11,688 days, more than one billion seconds ago, God moved me to attend my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
By his grace I was able to work through the Twelve Steps with a sponsor and the friends I've made there. It was a process of admitting my problem, turning my will over to the care of God, examining my life, making amends to the people I'd harmed and growing closer to God so that I might not harm them (or myself) again.
When I began I didn't realize that my drug problem was merely a result of the fact that I was unable to live as a human being, and that it really did affect every area of my life. In NA the first thing I was told was that my problem was not physical but rather that it was spritual and emotional, that it had to do with my inability to be fully human, with my alienation from God. The Twelve Steps were God's exercises in becoming human, and as I learned how to do that my obsession with drugs and my compulsion to use began to fade, and my many socially inappropriate behaviors began to be replaced with ones more worthy of a child of God.
I'm certainly a work in progress, but I've been freed from active addiction. I haven't used drugs in any form since my first meeting, and it's been so long since I wanted to get high that I have friends in NA who weren't born then. My torment, my struggle, and my misery are over, and have been for many years.
There are those here who deny that people recover in NA, who claim that the program looks at only the physical symptoms of addiction. I can only say that their experience with the program is exceedingly shallow; maybe the only meetings they ever went to were in a treatment facility, or perhaps they just didn't listen to a plain reading of the Twelve Steps. Whatever the case, I am only one of many, many hundreds of thousands of people who have stopped using, lost the desire to use and found a new way to live, by the grace of God acting through the Twelve Steps of Narcotics Anonymous.
I have never, not once, seen someone adopt the program of recovery and go back out and use. Every single person I've ever known to go out, if he comes back, says that he wasn't working the program, without exception. The success rate of NA is 100%.
Thanks be to God, who uses even drunkards to heal the world of evil.
By his grace I was able to work through the Twelve Steps with a sponsor and the friends I've made there. It was a process of admitting my problem, turning my will over to the care of God, examining my life, making amends to the people I'd harmed and growing closer to God so that I might not harm them (or myself) again.
When I began I didn't realize that my drug problem was merely a result of the fact that I was unable to live as a human being, and that it really did affect every area of my life. In NA the first thing I was told was that my problem was not physical but rather that it was spritual and emotional, that it had to do with my inability to be fully human, with my alienation from God. The Twelve Steps were God's exercises in becoming human, and as I learned how to do that my obsession with drugs and my compulsion to use began to fade, and my many socially inappropriate behaviors began to be replaced with ones more worthy of a child of God.
I'm certainly a work in progress, but I've been freed from active addiction. I haven't used drugs in any form since my first meeting, and it's been so long since I wanted to get high that I have friends in NA who weren't born then. My torment, my struggle, and my misery are over, and have been for many years.
There are those here who deny that people recover in NA, who claim that the program looks at only the physical symptoms of addiction. I can only say that their experience with the program is exceedingly shallow; maybe the only meetings they ever went to were in a treatment facility, or perhaps they just didn't listen to a plain reading of the Twelve Steps. Whatever the case, I am only one of many, many hundreds of thousands of people who have stopped using, lost the desire to use and found a new way to live, by the grace of God acting through the Twelve Steps of Narcotics Anonymous.
I have never, not once, seen someone adopt the program of recovery and go back out and use. Every single person I've ever known to go out, if he comes back, says that he wasn't working the program, without exception. The success rate of NA is 100%.
Thanks be to God, who uses even drunkards to heal the world of evil.
