The 11th Step


"We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out."   Step 11

I've been told, over the years, by conservative Christians that following the 12 Steps of addiction recovery is something that
I, as a practicing christian, should stay away from because the 12 Steps: You can probably imagine, then, the looks on their faces when I tell them that if it weren't for A.A. I wouldn't be the Christian that I am today. What you will find in these pages are the tools that I've used in my own recovery for over 18 years. It's also the story of my spiritual journey

It all started in the parking lot of a bar in Virginia Beach, VA. in the summer of 1984, a couple of months out of rehab and aftercare, when I got down on my knees and said "God, help me, I don't want to go back to the way I was!"

That prayer was from the gut. The feeling and emotion behind it came from a place I didn't know existed. In rehab I'd "done the steps", gone to group, and attended meetings. Afterwards I did the 90 days of aftercare, the "90 meetings in 90 days", and I was starting to feel good about myself, not to mention starting to feel again.

One night some friends asked me to be their "designated driver" so that they could go out and party and I said no problem. After about an hour of sitting in this bar and smelling the booze and staring at my friends beer bottle I knew that if I didn't get out of there I was going to get drunk and I realized that I didn't want that anymore.

I left the bar and went outside and that's when that prayer came out of nowhere from a place I didn't know existed and the desire to drink was lifted from me and hasn't returned. I got in my car and went to the "Waffles and Things" on the corner of Laskin Rd. and Pacific where a bunch of my A.A. friends met and hung out there drinking coffee and talking and went home around 2 A.M.

I knew that something had happened that night, I talked to God, and he listened and responded. I knew that I wanted to talk more but I didn't know how because I'd never been raised in a church as a child and I though all church people were hypocrites so I started frequenting a "New Age" bookstore down the street from "Waffles" and picked up a bible and a bible study called "Search the Scriptures" by an author I don't remember. I started getting on my knees at night thanking God for helping me get through the day and in the morning to ask him to help me through the day and to thank him for allowing me to have another day.

You notice I was doing all the talking, but, I wasn't listening. It wasn't until after I'd moved to Wyoming and joined a church here, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), in the early '90s that I discovered that prayer is more effective if you take the time to LISTEN to what God has to say to you. In other words, meditation.

I knew a little about meditation, the eastern variety but that didn't seem to fit with the christian turn my spiritual journey was taking. It wasn't until I read two books by Richard j. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth and Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home that I learned about a form of Ancient Christian Meditation called "Lectio Divina", or sacred reading, and a form of prayer called "Centering Prayer".