100 Sermon Illustrations on Addiction

Debate over whether drugs should be legalized. Would save money on law enforcement and bring in money in taxes, but could lead to higher addiction rates. Alcohol and tobacco responsible for 400,000 deaths a year, while death toll from all illegal drugs was only 3,562 in 1985. Most experts believe legalization would lead to higher addiction rates. One in 5 users becomes an addict. 140 million now use alcohol. 5-6 million use cocaine, 50 million might.

Back in 1985, in a remote region near Essex, Montana, a Burlington-Northern corn-laden train derailed, scattering the grain along the tracks. Most was picked up, but about 400 tons were left to rot (and ferment). In 1986 about a dozen bears (black and grizzly) discovered the intoxicating mash and went on a binge. Railway crews then dumped soil on the corn, but the bears were back after hibernating in 1987, digging down for another bender. Next, wary train crews mixed non-toxic quick lime into the mash, but in 1988 the bears were back again, sniffing around the tracks until they found some untainted corn and another drunken toot resulted.

But they are just dumb, brute beasts. If you drink, what's your excuse?

#404

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Overeaters Anonymous, OA, seeks to break compulsive eating. 9,000 meetings weekly. Based on a belief that compulsive overeating is a progressive disease that can be arrested, though not cured, by turning one's will over to a higher power. Often it is God. One said, it's not about weight, exercise or recipes; it's a process, a lifestyle. It is also about 'core' changes in who they are and how they live.

Years ago a friend gave me what he called his "Formula: How to Know Right from Wrong." The formula asks four questions based on three verses in 1 Corinthians:

1. "'Everything is permissible for me' - but not everything is beneficial."

Question #1: Is it helpful - physically, spiritually, and mentally?

2. "'Everything is permissible for me' - but I will not be mastered by

anything" (1 Cor 6:12)

Question #2: Does it bring me under its power?

3. "Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will

never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall" (1 Cor 8:13)

Question #3: Does it hurt others?

4. "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory

of God" (1 Cor 10:31)

Question #4: Does it glorify God?

As simple as this formula may appear, it is powerful in developing conviction, if we are willing to use it. These questions can get rather searching. But they must be asked if we are to pursue holiness as a total way of life.

Smoking kills 390,000 Americans a year, nearly 3 jumbo jetloads every day. Percentage who smoke has fallen from 40 to 29 percent since 1965. Women smoke more than in past, and their lung cancer rates have quadrupled. The smoking industry is fighting back efforts to curb it.

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Kitty Dukakis enters addiction clinic for alcohol abuse. Article focuses on addiction and its causes. Research may link addiction to personality disorder, but may not. Influences are still not understood. Various drugs are described.

Book review. Book is on addiction and relates it to free choice and responsibility. Addiction gives us the opportunity to appreciate God's grace. He focuses on the spiritual dimension.

A definition of addiction by psychiatrist Gerald May:

"Addiction is giving ourselves over to things that, in our deepest

honesty, we really do not want. It is a process of attachment which

'nails' our desire to specific objects, with the result that our will

and desire become enslaved. Addiction breeds willfulness within us,

yet paradoxically it erodes our free will and eats away at our

dignity."

For 1-6 million Americans, gambling has become a destructive compulsion. It's like alcoholism - they can't stay away from it. In the end they lose their money, their jobs, their families and their dignity. One compulsive gambler summed up his life this way: "You never really come out ahead. Even when you win, you still lose because you always want to gamble the money into a bigger win - and then you lose it all."

Erika Earnhart, 1976, $1 million, 2 divorces, child custody, alimony, debts.

Many animals get drunk on fermented fruit, and others crave human alcohol.

Koalas are addicted to eucalyptus and die without it. Examples of animal

drunkenness are given.

[used 11/14/93]

"The fact that drug use is natural doesn't mean it's good, then, just that

chanting 'no' isn't likely to rid us of it anytime soon. The most

controversial alternative - to haul off and legalize currently controlled

substances - could prove disastrous, given the deadly pharmacopia we've

amassed."

#1078

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When John Belushi died in the spring of 1983 of an overdose of cocaine and heroin, a variety of articles appeared, including one in U.S. News and World Report, on the seductive dangers of cocaine:

“It can do you no harm and it can drive you insane; it can give you status in society and it can wreck your career; it can make you the life of the party and it can turn you into a loner; it can be a elixir for high living and a potion for death.”

Like all sin, there’s a difference between the appearance and the reality, between the momentary feeling and the lasting effect.

#2050

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As we’ve said before on BreakPoint, America has a growing heroin epidemic. And as tragic as this is, it is an opportunity for the Church to be the Church.

Do you remember the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaigns of the 80s? One ad showed a rat frantically licking a water bottle laced with opiates. And a voice declared, “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead ... And it can do the same thing to you.”

This ad was referring to research published in 1978 that found when lab rats were given access to large quantities of opiates, they drugged themselves to death. These experiments supported the “chemical hook” understanding of drug addiction.

But in a recent TED talk, writer Johann Hari claimed that everything we know about addiction is wrong, including the ‘chemical hook’ model that most of us take as settled science. Hari came to this view after talking with medical researcher Bruce Alexander, who noticed that the rats in the original experiments were locked alone in cages with nothing else to do but use the drugs.

Alexander wondered if the rats would behave differently if they weren’t isolated and bored. To find out, he created an elaborate colony called “Rat Park,” which had plenty of food, fun, and company. In his experiment, the rats in isolation drank up to 25 milligrams of morphine-laced water daily, compared to less than 5 milligrams for the rats in Rat Park. Alexander concluded that isolated rats almost always become junkies, while rats living among other rats almost never will.

That experiment, along with other research, led Hari to conclude that the “War on Drugs” is missing a crucial point. It is focused more on stopping the supply of drugs than on figuring out why people feel the need to use them in the first place.

Hari argues that the problem “of addiction doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject — it’s in the pain you feel in your head.” Or as one recovering crack and heroin addict told him, “Addiction is a disease of loneliness.”

If Hari is right, there are incredible possibilities for the real-world mission of the Church since we live in an increasingly isolated world. Greater numbers of people seek escape from pain, fear, and the loneliness that comes from family and social breakdown. Hari suggests that we don’t have an addiction problem so much as a bonding problem. He writes that “if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography, or smoking crack or gambling.”

