The Healing Journey

August 4, 2024

“You are not alone.”
— Alcoholics Anonymous slogan

When Don walked into his 12-step meeting, he saw the familiar sign on the speaker’s table that said, “You are not alone.” He sighed. As a recovering alcoholic, he had seen the sign for many years and believed it, but since his wife Cheryl died, if someone asked, he would be certain to respond, “I’m all alone now.” Even his friends in the program, as compassionate and caring as they were, couldn’t take away the pain, although they kept in constant touch with him to make sure he didn’t pick up a drink, which is always a temptation for a recovering alcoholic confronting a crisis.

At night, when he was alone in bed, he prayed that he could be with her again because there didn’t seem to be anything to look forward to in life. It was unfair that she had died, but it was even more unfair, he thought, that he was expected to go on without her. He didn’t want to go on living. He prayed, and then God seemed to answer his prayer in a very strange way.

He put people in Don’s path whose lives seemed to be coming undone. At first he thought, “Isn’t it bad enough that my world collapsed, why the heck are these people coming to me?”

One was a young man whose wife and young son had left him because of his drinking. Another was a man who had stopped drinking only to have his wife come down with cancer and his son arrested for drugs. It took a while for Don to feel compassion again, but when he saw what they were going through, he couldn’t help but share their pain. Their troubles seemed to help him take his mind off his. Helping them gave him purpose. And then he had the dream. In the dream, there were people struggling to overcome their addiction to alcohol, and he was with them, and for a fraction of a second when he looked into the crowd, he saw Cheryl … smiling at him. And he realized. He wasn’t alone.

***