God stole all the trash cans…

So this is how my day started: I woke up with a lack-of-sleep-too-many-waffle-fries-last-night headache, an hour after I usually get my workout in. Today was supposed to be a rest day, so I brushed my teeth, decided I didn’t care what my hair looked like, pulled on my workout clothes, grabbed my iPhone and hit the street for a three mile walk. While I was walking, I became aware that I not only had the previously mentioned headache, I was also feeling a little crabby…OK, a lot crabby. The women’s AA meeting I attend is on Saturday mornings so by the time I hit the half way point, I had come to the decision to skip my meeting and just sit on my deck being crabby and smoking all day (don’t try to understand me, I sure as hell don’t). At about the two mile mark, I got a text from a friend that I met at my Thursday night meeting. All it said was “off to get my caffeine fix...” but that’s all it needed to say. There’s a saying in AA that goes “Whenever anyone, anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA to be there, and for that I am responsible.” “off to get my caffeine fix…” was the hand of AA reaching out to me so I took that hand and went to my meeting, even though I was crabby and would have much rather been smoking on my deck.

At my meeting, a woman came in a little late and barely 24 hours sober. As she told her story, I became acutely aware that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. After the meeting, I approached her and asked her how she was doing. She burst into tears so I hugged her and told her she was in the right place. We sat and talked for awhile and while I won’t go into the details of her story, she said something that brought tears to my eyes. She too had been the victim of sexual assault but unlike me, she was victimized by a family member. As she told me about the last time she saw this man, she said she reacted by asking him what had happened to him in his past, how had he been abused that made him think what he had done to her was ok. It humbled me to sit with this newcomer. She has a strength and grace that I can only aspire to. “Who hurt you?” That’s what she asked him. She didn’t say it with anger, she didn’t say it with rage, she said it with a sincere desire to understand what had happened to her. She went on to say “nobody that hasn’t been deeply wounded thinks behaving that way is ok, so he had to been hurt like he hurt me. He’s a victim too.” He’s a victim too, the humanity in that sentence gave me pause. She went on to tell me she realized the moment she said that to him that he wasn’t ever going to change, that he would go on thinking what he had done was ok and that she would do everything in her power to make sure he never saw her children, but that she needed to forgive him for her own peace of mind. Wow, that’s the only word that comes to mind as I have been thinking about this today. I have a degree in English so I should be able to come up with a better word than “wow” but that’s the only thing that comes to mind. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the place where I’m ready to forgive the man who raped me, but this newcomer made me realize that I probably need to be open to that possibility.

So here’s where God stole all the trash cans. When she was sharing her story, she said the reason she was at the meeting was that she had been trying to get sober and had told her husband she was going to a meeting Thursday night. She got as far as the parking lot but freaked out and couldn’t bring herself to go inside. Instead, she drove to the liquor store, bought a bottle of wine, went to a park where she usually drank alone, and downed it. When she got out of her car to throw the bottle away so her husband wouldn’t find it, the garbage can that was usually there was gone. She said “it was like God stole the garbage can.” She took that as a sign that she couldn’t hide from the fact that she was an alcoholic anymore and went home and told her husband that she had been lying about being sober the last month and that’s how she ended up at my meeting this morning. There are signs all around us, everyday that point us in the right direction, if we’re open them. God stole her trash can and got her to the meeting this morning and the hand of AA reached out to me and got me to the meeting so I could then reach out the hand of AA to someone else. Maybe wow is the perfect word after all.