This situation is tailor-made for Gospel-centered churches. Christians have always been a community of the walking wounded. Rather than presenting churches as places of perfection, we can reach out to substance abusers with vulnerability and honesty about our own need for recovery from the ravages of sin.

Yet, that’s easier said than done. In his book, “Life Together,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer described a big challenge Christians have in creating healing communities. He said that although people “have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and the fellowship.” If this describes your church, you might have a problem.

Alexander believes that we’ll only find lasting healing when we move past treating individuals and embrace what he calls “social recovery.” He asks, “How can we rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? ... where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?” The answer, of course, is the Church, the body of believers living in fellowship with Jesus and with each other. As Hari says, “The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.”

Resources

Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong

Johann Hari | TED talk | June 2015

Hard-Wired To Connect: The Field of Social Neuroscience

Chuck Colson | BreakPoint.org | April 30, 2007

[HolwickID #34499]

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Copyright (c) 2015 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The story of the birth of "Alcoholics Anonymous."

It was 1934. Bill Wilson was a pretentious, loud-talking New York City alcoholic. Nearly 40, he was feeding his habit by stealing grocery money from his wife. Sometimes he even panhandled. Several times he had been hospitalized, but he always started drinking again, no matter what resolutions he made.

One November day an old alcoholic friend, Ebby Thatcher, paid him a visit. Thatcher was sober and had come to tell Wilson why. He had had a religious experience. Members of an organization called the Oxford Group had visited him in jail, where he had been incarcerated for drunkenness. After talking with them, he had yielded his life to God. The desire to drink was gone, he said. His life was changed.

After several visits, Thatcher convinced Wilson - who was quite hostile to religion - to attend a meeting at a Manhattan rescue mission. Wilson, though quite drunk, was moved by the testimonies and went forward to testify to his own changed heart. This change lasted less than a day: Wilson went on a three-day binge and was hospitalized again. Thatcher visited the hospital, and at Wilson's request repeated his formula for conversion:

"Realize you are licked, Admit it, And get willing to turn your life over to the care of God."

After Thatcher left, Wilson fell into a deep depression. But finally, while still in the hospital, he found himself crying out, "If there is a God, let him show himself! I am ready to do anything!" What followed was a powerful spiritual experience in which Wilson felt overwhelmed by a sense of freedom, peace and the presence of God. He never took another drink.

That spring, Wilson went to Akron, Ohio, on a would-be business deal. The deal fell flat. Broke and lonely, Wilson felt strongly tempted to drink. Desperately, he looked in his hotel's phone directory and called a local Oxford leader, and told her:

"I'm from the Oxford Group and I'm a rum hound from New York."

He poured out his fear of falling, and she invited him over immediately. She had a project in mind.

For two years she had been working on a surgeon, Bob Smith. Smith was Wilson's opposite in personality. The surgeon was a silent drinker, stern and distant. The group had confessed with him and prayed with him, but his drinking had remained as uncontrollable as ever.

The next day the two men met in the kitchen of a local home in Akron, and they hit it off remarkably well. Within a month Smith took his last drink. At that kitchen table in Akron, Ohio, in 1934, "Alcoholics Anonymous" was born.

Sermon in 12 Step series. #2 and 3: Yielding to God. Heb 11:1-6

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YIELDING TO THE GREATER POWER

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I. What do you REALLY want?

A. A definition of addiction.

B. The epiphany of inadequacy.

C. There is a Higher Power beyond ourselves.

II. "God as we understand him."

A. Oxford Group: openness to people who are searching.

B. Phrase can allow us to define God, rather than Him define us.

C. We must understand God as Bible portrays him.

III. Surrendering to the Higher Power.

A. "Let go, and let God."

B. Obedience - doing what God says.

C. How surrendered are you?

IV. Restored to sanity.

A. Genuine faith produces balance in life.

B. Everything else is vanity, meaninglessness.

Gambler's Anonymous material to help identify problem gamblers. A major factor is denial. They bet when they are losing to recoup losses, and bet when they win to win bigger. The average gambler who seeks help is in debt $41,000.

Millions of families are torn up by alcohol.

Shani Gray grew up a rough area of Miami. Many of her friends turned to gangs and drugs, but her parents encouraged her to do well in school. For Shani, it's ironic that while her dad was encouraging her to stay on track and resist the temptations around her, he was sinking further into those same temptations.

"He's like the pink flamingos," Shani says. "They start out as white birds, but the stuff they eat turns them pink. Their outside changes because of what's going on inside. That's what happened to my dad. He tried hard to resist all that stuff, but he was in the middle of it. It got to him."

On the day of her graduation, in which she was the top student, she looked out across the audience to see her dad. But he wasn't there. He was off drunk somewhere.

Soon after he abandoned his family. The hardest part of his leaving is the message it gave to Shani. "I looked up to him," she says. "He worked so hard for us and I loved him so much. But he made a choice that said, 'My lifestyle is more important to me than you are.' He was my motivation to keep at it when I wanted to give up on college. Then he gave up on us."

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Whole article:

XTRA ORDINARY PEOPLE: Shani Gray

Where's God When Your Dreams Fall Apart?

By Carla Barnhill

Shani Gray had planned for this moment for a long time.

As she sat on the stage at her high-school graduation, waiting to give her valedictory speech, she felt that all the sacrifices she'd made to excel had been worthwhile.

Even the turmoil of the last few months -- her alcoholic father had left home, and she was fighting a losing battle for scholarship money -- seemed far away as Shani's fellow graduates settled into their seats.

The principal announced Shani's name. As she stepped up to the podium to deliver her speech, Shani looked into the audience for the man who'd promised he'd be there.

But her father was nowhere in sight.

The moment is still fresh in Shani's mind as she sits in the dorm lounge at Taylor University-Fort Wayne, where she is finishing her freshman year.

Sure, she was angry at her dad, and angry that she'd been passed over for some large scholarships. But she was also angry at God.

"I felt like nothing was going the way I'd planned it," she says. "I thought I would always be rewarded for the things I did. But there I was. My dad had left our family. It was looking like I wouldn't be able to afford college. And I felt cheated."

It was, she says now, a humbling experience.

Shani Gray is not a person who needs much humbling. Even though everyone at Taylor -- from the lady in the mailroom to the vice-president of the college -- knows her by name, she doesn't recognize just how special she is.

