard. We were looking forward to that first cool snap. What made the visit nice was how normal it was. There was no crisis, no request for many, no tension, no problems. I just began to relax

and to believe that finally things could be OK. It'd been two years of Caesar live in a fairly normal life,

sober.

And then on Tuesday I got a call.

They said Caesar had been in a car accident.

Heart had stopped under the way the hospital.

They were unable to revive him,

sorry, they said, but he has died.

Out of all the possible scenarios I pictured for our future, I never imagined this one

tragedy had cast a shadow

across our path and threatened to block the sunlight of the Spirit.

But the arms of the fellowship reached out to embraces,

and over the next few days God showed Himself and carried us purpose in many, many ways.

At a time of great need, I can say that God did not disappear from us,

that He made himself visible through all of you.

And Dave and I will never be able to fully express our thanks to the fellowship

for the way that you were there for us.

You know, my faith has been built most in the last few years over the slow process of surrendering to God. My own son, Sean,

he was a very wonderful, strong willed, bright child. You know, I'm going to say that I'm his mother. And it took a lot of consistency and discipline and encouragement and unity and prayer to raise him well.

And, you know, when he came back from living with his dad, we had a really on and off relationship for a while because, you know, there were times that he would be rude. He would hang up. And I'd say, Sean, we're not, We don't act that way in this house. And I might not hear from him for six months. But I had to stick to my convictions and not let fear be the thing that ran my life. And so, you know, I didn't let go of my principles.

I really wanted to be with him when he was with his dad. You know, you want to be there to see that he's brushing his, brushing his teeth, doing his homework, you know, hanging out with the right people.

But I don't think proximity really guarants any of us guarantees us anything.

Then when he was 16, he stepped off a bus and he ran out in front of a car and he got hit. Breckenridge Hospital called and said they found a library card in his pocket and they traced him to me. He had a head injury and so we left for the hospital. Dave and I found him bloody and unconscious on a Gurney and we prayed over him

and I wanted to stay with him for 24 hours a day until he got well. And prayer was my mainstay during this time. Because the the doctors can't tell you what's going to happen. They don't know how it's going to turn out. When someone has a head injury, they don't know. They can't tell you from one day to the next what's going to happen. So here I am facing powerlessness like I've never experienced it before. Is he going to live or is he going to die?

Is he gonna come back with everything or will he be a vegetable? You see, modern science can only go so far. The rest of it is in God's hands.

So Dave continued to encourage me saying Norma, God is going to find a gift to miss for us

no matter where. Thank you.

Well, Sean's and I see you who's there for 12 days and his dad shows up

and he told me to get out.

He said you don't have a right to be here. Sean doesn't want you here. I don't want you here. Leave. Well, you know, imagine this. Your son has a head injury. He's still in ICU. He can't really talk. He's not conscious. He's in the middle of, you know, this state and the ex-husband wants his own mother to leave. Nobody could believe this. So I went to the nurse

and we sat pouring over every legal document I could find,

trying to find a loophole, find something that would allow me to stay. But when I, you know, gave custody over to the father, I never imagined I would need legal protection.

I was a loud visitation rights and nothing really covered this situation. And so the nurse left and said I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do.

And at that point I did the only thing I knew to do.

I held the papers in one hand and I got down on my knees

and I said the third step prayer.

I said, God, I can't imagine why you would not want me to be by my son's side today, but if it's your will, then I accept it. In one day, maybe I'll know why.

And I picked myself up and I left.

I didn't expect to see Sean again

the next day, though. I got a call early in the morning from the nurse and she said we're going to have a meeting, We're going to work things out.

So I'll arrive at 9:00 in this hospital room with this huge polished ball in that table. There's about 15 people there. There's my ex-husband is there, the nurse, the chaplain, the bouncer, the at risk. I don't know who I was there, you know, and I'm still a shell of a person. I haven't slept, I haven't eaten, you know, and, and my ex is mouthing off and I don't know, you know, it's all lies. I, I can't combat it. I have nothing in me, you know,

and

it's all going nowhere.

