In today’s reading, it’s written, “I kept coming back and gradually my faith was resurrected.” That may be true for some of our brothers and sisters, but not for me. Before my first day sober, my faith was non-existent. My belief began around the age of eight, when I first became an Alter Boy in the Catholic Church. What little faith I felt went out the window when my father died in a car accident. He had been drinking all afternoon and taking pain pills for the pain he endured due to an accident at work. I remember being alone in our living room, looking out the window, when a police car came into the yard. I knew then that the accident I heard of was my father. I remember looking up and saying, “F-you” to God. That put an end to any faith and trust in God, as I didn’t understand Him.

Nothing changed on my faith front until I was forty-two years old and in deep trouble with the law as a result of being very drunk. When I realized that I could not stop drinking, my lawyer suggested I attend AA, and being sober may be my only chance of not doing time. I did exactly that, and the Judge gave me a break with a one-year suspended sentence. Since that day, I started seeing my faith grow, if not very slowly. As each miracle passed, I realized how I had no control over the outcomes, except that there must be a God, and he didn’t hate me anymore. When I finally put a pen to paper, the things that happened in those drinking days were there in an intervention which I never saw. I remember falling off a hotel roof in Japan and instead of falling four stories; I landed on a metal fire escape thirty feet down. Another near-death experience was when I lost control of my motorcycle, with a trailer truck on my tail, and I said, “Please help me.” Within a second, I was back on the seat, hands on the bars, while slowing down. There again it was God helping, but now I could see it. There were dozens of other eye-popping experiences along the way, and I just didn’t see where God was doing for me what I could not do for myself. More recently, I was in the ER on a gurney with my heart stopping for up to 15 seconds at a time. There were a team of doctors around me, and I was totally okay with what was going on. If it was my time to go, so be it. One of the doctors placed a pacemaker in my chest right away, and that solved the problem. It has taken many years of attending AA meetings before I realized how I was never alone.

My faith today is totally different from what it was 40 years ago when I first sobered up. I know, without doubt, that there is a power greater than me, and that power loves me and has been watching over me my entire life. Now, I see the miracles happening around me every day. I continue to do God’s will, which is located somewhere around my heart. Some call it intuition. I call it faith, a faith that works, when and if I work it.