Higher Power Kept Me Sober Until I Started Keeping the Credit Myself – Tim R.
About This Speaker Tape
Tim R., sober since April 30, 2007, tells a long-memory story that starts before he was born — Air Force captain father killed in Tokyo when Tim was six, a little sister age three, a six-year-old being told at a 21-gun salute funeral to be the man of the house. What follows is a kid carrying the weight of the world: cellulitis in his left knee at eight, a hospital room where he watched the boy next to him lose his foot, then his leg, then his life. Tim stole his first cigarette from his mother at eight and was up to a pack a day by fifth grade. By high school he was flipping ounces of pot to fund the habit, and by UGA he had discovered amphetamines and mixing drinks while studying so he could keep drinking during tests.
The career middle is a computer startup that grew to thirty-six stores and $165 million before an IBM audit snatched their distributor ticket and the whole thing imploded. Tim rode the bankruptcy down for seven years. He flew to a Halliburton project with a water bottle full of vodka, ordered a real bottle of water from the flight attendant, and mixed water into water over ice while the stranger next to him watched. A Fulton County DUI judge threw the book at him — thirty days, license gone, court-ordered psychologist three times a week at sixty-five dollars a session. Tim sold the psychologist a computer at cost and, as the first invoice generated, made him print and sign a letter declaring 'Tim R. is cured of alcoholism.' The probation officer called the doctor, who confirmed it. Tim drank for twenty more years.
The turn came when his diabetic mother told him, crying, that he had been too drunk the night before to help her. Tim got on his knees and asked a Higher Power for the strength not to drink. The craving lifted. Then he started looking in the mirror and taking the credit himself — willpower, he called it — and prayed no more. A year in, at a friend's funeral, another drinking buddy looked at him in disbelief when Tim said he had done it without AA, without a Higher Power, on willpower alone: 'Well, you must be one of those AA miracles I hear about.' Tim's mother had a stroke, broke her hip, got thrown out of six nursing homes because of him. He relapsed three months hard. His sister took him to his first meeting.
That first meeting was David C., sponsored by Bill Sanders, telling his own story — and Tim heard himself in it. He called Bill, who answered the machine with 'have a great day, unless you have other plans,' and called him back in three minutes and talked to him for two hours. Tim closes with Larry Scott's old-timer's prayer — asking for wings to get to the point, the grace to listen to newcomers, the freedom of promptly admitting when he is wrong, and the willingness to be a worker among workers instead of a bleeding deacon.
Discussion
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