And then something happened that later I saw as miraculous. One of the young nurses caring for Sean quietly spoke up. She said, Sir, did you know that when his mother's with him, his vital signs begin to perk up on the monitor?

I said no, I didn't know that.

And she said yes, Sir. And when he sits beside him during the day, he is calm, but when she's not there, he becomes combative and we have to sedate him.

He said no, I didn't know that she said yes, Sir. And as long as his mother's beside him during the night, he'll go to sleep. But when she leaves he tries to get up and follow him and we have to tie him down to the bed to keep him from injuring himself.

Big old 16 year old boy tied to the bed at night.

My ex said

no. I didn't know these things were happening and I don't want my son drugged or tied down. Well, I guess she can stay

now. Have you had the power that day?

Did the state of Texas have the power? Breckenridge Hospital have the power of my ex-husband? Me. No. God had the power that day and I stayed with him until he fully recovered. OK, well, he has a limp that has exempted him from the military service. But, you know, Oh, well,

Sean left the hospital and he went back, back to live with his dad. And that created more fear in me, you know. And but the day came when he and his father had a falling out, as I knew they would, you know, and they came to blows with each other. And he came back to live with Dave and I. So Sean is home. I should be happy, right? No. Went through six months of hell because as I said, the young man that came home was not the same one

as the child that left. And all these characteristics that he has, you know,

are exhibiting themselves and he he won't follow no house rules. He's arrogant, he's rude, he's out of control and dangerous, you know, because he would leave at any time, be gone for days. He might drive my car, which he has no license. But you know, once he hit a police car with my car, that's all the problem. The police took away the license that he didn't have, you know, So OK, I didn't have to be the bad guy. Good, you know,

And, you know, we're legally responsible for all of this. And so, you know, the hardest moment of my life appeared when I had to forever let him go to suffer the consequences of this decision. If he could not follow our house rules, then he had to leave

and go back to debt.

And he didn't go back to death. He went to youth shelter. CPS stepped in and made him a ward of the state. And so the next few years, we're crazy because he's in foster care. He's going through trauma or drama. And, you know, some days it's my way, some days it's suicide attempts. You know, I mean, he never really tried to kill himself. He's too much of A weenie for that. But he certainly could act it up, you know,

and, you know, but for me, I'm getting these calls at work, and I don't know what to do. And I'm still, you know, hurting over all of this. And so, you know, it was traumatic. It was traumatic for him, and it was traumatic for me. And the only way I survived was by focusing on the truth today,

focusing on prayer and on service and remembering because that just because I don't see the evidence, past experience shows me that God is on the scene working behind the wings now. I really wanted the clock to turn back. I wanted that little boy in his room with his toys and his Cowboys. You know, I couldn't accept that Sean was grown up.

And you know, it's been a lot of time

back.

I wasted precious moments of today looking for years I thought I had been stolen from me,

that God caused his own misery. I caused my own measure. God didn't do it. CS Lewis's Pain is God's clearing call to a deaf world.

A is 12 and 12 says pain is the touchstone of growth in which our character is carved.

I can tell you pain propels my program.

You know nothing and no one could touch the powerlessness I was feeling during this time. I was forced by circumstances to my knees again and God came through because during these years my faith became strong as I began to live the solution this program offers. The mainstay of my sanity was to throw myself into service work every night of the week. I was working one-on-one with someone

over the grip, being step work, speaking at treatment centers, sharing my experience, strengthen hope and looking for that newcomer. Walking in the door

one year at Christmas, I was pretty depressed. You know, Sean wasn't there. I tried to put on a brave face for Dave sake, you know, have a Merry Christmas. And the phone rings. It's 8:00 in the morning. It's one of my sponsors. And I talked with her for about 30 minutes and, you know, I hung up the phone and my life didn't look so bad after that. It was,

it was one of those things and you know, it talks in the big book about Bill going to his old hospital and despair and many times there he would be amazingly lifted up and sat on his feet. A design for living that works in rough going. See, we don't need a design for living that works when things are good. We need it for the rough going times.

