I was about 8 months sober, my sponsor was out of town, and I felt my job was interfering with my sobriety, so I gave my boss a 2 week notice. I was an assistant manager at a large truck stop, on the interstate, with access to the cash registers and the safe, so he asked for my keys right then and there, and I was done.
I happened to have $400 in my pocket, that I had just made change for the cashiers, and forgot I had it, until I did laundry a couple of days later. So I just planned to return it when I went to pick up my last check, but my check was short about $400. I then just kept my mouth shut and realized that God, one one time, was doing for me what I cold not do for myself. Now I could pay my rent. God watches out for me, even when people cheat me, but only if I stay sober. Made sense to me, but my gut started to bother me, so I called Del, and we met at a coffee shop.
I hesitantly[or hesitatingly?] unfolded my drama before Del and he asked me what was bothering me and I told him that I didn’t feel right about the money and I wasn’t sure that God had simply given me the money cuz the company owed me that same amount. A mere coincidence yes, but was it mine? I said that I obviously needed the money and used it, so couldn’t understand why it was bothering me[ACA guilt—lol]. I think I wanted him to validate and condone my windfall, but if I wanted that I woulda talked to my sponsor. But Del never told me to keep it but he didn’t say anything about giving it back either.
Del said, “Do you think you’re gonna get drunk over this right away?”
I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t and afta he grilled me to his satisfaction he was confident too.
Then he said those Golden Words: “Why don’t you wait a month—pray on it, but not too hard—and we’ll talk about then.”
That was the most novelist idea I had ever heard. I did not feel trapped. The weight and urgency about it all lifted. I did not feel any guilt—a temporary reprieve, I was sure. He assured me that prayer and patience works better than either of us trying to manage the situation. Y’see, the money situation went from being a potential crisis, full of fear and what-ifs, to being a solvable problem, with as much concern as topping off the air in my tires.
A month later, we met, just as planned. I told him that I decided to give the money back, and with a little twinkle in his eye, he asked me why.
I said, “I don’t get drunk over what they do to me, but I get drunk over what I do to them.”
He smiled and blinking his crystal-clear blue eyes he simply nodded his head, and I asked what he thought of my decision, but he simply asked me what I thought of it. Then I asked him what he woulda thought about it if I decided to keep the money.
He said, “It’s none of my business what you decide. I was just here to help you get comfortable so you could figure it for your own self. This ain’t my lesson, this one’s yours.”
That’s a truth that I don’t think I’d ever outgrow. In fact, I keep learning from it, for it came from a man who’d found emotional sobriety. Del will always be one of my heroes. He wore leg braces and was in a lot of pain, but his angelic blue eyes sparkled with the love of the fellowship. He tried to explain to me that all lessons are blessings, but I quite didn’t get it then, but later when I had a few sober-surrenders, I began to appreciate my friends complete wisdom.
Another time I asked him what it was like to have 35 years of sobriety, and I thought he’s tell me it was just all peaches and cream, and he said, “You’d think it’d get easier to surrender, when you gotta do it everyday, all day long, but the surrenders get tougher and deeper as you go.”
Another time he said that “The best time I was sober was between about four years to ten, when the program worked easily, life is god and I thought I new it all. Then the bottoms began, again and again.”
The Hole in the Donut 