How special? Just ask the professor who gave her an A in a tough, upper-level theology class. Or her high-school basketball coach who looked to her as the moral center of his team. Or her 6th-grade Sunday school teacher who asked Shani to help teach the class, since she knew the Bible so well.

Or ask just about anyone in Shani's neighborhood back in Miami. They'll tell you it takes someone very special to make it out of a place where many high-school students never even dream of college.

"In my neighborhood, you'd see kids on bikes, kids playing basketball, decent houses," says Shani. "But if you knew where to look, you'd find the drug dealers and gang members. It wasn't as dangerous as some parts of town, but at night, you'd definitely want to be behind your locked door and security system."

That atmosphere carried over to Shani's school, Carol City High. There, the violence of the streets made itself known in battles over dates and sports teams. Shani remembers a day when someone from a rival school's marching band showed up with a gun at Shani's band practice, wanting to shoot the trumpet players for winning a competition.

Violence was part of Shani's everyday life. So was the pressure to fit in at school. And fitting in meant dissing academics.

"There was always pressure to be average," says Shani. "Most kids felt like there was no point in working hard for grades, because teachers, parents, and society told them they weren't going anywhere. They'd see drug dealers making more money than any college professor could make. Most parents couldn't afford college, so unless you were a great athlete, you didn't have much chance of an education beyond high school. They figured, why bother?"

But Shani believed God had given her brains for a reason. She knew God could use her in the world and that a college education would prepare her for a whatever lay ahead. She also knew the only way she could afford college was through academic scholarships. So she determined she would do whatever it took to be the best in her class.

"I was raised by a whole bunch of people," she says. "My mom and dad, aunts and uncles, neighbors and friends from church. They all made sure I stayed out of trouble. They told me I could excel if I worked at it.

"I remember my dad telling me about his brother, who was very smart. His brother let his talents go to his head and thought he was too good to work for anything. So he ended up on the streets. Dad told me, 'The only way to get anywhere in life is to keep working hard for what you want, no matter what other people tell you.'"

A FAITH OF HER OWN

Shani's extended family provided her with something else that helped her stand apart from the crowd: a strong faith in God.

"I became a Christian when I was 8. But my faith was really just my mom's faith. I believed what she believed. It wasn't until I heard a former gang member talk about how God had changed his life that I thought about my faith. This guy had such a hard life, yet he was full of love for God. My life wasn't perfect either. But even though my dad was an alcoholic, he was there and I knew he and my mom loved me. We always had food on the table, and clothes to wear. Compared to most of my friends, I had it pretty good. What reason did I have for not living 100 percent for Christ? None. That's when my faith became my own."

For Shani, faith means standing for what she believes, no matter what the people around her think.

"Back in Miami, there was constant pressure to do drugs, drink, and have sex. But I believe my actions speak for my faith as much as, if not more than, my words. I mean, to the people in my school, I was Jesus. They were always watching me to see what being a Christian meant. Plus, I had things I wanted to accomplish, and that stuff just gets in the way, so I stayed away from it."

But staying away from the "stuff" didn't mean staying away from non-Christians. "If you don't know any non-Christians," notes Shani, "how can you lead them to Christ?"

"I really tried to be approachable to my non-Christian friends. I didn't judge them, but I was clear about my beliefs. I had a good friend who was struggling with her sexuality. I let her know I didn't agree with the choices she was making, but also that I was there for her if she needed to talk. She did, and I was able to tell her about God and the love he has for her. It's taken awhile, but she's stepped back from the life she was living and is trying to figure out what kind of person God wants her to be."

She continued to excel in the classroom, and by the middle of her senior year, it looked as though her plan was right on course. She had been accepted at Taylor University-Fort Wayne to study criminal justice, she would graduate as class valedictorian, and she would leave Miami knowing she had a bright future.

Then her dad, the man who promised her that her hard work would pay off, moved out.

PINK FLAMINGOS

Shani has only talked to her father a few times in the year since he left. He's been in rehabilitation for drug and alcohol use.

For Shani, it's ironic that while her dad was encouraging her to stay on track and resist the temptations around her, he was sinking further into those same temptations.

"He's like the pink flamingos," Shani says. "They start out as white birds, but the stuff they eat turns them pink. Their outside changes because of what's going on inside. That's what happened to my dad. He tried hard to resist all that stuff, but he was in the middle of it. It got to him."

But the hardest part of his leaving is the message it gave to Shani. "I looked up to him," she says. "He worked so hard for us and I loved him so much. But he made a choice that said, 'My lifestyle is more important to me than you are.' He was my motivation to keep at it when I wanted to give up on college. Then he gave up on us."

THE LAST STRAW (ALMOST)

But graduation was right around the corner and Shani didn't have time to think about her pain. Instead, she focused on her schoolwork and her future in Fort Wayne. Then came another blow.

With Shani at the top of her class, she was certain she'd be rewarded with enough scholarship money for college. But to her surprise and great disappointment, the big awards went to other students. As a result, Shani faced graduation with one scholarship -- worth only $500.

Her college plans were crumbling fast.

Nothing had turned out the way Shani had intended. No dad, no money, no future. As the summer wore on, Shani buried her pain in her frantic schedule. She worked extra shifts at her job, trying to earn as much money as she could in a final effort to get to Taylor. Shani and her mother continued to pray that it would all work out, somehow.

Slowly, the money she needed, and more, came trickling in from small private scholarships, as well as from people who knew the Grays needed help. Shani would make it to Taylor after all.

A PLAN TO TRUST

As she walks toward Taylor's gym to shoot baskets, Shani now knows God had some unexpected surprises in store for her last spring.

"Last June," she says, "I was as angry at God as I've ever been. But I was mad because it looked like my life wasn't going in the direction I had planned. I'd been saying that I trusted God, but I wanted things to go my way, not his. And after all that, God put me right where I'd wanted to be all along. My dad's still gone, but I'm learning to deal with the hurt he caused us. I'm finally letting go of the anger I'd felt since last spring. And I'm a stronger person because of what I've been through. I know now that good things don't just fall in your lap because you follow the rules. God's been with me the whole time, blessing me in ways I never would have thought. Now, I am trusting God with my future and I know it will be alright."

