Hope is a good thing

Practicing the principle of Step Two

“The Al-Anon Family Groups are a fellowship of relatives and friends of alcoholics who share their experience, strength, and hope in order to solve their common problems. We believe alcoholism is a family illness and that changed attitudes can aid recovery.”

- Al-Anon Suggested Preamble to the Twelve Steps

“If that degree of humility could enable us to find the grace by which such a deadly obsession could be banished, then there must be hope of the same result respecting any other problem we could possibly have.”

-Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (Step Seven)

I love The Shawshank Redemption. It has always been one of my favorite movies. It was also an incredible novella by Stephen King, the full title being Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. So much hope in this film. When everything, and I mean everything, went wrong for Andy Dufresne, who spent nearly three decades in prison, his best friend and longtime prisoner Red delivered the most powerful statement of the movie:

Hope is a good thing.

I had so many hopes for myself. And I could never quite reach my dreams due to my alcoholism. The same was true with the alcoholic relationship. I had a dream for us that could never be realized, even though I was sober. Needless to say, I was pretty hopeless as I hit two bottoms, first when I surrendered to my own disease, and second, when I surrendered to his.

Alcoholism is a tragedy. It is the great eraser that takes away everything meaningful in life. Because I work with quite a few newcomers in both programs, I get to continually witness the effects of this disease and the hopelessness it causes. Families, jobs, homes, God— they all disappear at the behest of King Alcohol.

It is a spiritual paradox of our recovery that complete hopelessness is usually required as the admission price to sobriety. And to Al-Anon recovery. I had to be completely out of ideas about how to stop my drinking on my own. Later I had to run out of plans on how to manipulate the alcoholic into sobriety. None of it was working—and this was a good thing. To be at the absolute bottom without a sliver of hope was exactly what was needed in each case.

At each of these bottoms I could finally let God in.

I have spent so much of my life in self-will. I always try to run the entire show. And it never works. I don’t think the Big Book’s description of self-will run riot is an understatement. We are power drivers in the extreme who are unfortunately left with nothing as people flee from us. Opportunities disappear. And of course we are always in total collision with our fellows.

So hopelessness is a good thing.

Especially for the alcoholic and the Al-Anon. I cannot receive spiritual help without being hopeless. Otherwise my ego gets involved and I will try over and over to keep running the damn show—the one that never came off well in the first place!

Once I surrender and allow God in, the hopelessness turns into hope. How? Because now I am learning a different way of living. I am relying on infinite God for literally everything for the first time in my life. I am convinced that I cannot do it on my own. My own disease convinced me. I am exhausted from managing and controlling.

We are so fortunate that hope only comes to us in bits and pieces—just enough to sustain us for another twenty-four hours. We begin to rely on God on a daily basis. He provides the manna from heaven—one day at a time. He gives us this day our daily bread.

I have experienced so much hope in my darkest times in recovery. But this hope was only given to me a little at a time. I had to rely on God each and every day because of this. And each time God reveals his love, power, and purpose in my life, it builds my faith. My belief becomes a working faith. I instinctively begin to know that God will always be there for me, no matter what happens. My only job is to keep trudging—to walk through this life relying on my Higher Power.