Moments with Dr Steve – Number Fifty-nine

Through Gates of Fire – Number Ten

God’s Reparatory

As we march along through the initial chapters of ‘Through Gates of Fire – Vol One – Wingless Flight’ – we find a recent and want-to-be-recovering alcoholic – troubled.

He questions – how?

How can he…

  • Live a sober life

  • Ever reclaim the broken and shredded image/reputation that he has earned of a worthless drunkard

  • Find the courage to show his ‘sober’ face in public

  • Remain and retain his conscious in-light of his past behaviors and atrocious and often mendacious actions

  • Retain his sobriety and keep ‘sober-living’ as a priority and a life-maker and life-marker

  • Care for the messianic child – Flash Bastion – in a proper and protective manner – and do this for life

  • Earn his own keep – he has not held a job in over two full decades

  • Look his own wife in the eyes – after the manner in which he has treated her – and for the sot of a life that he has created for the two of them

  • Manage God’s forgiveness as measured against his own self-revulsion

The care-taker character – Tommy – heads to St. Gabriel’s – a working class church – early in the morning – to pray – and to confront God – and to abandon this lost cause of him actually being able to live this new life.

Addicts and Sobriety and Sober-Living

I have lived long enough – and worked with enough addicts to know that the above scene is very real.

I have walked through enough personal sewers – personal sewers that stink to high-heaven with personal frailties and relapses and wonky belief systems and stops and starts – to know that addicts struggle with the entire notion of – let alone the supportive lifestyle that sustains – sobriety.

I understand their condition.

My effort – and this is a maximum effort always – is to press them into the winepress of sober-living once again. Why?

Because alcohol and drugs shatter, destroy and ultimately kill human spirits.

For me – sobriety and full and complete ‘Sober-Living’ are non-negotiables.

What’s interesting is that in Tommy’s case – God intervened again – in a direct and magnificent way.

In our next visit to ‘Through Gates of Fire’ – we will follow Tommy into the tiny chapel and see how God helps him.

For you…

  • Sobriety and ‘Sober Living’ are your primary goals and solitary option

  • Sobriety and ‘Sober Living’ mean and require total and complete abstinence

  • Sobriety and ‘Sober Living’ should then be the moniker and hallmark for every, single living congregation of saints

  • Sobriety and ‘Sober Living’ should be the imprint every child has in their collective memory of their mother and father

If you struggle with addiction and recovery issues…

Head over to:

www.stalegis.org

Pick up a copy of: ‘The Way Out’ and begin to learn of, and then lean into – and then live out the precepts of personal reinvention.

We are building a ‘GCC’ – a ‘Global Cultural Conversation’.

Our conversation includes those who fall from Grace – and welcomes those who have yet to develop proper sea-legs.

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