And that's a plan she can trust for the rest of her life.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./CAMPUS LIFE Magazine

May/June 1996, Vol. 54, No. 10, Page 30

clmay96mrj6CA0306419

#3748

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Leaders in today's “war on drugs” have placed their major emphases on interdiction efforts and stiff punishments for those who produce, smuggle or sell illegal substances. A lesser degree of attention has been paid to certain prescribed prevention and treatment efforts. Public opinion has been mobilized to insure the continuation of these somewhat questionable but noble-appearing efforts. In order to justify this current agenda of action, our leadership has perpetuated several misconceptions designed to hold at bay those who ordinarily might question a course that thus far has offered no real proof of permanent success.

We will examine six of these misconceptions and the truth about them this month and six more in our September column.

MISCONCEPTION #1: Advocates for the “war on drugs” define their efforts in military terms and the enemy as the terrifying substances that produce havoc and death.

THE TRUTH: The term “war on drugs” is completely misleading. The drugs themselves, whether legal or illegal, are not the culprits until they are used. President George W. Bush once told us about a meeting with Mexican authorities while he served as governor of Texas. “I had gone to meet with the Mexican leaders to urge them to use stronger tactics against smugglers of illegal drugs into the United States,” he explained. “They finally responded that they would intensify their efforts if we would do something about the large number of customers on our side of the border who demand the banned substances.”

As long as the general public desires such substances, there will be more supplies to replace the shipments which we have interrupted, and more drug dealers and smugglers to take the place of those whom we lock up. Therefore, our current plan of action will continue to offer no promise of hope for rescue from this dilemma.

MISCONCEPTION #2: The slogan “war on drugs” has proven popular because it idealizes the notion that the drug abuse problem belongs to “them” and not to “us.”

THE TRUTH: It has become easier and easier for the average citizen to say a hearty “amen” to any such effort that would rid society of this dark problem. During the 1960s and '70s, the public envisioned drug abusers as those who frequented the dark alleys and abandoned buildings in such cities as New York and Chicago. Today we have come to realize that the drug problem knows no boundaries -- racial, economic, geographic or religious.

The potential for this dark tragedy stalks every family. It is certainly “our” problem!

MISCONCEPTION #3: Illegal drugs are far more dangerous and addictive than the legal behavior-altering substances.

THE TRUTH: While illegal substances such as heroin, methamphetamine and designer drugs destroy lives every day, the alcohol problem is considered by many to be our number one drug problem. Most medical authorities consider an addiction to alcoholic beverages to be one of the most difficult to break. No one can reasonably argue that the abuse of such drugs as anti-depressants, tranquilizers and painkillers does not constitute a major part of our growing legal medicine problem.

A stamp of legality on these substances does not remove the potential for disaster. How often do supposedly educated people refer to “drugs and alcohol”? Certainly any substance that alters the way we think, act or feel must be considered a drug. The hypocrisy of our divided approach to the drug problem is obvious to any thoughtful individual.

MISCONCEPTION #4: Most commonly used slogans and buzzwords associated with the drug problem and its solution are negative: for example, “war against drugs” (or drug abuse). This method is used to clearly identify an enemy of society.

THE TRUTH: It is usually easier and more popular for the public to be against an evil than for good. The best method of relief for the problem would be the public adoption of a better way of life than drug abuse. However, this is often unpopular because it demands so much of the individual.

MISCONCEPTION #5: The leaders of such efforts constantly remind us that the more money we spend, the better the opportunity for eventual relief from this problem.

THE TRUTH: A successful solution does not require more bureaucracies, the building of more prisons, the hiring of more law enforcement officers, the perpetuation of “feel good” educational programs, and the enactment of stronger laws, even though these actions may provide a temporary sense of relief.

Instead it demands the changing of the hearts of men and women. We must embrace the concept that sobriety and self-control help lead to success, happiness and inner peace.

MISCONCEPTION #6: Treatment experts have long insisted that drug addiction is a disease and should be treated medically.

THE TRUTH: While the minds and bodies of addicted individuals may eventually become diseased because of the sad habit, the vast majority of such persons made the choice to take the first drug, and all such addicted persons must eventually make the choice to become free if wellness is to be achieved.

There was certainly nothing in the body or mind of the individual that cried out before the initial choice, “You're doomed to become a drug addict.” There certainly may exist a weakness in individual makeup that makes it easier to become addicted after the first decision. The “disease” label is just another excuse for irresponsible behavior.

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Ted G. Stone and Philip Barber are coauthors of two books on alcohol and drug abuse, “The Drug Tragedy -- Hope for the One Who Hurts” and “The Drug Tragedy -- Hope for the One Who Cares.”

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #1525]

Thirty years ago, Ann Kiemel Anderson was a best-selling Christian author and speaker whose first book boldly declared, “I'm out to change my world.”

Today, after tragedies ranging from multiple miscarriages to drug addition, Anderson says she's learned that Jesus is the source of true change.

Noting that many people looked at her early adult life and “thought I had just everything,” Anderson said, “It appeared that I really was a very together person.”

But “along the journey, I got lost,” she confessed. “It's a powerful thing to me tonight to know that Jesus doesn't put his hand on perfect people.... I ask your forgiveness for getting so lost.”

Mixing testimony and songs, Anderson recounted her journey from bold Christian witness and publishing notoriety to despair, addiction and self-loathing.

While she was “passionate about Jesus and wanted everybody to know him,” Anderson said she also “was passionate that you love me.”

Citing her experience as a marathon runner who qualified three times for the prestigious Boston Marathon, Anderson told the crowd, “If you're not enough before best-selling books and standing ovations and marathons, you will never be enough with them. Externals will not make you whole.”

Deciding in her mid-30s that marriage was the next step toward success and fulfillment, she said she determined that Will Anderson was God's choice for her. But conflict soon popped up in their marriage.

Explaining that one of her husband's traits was to fix problems he encountered, Anderson said, “When Will married me, I became his next problem to fix.” Acknowledging her own “gaping, gaping insecurity,” she added, “When he set out to fix me, it made the hole in me bigger and bigger.”

Repeated miscarriages eventually led the Andersons to adopt four sons. Yet “babies and a handsome man and all my success never made me enough,” she said.

“I was an addict of performance and praise just waiting to be an addict of pills,” she added. After being given morphine to relieve the pain of a kidney infection, she soon became hooked on pain pills.

