"But for the Grace of God..."

This is story I submitted to "The Grape Vine." A magazine published by A.A. They were looking for stories that realted to some of their "slogans." This story is about one that use at times: "But for the Grace of God, there go I." Anyway, they rejected it.

Back in the day, back before I stopped drinking, back before my conscientious relationship with God, and back before I knew A.A., I had a job. This job came to me like any other job for me back then: I was unemployed and either in the middle of a binge drinking period or just getting out of one. I can recall the day I got hired, the day they told me about how much money I would be making. The money would be close to double what I had ever earned before in my short life time. That day I drove home thinking, “Alright!! More money for beer!” Looking back now, I should have been grateful to God to have such a wonderful opportunity. I had not worked for over four months, plus, I had just been barely scrapping by, living from paycheck to paycheck, at my previous job. This new job had started out as nothing more than a means to pay bills, but I found myself working into management. Even though I thought this was what I wanted as my career, I had no focus other than making more money. Drinking was still my main focus in life. Before I knew it, nine years went by, along with my youth (nearly all of my twenties).
By the ninth year into that job, my life had begun to fall apart and my drinking had gotten worse. My first child came to me, but a few short weeks later, my wife tossed me out. She took our house and most of our possessions, along with my son. For two years prior, I had been binging heavily. Before this time, I was fun to be around when I drank. The life of the party, but a short time before my ex became pregnant, I became mean when I drank. Soon, I started being mean and angry when sober. Before, I just wanted to have fun, then, it turned into vengeance and an outward expression of deep rooted anger. I was angry at my miserable life, stuck in a job I hated, married to a women I thought I despised. I hated the World and everything about it. I was angry at a God that I did not understand or know. Deep down, my anger was actually directed toward myself for not having done anything with my life. Thirty was just around the corner and I hated myself. Yet, I could not see that alcohol was keeping me from doing what I wanted, even though I had no idea what that might be. Each day after the divorce, I became angrier and drank even more. Anger ruled my life, even when I was not drinking. Then, my health began to fail. Heartburn began to accompany my anger, keeping me awake at night and spoiling any enjoyment I got from drinking. My heartburn progressed to the point that after one drink, I would become ill and vomited blood. This would never do, would it? I could not keep drinking with this in the way. After all, alcohol was my only foreseeable future.
A quick trip to the doctor told me that I had ulcers. Just follow this very strict, very bland diet and take this really expense medication for two months and I’ll be right as rain. No alcohol, no caffeine, no spicy food, pretty much nothing for two months. No problem. A quick hiatus and then I’ll be back to my drinking and hating live without the bleeding and loss of sleep from heartburn. However, I would not return to drinking.
One month into my drinking vacation, my closest friend died in an alcohol related car accident. The night before the services, I went to her wake (“viewing” some call it). The nature of the accident would not allow for an open casket, so her mother had placed many photo collages of my friend in front of her casket. My friend was the type of person who loved taking photos, especially at our parties. Of, course, I was in many of those party
photos, drinking, drunk or getting there. This was my moment of humiliation, my moment of self-actualization. I stood there, looking at myself in those photos, a drunk. A lousy, worthless, angry drunken shell of a human being for all to see; forever immortalized in a friend’s innocent attempts to remember the fun times with loved ones. My embarrassment was over-whelming. I struggled hard, fighting the urge to just grab those damned photos and burn them all. I did not want anyone to see what a poor excuse for humanity I was then. Of course, that was ridiculous. Everyone that would be in attendance knew I was a big drinker. Many were in the pictures, themselves, drinking with me. Besides, those photos had not been placed there just to harm me. What had been meant as an innocent celebration and memorial for a grieving mother’s lost daughter turned into an act of God for me.
At that moment, I lost my desire to drink. Whatever it was that motivated me to drink, whatever had been inside me that drove me to get drunk whenever I drank, whatever was inside of me that fed my self-destructive behaviors, was taken from me, buried along with my best friend that next day. To those who knew me and her then, this may come as a shock or maybe produce feelings of disgust, for she was dearly loved by many. Some may take offense to know that during her wake, I was selfishly not feeling sorrow and grieve from the loss of such a wonderful person, but thinking of myself. To those people, all I can say is that I have felt pain, grieve, sorrow, and quilt every day for her over the last twelve years.
