I Appreciate the Wake-Up Call, Officer—I’ll Just Be on My Way Now – Jonathan

About This Speaker Tape

Jonathan shares his story from Shelby, North Carolina, describing a childhood in a Southern Baptist home where everything was right — no abuse, no dysfunction, just respected parents who practiced solid principles. Despite that upbringing, he felt like an outsider from an early age, never quite measuring up, always shape-shifting to fit whoever he was around. At 16 he started drinking and immediately drank differently from his peers, quickly losing interest in school, relationships, and everything that didn't involve alcohol. By the time he graduated high school he'd already been to jail.

After a friend got sober in a Texas rehab, Jonathan had an intense spiritual experience alone in his room — the obsession lifted and he threw himself into church work, eventually moving to Kansas City as a youth pastor. But without inventory, honesty, or any real program of action, the bedevilments set in: crippling depression, isolation, inability to connect. He white-knuckled it for three years before relapsing on a beach trip with a girlfriend, and the progression slammed him back to where he'd left off within months. Pills entered the picture alongside alcohol, and the disease accelerated.

Multiple cycles of consequences, geographical cures, and dry stretches followed — each one ending the same way. He describes the utter inability to leave it alone despite desperate necessity, welcoming the idea of death because he knew he could not stop. After a dramatic arrest where he essentially engineered his own capture, he ended up in a hospital in Greer, South Carolina, then a 28-day treatment center where recovered alcoholics handed him the Big Book and told him bluntly that without the steps he would not stay sober.

Jonathan connected with a sponsor who asked him what he was thinking rather than what he was doing, and through that honest fifth step he experienced real human connection for the first time. He describes the quiet that replaced the constant voices of self-doubt, the ability to walk into a room and actually like people. Now he sponsors two men, guiding them rapidly through the steps, and is starting a new Saturday night meeting in his area because there isn't one — on what he calls one of the biggest drinking nights of the week.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and reading from There Is a Solution — the passage about passengers rescued from shipwreck
• 4:00 Growing up in a Southern Baptist home with no one to blame — feeling like an outsider from childhood
• 8:00 Started drinking at 16, immediately drank differently from peers, jail before graduating high school
• 14:00 Friend goes to rehab in Dallas — Jonathan has a spiritual experience alone in his room and gets sober through church
• 20:00 Three years dry as a youth pastor in Kansas City — crippling depression, the bedevilments without a program
• 28:00 Relapse on a beach trip — Crown and gingers at a surfside bar, physical allergy kicks in harder than ever
• 35:00 Progression into pills alongside alcohol — mother finds them, confrontation at grandmother's house
• 42:00 Arrested by high school classmate — shoplifting alcohol, passing out behind the wheel, threatening suicide in jail
• 50:00 Old-timer from Lawrence Road Group visits the hospital — 100 years old with cataracts, smiling and filled with joy
• 55:00 Working the steps with a sponsor who asked what he was thinking — now sponsoring others and starting a Saturday night meeting