“I confess to you that there were major contradictions in my life,” Anderson said. While being honest in what she shared in her books and speaking engagements, “my lie was in what I didn't tell you.”

With a growing addiction problem and declining health, Anderson suffered a pair of comas while separated from her husband.

“When I awakened from my second life-threatening coma, God finally had my attention,” she recalled. Entering a secular drug treatment center, she said the experience was “the hardest, most nightmarish journey of my life.”

Describing the severity of the treatment and confrontational group therapy sessions, Anderson added, “It took all of it to break through the thick, thick layers around my heart. For God to crack through down to the core of my soul, it took the toughest and the worst.”

Realizing it would take more than personal willpower and brains to gain physical, emotional and spiritual healing, she declared, “I wanted God and I wanted freedom more than anything else in my life.... There was only one thing that delivered me, and that was the blood of Jesus.”

As she pursued healing from her addiction, Anderson said God also was getting her husband's attention.

After they reunited, “Will and I pledged to each other and to God that we were going to be the family God wanted us to be and we were going to love each other the way God wanted us to.”

A few years later, Anderson's husband was diagnosed with cancer. He died two years ago.

Despite their earlier marital struggles, “I know what transformation is because Jesus did it for me and I saw God do it for Will,” she shared. “It was so precious.”

Reflecting on her spiritual pilgrimage, Anderson said, “I was lost, I was confused and Jesus pulled me together. Jesus did for me what I could not do for myself.

“I want you to know that life will never again be about me,” Anderson told the women. “When Jesus healed me, I never wanted any attention again.

“I don't go around worrying about whether people like me,” she added. “Only God defines me.”

[Ann Kiemel Anderson died from cancer on March 1, 2014]

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #15845]

RECOGNIZING THE ADDICTIVE/COMPULSIVE*

Often Pastors in traumatic circumstances respond to such crises by adopting addictive and/or compulsive behaviors. Here's a simple listing and descriptions to help identify such individuals.

1. Preoccupation... with any addictive agent: persons, things, activities, events, behaviors, etc.

2. Increased Tolerance... the longer the addiction, the greater the tolerance level for involvement with the addictive agent.

3. Loss of Control... an inability to cut back, modify, or resist behaviors in spite of promises.

4. Withdrawal... any attempt to stop or modify use or attachment to addictive agent causes withdrawal symptoms such as depression, extended periods of crying, anger, irritability, etc.

5. Secretive Behavior... clever denial techniques and cleverly concealing evidence help conceal the problem.

6. Denial... marked by defensiveness, rationalizations, or the "shrug off" ("It's no big deal," "I'm in control," etc).

7. Yo-Yo Complex... wide and sudden moods swings which addictive persons can hide quite skillfully.

8. Blaming... the "It's not my fault" syndrome.

9. Mental Lapses... blackouts, loss of memories, daydreaming, pre-occupation with the addictive agent.

10. Physical Symptoms... headaches, ulcers, hypertension, etc.

11. Rigid Attitudes... intolerance of differing viewpoints, black-or-white, all-or-nothing thinking patterns leading to disrupted relationships.

12. Low Self-Image... the longer the period of addiction, the less one cares about themselves and the greater the potential for addicted individuals to act contrary to their original value system.

13. Tragedy... compulsive addictions can so alter judgement that accidents, injuries and even disability or death can result.

________________________

* Adapted from Wright, Norman. "Dysfunctional Roles: Do I Have One?" in "Always Daddy's Girl." Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1989. pp. 175-177

*

Memo to those who hurt because of drug-related problems: "You can get well. You are not required to wear those sad nametags 'alcoholic' or 'drug addict' the rest of your days."

We pray for the day when you will be able to boldly proclaim, "I used to be a drug addict, but I am no longer a drug addict. I used to be a recovering individual, but I am no longer recovering. I am recovered forever by the grace of God, and that same hope can belong to you."

There are a few who fortunately grasp the keys to recovery overnight and become public evidences of miraculous cures. Steve Cobb, the dedicated young pastor of Temple Baptist Church in New Bern, N.C., is living proof of this possibility. During the early 1980's he was locked into a self-made hell of party life. He lived for the booze and the vast array of illegal "feel good" substances that dominated his tragic lifestyle.

Steve was searching for a way out, and when his parents suggested a conversation with a former drug addict turned crusader, he reluctantly grasped the opportunity. The next day he attended church to hear the stranger share his story of his downfall and all the terrifying consequences associated with the drug world. But what most attracted the interest of the young druggie was the speaker's constant assertion that he had achieved permanent recovery from his addiction with the help of the Lord. When invitation time came, Steve came forward and explained to the caring pastor of the church, "If God could do it for Ted Stone, He can do it for me."

The Asheville, N.C., resident broke free from his tragic habit. He had wisely substituted a complete dependence on Jesus for his former addictions, and his life was changed forever. His commitment to the Lord became obvious from this moment, and his daily testimony led countless friends and strangers to follow his example. He accepted God's call to the ministry and graduated from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Today God is using this devoted Christian servant and his fellow church members as beacons of hope for the lost and hurting in North Carolina's coastal region.

The co-author of this article, Philip Barber, often relates to listening audiences. "Until I heard Ted proclaim from a church pulpit that he once was a drug addict, but that he was no longer a drug addict, I had no hope that I could ever get well," Barber said.

For Philip and many others the road to recovery proved painful and bumpy. The eventual recovery did not come overnight, but for these who struggle through relapse after relapse, recovery can also become permanent. The temporary falls can become lessons well learned, steppingstones to eventual recovery, as in Philip's past history. The once recovering individual, as he learns to rely more on the strength of the Lord and less on his ability to run the show, wakes to discover that he, too, is finally recovered by the grace of God. Without the light of hope ever visible at the finish line of the race, there would have been little reason to continue the race.

References to the addicted state as a disease, caused by physical and mental makeup and family history, are false and misleading, and detrimental to the assumption of personal responsibility for one's actions. Certainly a person who wanders deep into the addictive lifestyle will become sick, but there is nothing in the system of a healthy individual that cries out, "You must be a drug addict," or "You must be an alcoholic." In the vast majority of cases of substance abuse, the afflicted person made the initial choice to participate, and certainly the addicted one in every case must make the final choice to discard the dark lifestyle. The struggle for sobriety need not be a lifelong battle, even though the weaker ones must forever remain vigilant. The adoption of sobriety and self-control as the best road to success, happiness, and inner peace will help nurture a deeply ingrained will to remain free from drug abuse, and a return to the unhappy past will no longer be an option. We can learn from our mistakes!