Shortly after that fateful night, I lost that job. Before then, though, I lost all of those drinking buddies I thought were my friends. Six months after getting fired, I found myself alone, jobless, and deeply depressed. I had no friends, no wife or girlfriend, no money, and sold most of my few material belongings to pay rent and child support. All appeared to me, lost, but I did have something: my son and a ton of mental health issues. After a couple of suicide attempts, I found my way to God and the wisdom of A.A.
What seems like an eternity latter, I have been able to look back at this and see how God graced me with these lessons that taught me the errors of my drunken ways. I have since worked hard to help others and repay to God the blessings of recovery. I made a promise to myself to never return to the kind of job or any other that was not helping others. However, after seven years of sobriety and near completion of a college degree in psychology, I had to return to the same type of job as before. Although this job was with a different company, it was in the same type of business: a grocery store.
My financial situation at the time was dire and this job paved well. Plus, it allowed me the flexibility to continue with my education and to realize my desire to work for God. For the first few weeks, anxiety suffocated my senses. All of those old pains, fears, feelings, and memories of drinking and my lost friend flooded my mind, drowning me with reliving a past that I had hoped was already closed.
One particular evening, I was standing in the isle of this store, trying to focus on the items on the shelf that I was working. Suddenly, this intense feeling, this intense need to just leave, overtook me. Either end of the isle seemed hundreds of miles away. My body was frozen with fear. “Why, God? Why am I made to be here and suffer so? There has to be other jobs, doesn’t there? Have I not turned my life over to You to do good for others? I’ll work for less pay, for free, if need be!” Then, a voice called my name.
The voice was a former co-worker from the other store. A person with whom I had partied with on several occasions and someone I had not seen since leaving there. He was drunk. As he stood there, swaying to and fro, he expelled his foul stench of alcoholism upon me. He told me of how he and others who had at one time professed to being my good friends, had stolen from the store in an attempt to get me fired from my management position. Obviously, it had worked. “I thought you had a good job,” he told me with demeaning intent, referring to a job I had at the U.S. Postal Service before I went back to school. “Now your back in this sorry place. What happened to you?” he added with sarcasm. Before I could react, telling him God and sobriety had happened to me, he staggered off to make his purchase. When I reflect upon that moment, I can recall how awful he looked. His face was flush from years of alcohol abuse, his eyes dark and sunken, his posture slumped. Had I looked as he back in my drinking days? Was it that obvious to others? I suspect that both questions can easily be answered “yes.” However, I failed to see, until latter, the blessing of our ‘chance’ encounter.
Time past at that job. Eventually, everyone knew me as a non-drinker and a person in pursuit of goals that did not pertain to drinking and material gains. This, however, did not endear me to them, serving only to alienate me from nearly everyone. My boss was himself, an alcoholic, stuck in his drinking. A man who went to the bars nightly, drinking until the early hours of the next day. Often, he came to work drunk. Even though I seldom shared my life with any of them, I would be ridiculed often by them. The only way any of them knew of my sobriety was after my repeated declines to join them for drinks and their relentless pressuring and questioning. Yet, through out all of this, I did not give into drinking nor pushed A.A.’s or my ideals on them. However, on several occasions, those same people who, as a group, ridiculed me for my chosen lifestyle, would privately seek my advise. Their destructive drinking habits and lack of faith in God were so very obvious to me as the source of their suffering. Yet, I did not pass judgment on them. I would listen to them, doing my best to give short, simple advise when asked. Their unhappiness was not spoken of by me or with them unless they approached me first. Despite their apathy, I would give them the best I knew how. Then, I got moved over to the freezer section.