Sometimes I'd get a call from Mark. Well, he's run away. We don't know where he is. We'll let you know. One night, it was the coldest night of the year. I was crying. His foster mother was crying and his social worker was crying. All the women were crying over this kid out in the cold, you know, And I would just wipe away my tear and I would go do a third step with one girl

or 4th step with another girl. I don't know what they got out of it, but God gave me what I needed that day, every single time.

I refuse to sink into worried remorse, morbid reflection. I focused on the present today. I envisioned only the good. You know, fear can almost, you know, create your own destiny if you let it.

And I prayed for other teenagers, and I think I helped a few

during this time when I had so much uncertainty, so much fear, and such great despair. I felt like I was the one that God carried when there was just one set of footsteps in the sand. I was experienced that kind of faith that works under all circumstances. And I lived and breathed that third step every day,

not with the resignation, but with strength. It was my power.

This is a time when I found I wasn't carrying the message. The message was carrying me into a place of comfort and conviction. Whatever I needed,

you know, God transformed me through all of this.

I remember why I fully surrendered, Sean. I wrote about it in my journal. I had gotten another letter marked returned to sender on Mother's Day.

It was his handwriting. And that was the day I finally broke and I just stopped giving him the power to hurt me.

And I wrote this.

I realized how much I've continued struggling to make something happen between me and my son, and the failure of each effort has further depressed me and pushed me into despair. And now, even when I shall go, I have great faith that God will restore my son to me. I was still whistling in the dark, pretending happiness, still afraid and doubtful.

I realize that for me, my son was my drag of choice, but I'm only happy when he's in a relationship with me, unhappy when he's not. And while we're on, I'm still miserable, afraid it will end if I don't do or say the right thing.

And I desperately try to buy His love, my emails, my phone calls, or acts of desperation. And that He sometimes manipulates me because He knows my fear will do anything to drive me to get another visit. I feel guilty for going on with my life. My prayers are tainted with begging and pleading to God. Dear God, I hope today I can put my desire on the altar.

And put first the desire for your will in my life and in my son's life.

I hope I can base my future happiness on my relationship with you, not on the presence or absence of my son. I pray I can accept this day for what it is and let you make things happen in your own time. As my efforts have failed miserably. Help me surrender this desire. Give me strength and peace

no matter what my present circumstances are. Help me to look for your will today, not my son, And help me to be more grateful for the rich, beautiful life I have and for each person in it.

I never returned to a level of despair like that again.

I cried out in anguish and God answered me with freedom.

You know faith isn't really faith until it's all you got left to hang on to.

And if my response to anguish had been to sit at the door of God's pity, God's purpose, and enter the slow death of self pity, I wouldn't be the person I am today. Pain without purpose is just pain. The uncertainties and impossibilities in my life without God. That's a purely human experience. But when I got in and learn whatever it is I'm supposed to learn and turn in faith to Him,

then and only then does God assign a purpose to my pain

and use it for a higher good in my life and in the lives of others. When all I have is my misery and my fear against life's and possibilities, I'm left with nothing but depression and despair. But when I can invite God in against the impossibilities of my life and against my fear, then what was a human experience now becomes a divine one, and God can weigh any balance.

I heard someone say something once that I have never forgotten.

If God can accomplish His purpose in this world through a broken heart, then I have to thank Him for breaking mine,

Bill Wilson said. The good is the enemy of the best.

It took me a long time to understand what did he mean by that, but I finally understood one day. He meant that what's a good thing for him may not be what is best for everyone. Only God knows what's really best. And when I don't have to know it all, then I can live in the present moment and trust that God will protect and provide for me today, tomorrow, and in the future. Living by faith, not sight. Blind faith

when I can get to this place in my heart and mind.

It's a place beyond acceptance of life's uncertainties, beyond surrender. It's a place of total abandonment. Abandonment of all of me, all I have, all I am, and all I know.

My husband calls it free. Falling into the grace of God,

can I let go of all I wish to happen in my life for what God wants to happen instead?

And believing this, can I understand that if it is God's will, it's better than anything I could possibly dream up? It says that in the big. But when we look back, we realize the things that came to us when we put ourselves in God's hands were better than anything we could have planned. Follow the dictates of a higher power and you will presently live in a new and wonderful world no matter what your present circumstances. See there are two worlds I can live in,