As those of us who have obtained permanent recovery, whether by overnight miracle or through a long struggle, rejoice, we must never forget that there remain others who hurt and desperately need the encouragement of those who have crossed the victory line. The promise still rings clearly from Revelation 21:7, "He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son."

*

Lessons From Rock Bottom: The church can learn about grace from the recovery movement.

In earlier times, some theologians wrote "natural theologies" by first explicating the wonders of nature and then gradually moving toward theism, revelation, and Christian doctrine. If I were writing a natural theology today, I think I would start with recovering alcoholics.

It staggers me that psychiatrists, pharmacologists, and scientific reductionists cannot improve on a spiritual program devised by a couple of Christian alcoholics 60 years ago.

Anthropology, original sin, regeneration, sanctification -- the recovery movement contains within it seeds of all these doctrines. As an alcoholic once told me, "I have to publicly declare 'I am an alcoholic' whenever I introduce myself at group. It is a statement of failure, of helplessness, and surrender. Take a room of a dozen or so people, all of whom admit helplessness and failure, and it's pretty easy to see how God then presents himself in that group."

The historian of Alcoholics Anonymous titled his work NOT-GOD because, he said, that stands as the most important hurdle an addicted person must surmount: to acknowledge, deep in the soul, not being God. No mastery of manipulation and control, at which alcoholics excel, can overcome the root problem; rather, the alcoholic must recognize individual helplessness and fall back in the arms of the Higher Power. "First of all, we had to quit playing God," concluded the founders of AA; and then allow God himself to "play God" in the addict's life, which involves daily, even moment-by-moment, surrender.

Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, reached the unshakable conviction, now a canon of twelve-step groups, that an alcoholic must "hit bottom" in order to climb upward. Wilson wrote his fellow strugglers, "How privileged we are to understand so well the divine paradox that strength rises from weakness, that humiliation goes before resurrection: that pain is not only the price but the very touchstone of spiritual rebirth." The Apostle Paul could not have phrased it better.

The need for humble dependence continues throughout recovery. Although an alcoholic may pray desperately for the condition to go away, very few addicts report sudden, miraculous healing. Most battle temptation every day of their lives, experiencing grace not as a magic potion, rather as a balm whose strength is activated daily by conscious dependence on God.

One alcoholic wrote me,

I know that I can go out and start drinking today and... have

all the sex I want with all the women I want and live in a state

of continued drunkenness for quite some time. But there is a

catch. I know firsthand all the misery and guilt that comes

along with it. And that is something I want no part of. I have

experienced guilt and misery so extreme that I didn't want to

live anymore at all -- and that, my friend, is why I would rather

not have to take advantage of God's generosity in being willing

to forgive me once again should I go that route.... Plus, in my

present life, every now and then I think I do manage to do God's

will. And, when I do, then the rewards are so tremendous and

satisfying that I get kind of addicted to that closeness to God.

There is a common saying in AA: "Religion is for people who

believe in Hell. Spirituality is for people who have been

there."

In correspondence with Bill Wilson, the psychiatrist Carl Jung remarked that it may be no accident that we refer to alcoholic drinks as "spirits." Perhaps, suggested Jung, alcoholics have a greater thirst for the spirit than other people, but it is all too often misdirected.

Early in the AA program, two groups divided over the issue of perfectionism. One, an offshoot of the Oxford Group, insisted on "Four Absolutes" and required its members to commit to a strict Christian creed. The other, led by Bill Wilson, started with a dependence on grace, an acknowledgment that its members would never achieve perfection. Absolutes, said Wilson, either turned alcoholics away or gave them a dangerous feeling of "spiritual inflation." Over time, the perfectionist Oxford Group shriveled up and disappeared; grace-based AA has never stopped growing.

We in the church have as much to learn from people in the recovery movement as we have to offer them. I was struck by one observation from an alcoholic friend of mine. "When I'm late to church, people turn around and stare at me with frowns of disapproval. I get the clear message that I'm not as RESPONSIBLE as they are. When I'm late to AA, the meeting comes to a halt and everyone jumps up to hug and welcome me. They realize that my lateness may be a sign that I almost didn't make it. When I show up, it proves that my desperate need for them won out over my desperate need for alcohol."

*

Spiritual Recovery series Psalm 30:1-12

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM

==========================

I. Apollo 13 as a metaphor for life.

II. We can relate to Psalm 30.

A. David was saved from death and damnation.

B. Pits are not fun.

III. Society avoids the concept of sin; so do many Christians. #2583

A. It is common to view individual sins as nuisances.

B. Sin, even if insignificant, can lead to terrible consequences.

IV. You can't reform yourself.

A. We must realize our schemes for reform are hopeless.

B. Denial just delays the inevitable.

C. Only God can change your life.

V. Four simple steps you can take to recovery.

A. You must be aware that you have a problem.

B. You must be aware that you are powerless over that problem.

C. Your life is becoming unmanageable because of the problem.

D. You must ask God for help.

VI. Almighty God is greater than any problem we face.

Now that America believes less in help-your-fellow than in blame-the-person-who-made-you-a-victim, can Alcoholics Anonymous still get its message across?

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS turns sixty this year, and while its size and reach show no sign of waning (there are more than a million members in the United States and Canada, and eight hundred thousand more scattered through a hundred and forty other countries), there is a feeling among A.A. veterans that the fellowship is at a crossroads. At A.A.'s General Service Office, in the Interchurch Center in New York City, an austere office building at 120th Street and Riverside Drive that is known in the neighborhood as the God Box, one staff member reflected recently that the Age of the Founders was long gone - Bill Wilson, the New York stockbroker who led the movement for more than thirty years, died in 1971, and Bob Smith, the Ohio surgeon who founded it with him, had died twenty years earlier - and the Age of the Apostles was now ending. "There's practically no one alive today who was there when Bill and Bob met, or in that very first group," she said. "Pretty soon, there will be no early-timers at all."