This new job was perfect for me. The shift meant coming in early in the morning, 3:30 AM, and gave me time to pursue my B.A. with late afternoon and early evening classes. Plus, it was such a great relief to be alone in my own little section of the store and away from the taunting. One morning, a particular fellow employee approached me with a concern. This guy had really started to drink heavily in the past six months or so. His drinking was having a very negative effect on his life. His wife had left him and he was on the verge of getting fired. Many, many times in the past three months, he had missed work because he had been out all night drinking. Coming into work drunk was grounds for automatic termination (although the store manger was doing it almost daily), so he had taken to calling in sick, some times, three times a week. Everyone knew it was because of his drinking. His situation progressed to the point that he had stopped calling in and would just not show up for his shift. Everyone knew it, so why hide it.
On this day, he came over to my little corner of the store, drunk, reeking of alcoholism, and asked me, “What am I supposed to do?” This was the day after one of his no shows at work. He had received an ultimatum a few days prior, but chose to drink anyway, missing yet another day of work. “What am I supposed to do here,” he told me with anger, looking for empathy. “If I show up drunk, I get fired. If I call in, I get fired.” He went on to complain further about his plight, but I do not recall his words. In my mind, I was screaming, “Hello! Your forgetting door number three here! You know, the not drinking one.” However, I kept quiet.
“What is this about, God?” I asked myself. Then, ideas came to me. I wanted to help, maybe give some suggestions instead of passing judgment upon him. I thought to tell him that maybe he could wait, maybe drink on his days off or at least, not drink so much before coming to work. You know, maybe go home before the bars close at 2:00 AM, a short hour and a half before our shift begins. Then, he started complaining about how coming in so early interfered with his drinking. This was ironic since it was his idea in the first place to change our shifts because coming in at 8:00 PM meant missing out on going to the bars. Before I could say anything, he walked off.
Maybe this was for the best. Would he have listened to me? Would I have listened back in my drinking days? The answers are certainly “no.” In fact, hearing those words back then or any other suggestions of drinking reduction would have prompted me to further binge. Latter that morning, he stormed out of the store in anger, having received a three day suspension and a promise of termination for another no show incident. He would latter be fired, a short two weeks latter, for more no show/no calls.
As I watched him walk out the door that morning, a feeling came over me. Sure, I felt sorrow with a deep desire to reach out to him, but this feeling was a revelation from God, a self-actualization again. This was, in a sad way, very comforting for me. This thought was an expression I had heard before, at meetings, from others recovering, and from others I had met who were not recovering, but seeking God. This time, instead of thinking about advise, holding back my thoughts, I voiced aloud, to no one there, “But for the Grace of God, there go I.”
At first, I viewed this job as karma. Then, after a short period, I discovered that I was working through some unresolved issues and gaining closure. There was more than just that though. I was grateful for the monetary means it provided me, but the exact nature of why again in a grocery store had eluded me. Why had I been placed back at a job that was not helping others? Now, I know. God had placed me here not just to help me pay my way through college and work through some issues, but to show me the wonders of God’s work. All of these difficult events I’ve described here, plus many others not mentioned, where the Grace of God. How intricate, well conceived and perfectly executed this Plan had been, all aimed at me, all intended to get me to stop my drinking for good. The ulcers, the loss of a very dear friend, and all of the other loss, all part of the Plan, and now, the torment from alcohol blind co-workers. Of course, I am not the soul beneficiary of this Work, but I, from the Grace of God, can now see these events in this way. At that moment, standing there in the freezer isle of a grocery store at 6:30 AM, I knew that but for the Grace of God, I could easily still be a person who’s life is a complete mess from alcohol abuse.
Four years latter, I am now working on a Masters degree and no longer working at that job. My money situation is far worse now, but that is not important. My pursuit of God is the True importance in life. Recently, I saw this guy again. He is still drinking and jobless, having lost several other jobs due to drinking. Thank you God, for your Grace, for if not for You, I would still be blinded by alcohol and living a pointless, empty life of alcoholism. Some people are looking for help and others are at point in their life’s to at least be willing to listen, if nothing else. My mentor here is, unfortunately for him, not one of them. Drinking still blinds him to the Truth and the errors of his ways, as it did me. If not for God’s thorough Work, I would still be blind. It pains me to say, yet I am thankful for the message, but for the Grace of God...