Celebrate Our Bridges Back To Life
TODAYS PRAYER: Celebrate Our Bridge Back To Life!
Don't let the wealth in the title of the video below fool you and no, it is not an attempt to convert you. If a conversion is necessary than life will do that on it's own as we have discovered through our personal experiences leading up to our entrance into the palace of recovery.
I share it hear today because something in the talk caught my attention. Pastor Opiyo was speaking about a particular point of view of many church people who think from a world ending perspective rather than a heaven on earth right here and now perspective.
He said it much better so I hope you give it a listen.
But it got me thinking about how there is this reference in the AA literature about it being a "bridge back to life", a mechanism to shift those caught in the grips of their destructive addictions and plug them back into their lives - their here and nows.
On the face of it that is a very broad statement and we come in through a diverse array of "lives", some of which we shouldn't return to for reasons legal or for the health and sanity of those around us.
To be clear, I remember distinctly thinking at an early point in my first attempt at "recovery" that I was a part of a group of people that had formed a separate society and they were being selfish in keeping all this program goodness to themselves and i should make it my mission to take this "gospel" out into the world - well bars actually - which if you look at the world of most addicts/alcoholics you will find that their world is limited to the places that connect them to their drugs of choice - but that seemed as good a place to start, especially since the message was one of recovery from alcohol.
As you can well imagine that was my personal Eve in the garden of Eden conversing with the snake moment that resulted in my fall from recovery.
With Eve it wasn't just the conversation with the snake it was what did the conversation, the words of the snake, cause her to do? She doubted God, Disobeyed God and ate the fruit she was told not to eat.
Our bridges give us a way to have our presence in the doingness of our lives be more contributive, more giving to, than something that sucks the life out of everything around it. We become divinely present in the life we are living now.
Also when I think of this idea of a "bridge back to life" I think of a life that has a "program" as one of, if not it's main, sustaining taproots. Bridges tend to be permanent structures in our societies. And so it is with us. Program while a newish term is not a new phenomenon in the history of humans. We have always had a collection of support and ways of being and doing things that guided and helped the individual members as well as the collective as a whole.
Our "bridge back to life" is a permanent structure that makes up our community and also that connects communities. That’s the purpose of bridges, to bring something to something. In a way because we are a given something so that we can then do something - we, too, are bridges.
For us in recovery that usually translates simply to: carry the message. Carry where? To the still sick and suffering who don't know there is a way out of their sick and suffering. That they don't "have to" live that way. And we, through how we are living our recovered lives, are proof that the "word" we were specifically given is true.
I can tell you based on lived research that sitting in a bar drinking shots and telling other people drinking shots about AA never resulted in one of them putting the drink down and looking up a meeting. But it did result in lots of laughter and more shots.
I was remarking to a friend the other day about how my apartment has grown in its cluttered-ness since I got sober. And that I remembered, so many years ago, when I first moved in all I had was a blanket, a trunk full of clothes, a folding beach chair and a small b&w tv my older sister gave me. Drugs and alcohol, or my "entertainment budget" took up the bulk of my funds and then when I walked into sobriety that changed - and it did so a lot of the time in spite of me.
When Jesus said he came so that we would have life and have it more abundantly he wasn't kidding or trying to be nice and make poverty sound spiritual. He also wasn't trying to contain the powerful message of hope and recovery to a small select group. The community he belonged to was struggling with that long before he appeared and still long after as does just about every other community that asserts itself as a community. If left to our own devices, more times than not, we will isolate, or community-ize", ourselves to our own peril while swearing that what we are doing is in our own best interest.
As it turns out human is a community endeavor. Our bridges gives us a way to connect to other members that make up life, our recovery community of choice (or necessity), or the kingdom of God or the body of Christ or however that has been made manifest to you. We need each other, not from a poverty perspective, but from an understanding of who and what we are.
We also understand that “recovery” - getting sober, clean, a food program, sla program, solvant, gamble free - etc, is not about a far off goal but about how to live today. A day at a time. “On earth as it is in heaven” is not a statement of comparisen but of “earth”, our lives as we are living moment to moment, being a reflection of “heaven” right here and right now - as one, temporally together.
So we take a moment today to celebrate our bridge, your bridge, the bridge that maintains the connection to life - to us, with the added understanding that in this celebration we are also honoring ourselves who, having crossed to bridge, became the bridge that connects the message of hope and recovery to those who don't yet know or have forgotten that there is hope and there is recovery - that there is life way more abundant than the lord of addictions would allow for any meaningful length of time.
We were given something in order to do something.
We are blessed to be a blessing.
Amen! Aho! Ase! Amin.