Standing like a crewcut cadet among fops, the Interchurch Center is set between the ornate spire of Riverside Church, to the north, and a row of neo-baroque apartment houses, to the south. A reasonable facsimile of a midtown corporate fortress, it has revolving doors that spin you onto a mopped marble floor, and a badged guard who eyes you from behind a security counter. In A.A.'s eleventh floor office - described by one staff member as "the visible clearing house of an in visible organization" - close to a hundred people are at work, filling orders of A.A.'s publications, referring callers to local groups, disseminating information to the public and to the medical an counseling professions. "We are a repository of group experience," he said. "People write us about a problem they are having in their group - an unruly member, a question about confidentiality. We share experience by telling them what been done in similar situations in the past. We don't issue directives. We don't hand down rules."

Besides being the nerve center for the more than fifty thousand registered A.A. groups in the United States, the General Service Office is a shrine. Its corridors are hung with poster-size photographs of the founders, and placards bearing their sayings; along one long wall of an anteroom that leads into the organization's archive is a locked glass case containing various editions of the Big Book - the basic A.A. text, which has sold thirteen million copies since it was first published, in 1939. "I consider the Big Book an inspired text, written by Bill under the guidance of the spirit," another staff member said. "And I worry that I see a shrinking in the reading and studying of the Big Book. People paraphrase it incorrectly. Some do spot reading, or they don't read it at all."

Some members say that if the Big Book is losing its hold on new members, it may be because its image of the alcoholic is hopelessly cornball and exclusively male: he is a traveling salesman tempted by the hotel bar; he is compared in his desperation to a "gaunt prospector, belt drawn in over the last ounce of food"; or, in his drunken oblivion, to "the farmer who [comes] up out of his cyclone cellar to find his home ruined," looks around, and remarks to his wife, "Don't see anything the matter here, Ma. Ain't it grand the wind stopped blowin'?" There is even a condescending chapter addressed "To Wives." Today, A.A. is more than a third women, and twenty per cent of the membership is under thirty - people for whom prospectors and storm shelters are defunct metaphors.

Others think the integrity of the fellowship is being threatened by "people who come in because the courts or rehab centers send them," in the words of Dr. Marc Galanter, a New York psychiatrist who has written extensively about A.A. "Many of these people have to get a meeting card checked off to show that they're fulfilling the obligations of, say, their suspended sentence - and though A.A. welcomes them, this is something that's basically against what makes the fellowship work. Coming in is supposed to be voluntary - an act of spiritual surrender, not acquiescence to some legal requirement.

And others think that A.A. is becoming a social club where people of leisure show up casually, in order to make deals or dates. "It used to be that when someone talked about suffering, you could hear a pin drop," a retired advertising writer who has been in A.A. for sixteen years said. "But now people come to the meetings with a bottle of designer water in hand, and there's more and more talk about success. It kills the meeting. People get up to pee, or to look for an ashtray." One member, a carpenter of about forty who lives near a posh New York suburb, put it this way:

"We have actually become afraid of the still-suffering alcoholic. If a drunk walked into a meeting in my town, people would be aghast. We've become too nice for that." He still attends his home meeting, he said, but he goes once a month to a meeting in a men's shelter in a neighboring town, to get "the real thing."

It is not only this squeamishness before the hard-core alcoholic that bothers A.A. veterans, but what they see as a growing expectation among some members that meetings will amount to a form of public coddling. Sometimes this expectation is met ("unconditional love" is how one member described what she encountered at her first meeting); but sometimes it is disappointed. When a young woman at a meeting we attended said in a private schoolish whine that she, as a recovering alcoholic, deserved "more space" than she was getting from her non-drinking friends, a young man in dreadlocks looked at her with a mischievous grin and said, 'When I was drinking, I had the same problem you have now. I had not yet achieved low self-esteem."

The rebuke was a pure expression of "the real thing" - of the Big Book's principle that "self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity" are "the root of our troubles," that we "must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us!" But some veterans are troubled that this basic A.A. insight is invoked less often than it used to be. They worry that alcoholism, which was once a source of convicting shame in America, is being turned into an alibi. They mention the recent case of a West-ch ester man who confessed at an A.A. meeting to a murder committed while he was on a binge, and then mounted a legal defense based on the claim that alcohol had led him to confuse his victims with the parents who had emotionally abused him as a child. And they laugh - though not with real amusement - about the case of Leonard Tose, the former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, who responded to a suit to collect gambling debts brought by an Atlantic City casino a few years ago by countersuing and claiming that the casino had allowed him to gamble away his fortune while he was manifestly drunk. "A.A. is not about excuses," one longtime member said. "It's about obligations. Bill and Bob would be appalled."

A.A. came into existence at a time when Americans were introduced to fear and futility on a scale that had not been previously imagined and has not been matched since - a time when it was a common experience for a man to feel prosperous one day and to be reduced to nothing the next. When A.A. first took form, in the nineteen-thirties, it was not a place where one came to ventilate anxiety about the enervation of a stressful life. It was the last stop before the abyss.

For many drinking Americans, Prohibition had been less an obstacle than a nuisance. (H. L. Mencken reported that he failed only twice during Prohibition to find a drink - once when he was traveling in Pennsylvania and did not realize that "seafood" was the local euphemism for beer.) During "the dry years," Bill Wilson had made his living as a kind of mobile industrial-espionage agent, scouting out companies for his brokerage house by befriending research- and-development men in their local watering holes, and then stiffening his will with another drink before attempting to persuade investors of the truth of tips he only half believed himself By the time of Repeal, in 1933, he bad drunk himself out of his job.

He and his wife, Lois, who at that time worked as a salesclerk in Macy's, joined the ranks of Depression vagabonds, living with her parents, with friends, or on their own in shabby apartments. Paul Lang, the archivist in charge of the Wilson family papers at Stepping Stones, their eventual permanent home, in northern Westchester County (it is now a historic site, maintained by a foundation established upon Lois's death), counts fifty-four different addresses for the couple in the early nineteen-thirties. These were hellish years, during which three ectopic pregnancies ended Lois's hope of bearing children and the pace of Bill's drinking grew in proportion to his shame. Bill would dry out periodically in a clinic on Central Park West called the Towns Hospital, then try to stay sober until the "small, cold ball of fear ... in his stomach would surge up," and only a drink could mitigate his terror of its return. He promised abstinence and was meanwhile hiding his liquor from his wife "as a squirrel would cherish nuts ... in the attic, on beams, underneath the flooring... in the flush box of toilets." The archive at Stepping Stones contains Lois's personal Bible, in which Bill wrote periodic pledges to stay sober - promises whose ingenuousness is matched by a fear legible in the handwriting itself, which becomes increasingly spidery as it moves down the page:

To my beloved wife that has endured so much let this stand as evidence of my pledge to you that I have finished with drink forever.

