Spiritual recovery: finding Alcoholics Anonymous changed my life in more ways than one.

June 7, 1988. I'd just been awakened by the owner of the drive-in movie theater. "Would you please leave?" The movie had been over for some time now, and mine was the last vehicle on the lot.

Gradually I became aware of where I was and what was happening. I'd gone to the movie to escape. I'd gone by myself, gotten drunk, and passed out.

How could I do that? Wasn't I an elder at my church? Wasn't I a church leader? Didn't I preach sermons about Christian living and victory over sin? Absolutely! Then how could I explain my situation? What was I doing sitting all alone at a drive-in movie, drunk and full of self-loathing? These were just some of the questions I asked myself six years ago when I took my last drink of alcohol.

What was wrong with me? My name is Virgil, and I'm an alcoholic. I'm also a Christian. I became a Christian 15 years ago, in 1979, at age 24. When I first gave my heart to Jesus and asked Him to come into my life I'd been drinking and drugging for 10 straight years, since I was 14. I was addicted to nicotine, alcohol, and drugs, and I was tormented by a very low self-image.

Amazingly, within a short six-month period it appeared that God totally removed from me my compulsions to smoke, drink, and use drugs. I was set free from addictions that had dominated my life since my early teens. So again, why was I alone and drunk at the drive-in, nine years after I'd been "set free"?

As I asked myself this question I was filled with fear and frustration. What had gone wrong? What was wrong with me?

By this time I'd been in the church of my choice for eight years. I'd been married for seven years to Cindy, a women who'd been raised in a strict fundamentalist Christian family, a woman who had never taken a drink of alcohol, smoked a cigarette, or taken any other drug. Did she deserve any of this?

We had three children and a fourth on the way. Just two days earlier we'd celebrated our seventh anniversary, with renewed hope that things were going to get better. The week before, I'd gotten a new job (my seventh in the past year), and we wanted to think it was going to help solve our problems.

On our anniversary we'd driven to meet my wife's father, and he'd taken her and our three children with him out to the West Coast to attend my sister-in-law's graduation.

Cindy and I said our goodbyes with a desperation, a hope, that this time the job would work out, that we'd get on our feet. We knew our time was getting short. We couldn't go on much longer.

She and the family headed west. I headed east, and at the next stop for gas, when I went inside to get something to eat I also ordered a beer. The next day I quit my job. The following day I got drunk and ended up at the drive-in movie.

Dare I trust in God? After nine years of trying with all my ability to be the best Christian I could be, I found Alcoholics Anonymous.

Going to my first AA meeting wasn't easy. I felt I was above it, that I didn't need it.

AA told me that I was powerless over alcohol and needed to depend upon a power greater than myself to restore me to sanity--the power of God. I thought I'd already tried that. Hadn't I attempted to serve God? All I'd gotten in return were unanswered prayers, frustration, and humiliation. How could I believe that God would help me? I knew how hard I'd tried, that I'd been sincere as a Christian, and that it hadn't worked. Why would it work now?

The thought of trusting God to help both angered and scared me: angered because I didn't understand what had gone wrong before, and scared because my theology told me that God was good, that He would never leave me or forsake me. If this was true, that had to mean that the problem was me, that I was fundamentally beyond help, that even God couldn't help me. And AA was telling me that without God's help I wouldn't make it.

Today I thank God for AA because it saved my life, my marriage, my family, and my ability to have a Christian experience. Thanks to the program, I know I have a God who loves me and who accepts me as I am.

The most significant thing I learned early on was the true nature of alcoholism. AA teaches that "once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic."

Understanding that was significant for me. When I became a Christian I just knew that God had done for me something I was incapable of doing for myself. He had removed my compulsion to drink. If you would have asked me about my drinking at that time, I would have told you that I "used to be" an alcoholic. I would have told you that I was delivered from my past--that by His grace I was cured!

AA tells me I'm never cured, that the very most I can hope for is to be granted another 24 hours of recovery. Learning this was just the tip of the iceberg for me. I eventually gained new insights on how alcoholism related to my Christian experience, and I no longer naively believed that once I became a Christian my problems would be over. I knew I had to become dependent upon a Power outside of and greater than myself.

A self-centered past. All my life I'd never developed any discipline. I'd resisted authority figures; I'd looked after my own needs first. I grew up in a violent family where each day it was like being in a war zone. I learned to fight, cast blame for all my shortcomings, and run from life.

Early in our marriage Cindy and I started having problems. Neither of us was good at communicating. We gradually began to drift apart because we were so busy trying to change each other. Resentments started to build, and we were both unhappy.

I couldn't imagine her accepting me if she really knew me. At the time I was too preoccupied with my own defects and shortcomings to even accept myself. I couldn't imagine anyone else doing it (even God).

So I began to feel trapped. From one distrust to another, from one resentment to another, from one year to another, and from one child to another, the resentments in our marriage had continued to build, until I found myself in front of a bottle again, medicating my pain. And wondering how God "could have allowed all this to happen." In time I ended up at the drive-in movie.

Learning to trust. In Alcoholics Anonymous I learned that God loves me just the way I am. He loves and accepts alcoholics. "He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust" (Psalm 103:14, NKJV).(*) I also learned that I really didn't trust God. I trusted Him only to a certain extent. Once my life had gotten a little straightened out I believed I had to take it from there.

Today I understand that God isn't the least bit threatened by my weakness. Nor is He the least bit unaccepting of me in my fallen condition. Yet before I could conceive of Him in this way I had to experience that kind of acceptance.

First, AA taught me to accept myself by their acceptance of me, as ugly as I thought I was. Next, I was able to duplicate their acceptance. Then, and only then, was I able to present the me I'd always been trying to hide (even from myself) for healing.

It's been six years since I've had a drink. More important, I know what it's like today to have a wife whom I love and trust as my closest friend. One day at a time our marriage has worked out, and I like to think that ours is a good example of what God can do in a home. We have four beautiful children. Cindy and I are both in college, close to having our undergraduate degrees. We look forward to the future, believing that "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Alcoholics Anonymous' Twelve Steps

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. We continued to take personal inventory and, when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

(*)Texts credited to NKJV are from The New King James Version. Copyright 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.