Bill

Oct. 20, 1928.

Thanksgiving Day 1928. My strength is renewed a thousand-fold in my love for you.

To tell you once more that I am finished with it. I love you. Jan. 12, 1929.

Finally and for a lifetime. Thank you for your love. Sept. 3, 1930.

As Bill later wrote in the Big Book, he was locked in this cycle of resolution and relapse by his inveterate tendency to compensate for pain by finding someone or something to blame:

With the alcoholic... this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.

It was in the detox hospital in 1934 that Bill first arrived at this difficult knowledge. The epiphany came as his doctors were putting him through the usual regimen: sedating him with belladonna and purging him with castor oil. (Medicine had - and has - made little progress in treating alcoholism since the eighteenth century, when the pioneer physician Benjamin Rush treated a man "habitually fond of ardent spirits" by mixing tartar emetic with his rum.) Left to endure the craving and the cramps in a room that had been cleared of potential suicide instruments, Bill had the experience that broke the cycle:

My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying our, "If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!"

Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are to describe it. It seemed to me, in the mind's eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a rime I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, 'So this is the God of the preachers!"

Bill left the hospital as a man possessed, roaming New York, in the words of his biographer, Robert Thomsen, "at all hours, indefatigable and incorrigible, totally convinced that if he could do it, could find a way out, [anyone] could do it." He literally dragged drunks home from the gutter, inflicting them on his wife, who fed and bunked them in their Brooklyn home while he pleaded that they consign themselves to "the Presence.' Mostly, what the Wilson's got in return was petty thievery and, sometimes, vomit on the floor.

In the grip of his new obsession, Bill found himself ridiculed not as a drunk but as a fit successor to temperance fanatics like Carry Nation. In the first decade of this century, Carry Nation had toured the country from saloon to saloon, smashing - as her biographer Robert Lewis Taylor puts it - "Venetian mirror[s] with brickbats," ripping "candid and stimulating prints from the walls," and, on one notorious occasion, throwing "a billiard ball at what she mistakenly took to be Satan lounging behind the bar." She ended her life, in the words of the historian Norman Clark, as a carnival freak... a sideshow for a series of county fairs, armed with hatchets and her Bible" - and to many who watched Bill on the prowl he seemed headed for the same oblivion. Yet however unavailing these efforts were for his "patients," they had the strange effect of somehow keeping him sober himself.

Bill did not come close to a "slip" until the spring of 1935, when he found himself in an Akron hotel lobby with nothing to do on a weekend afternoon. A business deal that had brought him to town had fallen through, and he was drawn by the sociable sounds of the bar.

Retreating to a phone booth as if to a pocket of air in a room fast filling with smoke, he dialed all the church numbers he could find in the local directory, and when a clergyman answered he said - not knowing quite why - that he was a "rum-hound from New York" who needed "to speak now" with another alcoholic.

He ended up visiting a local surgeon named Bob Smith, who was known around town as a hopeless boozer; and their encounter was, in effect, the first A.A. meeting. Dr. Bob never touched another drop for the remaining fifteen years of his life, going "dry into his casket," as the poet John Berryman wrote in his novel "Recovery," which is about his own A.A. experience. "Look up his life sometime, there must be stuff"

It took a while for the two men to identify the "stuff" that had saved them: the therapeutic value for oneself of helping another person stay sober. "Our talk was a completely mutual thing," Bill [re]called. "I had quit preaching. I knew that I needed this alcoholic as much as he needed me. This was it." Together, they began to visit patients in detox, telling their story, and inviting them to give the new talking therapy a try. Let us talk to you, for our own sakes, they said, in effect, and then talk to us and we'll listen. Sometimes they were shooed away like pestering salesmen. But soon they had a success - with a businessman who was going through his eighth detoxification in six months, the previous one having begun with his punching two nurses in the eye. At first, he resisted, and railed at his wife for revealing his drinking to strangers. When she coaxed him into seeing them, he braced himself for another sales pitch. But he relented when he realized that "all the other people he had talked to me wanted to help me, an my pride prevented me from listening them... but I felt as if I would be a re stinker if I did not listen to a couple o fellows for a short time, if that would c[ure?] them" - and he became the third member of the new fellowship that called itself "bunch of nameless alcoholics."

The principle on which the new group was based was that no one is responsible for the wreckage of the alcoholic's life except the alcoholic himself. No mart what has been done to you, member would be told, you are responsible f what is done by you. They would refuse to project evil onto some blamable cause, even though they might speak of alcoholism as (in the Big Book's words) an "illness" or "allergy," and of some people as alcoholic before they ever touched a drop, as if they were born tinctured by a poison activated by the first drink.

Within Alcoholics Anonymous (the name was adopted in 1939), some people speak of its astonishing growth after the Akron meeting as the expansion of God's dominion. But there has always been a palpable tension between what might be called the pietist and the rationalist wings of the movement; and traces of this division remain in the Twelve Steps, the list of principles that Bill Wilson drew up as he wrote the Big Book:

_________________________

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

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

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

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

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

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

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

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

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

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. 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 alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

_________________________

Although some members still speak of these steps as if they were brought down from Sinai or were revealed, like the Book of Mormon, by a messenger angel, they are in fact products of contention that is still discernible in them. Their wording was under debate until just before release of the Big Book, when the phrase "on our knees" was deleted from Step 7 and "as we understood Him" was inserted in Steps 3 and 11. Some regard such concessions as proof of the democratic genius of the fellowship - of its ability to modulate the idea of a personal deity into an abstraction that can accommodate all members, including non-Christians and agnostics. Others worry that God has become so vague a conception that he has disappeared. Evidently wearied by the prevalence of the term "self-help," one member complains, "We're not a self-help program. If we were helping ourselves, we'd be in trouble. We are a spirit-help program, a God-help program."

God has always been A.A.'s raw nerve. Bill confided in only a few friends about how "the Presence" had manifested itself to him, lest A.A. become linked in the public mind with crackpots and ranters. But shortly after that hospital experience a friend recommended to him William James's "The Varieties of Religious Experience." Bill read the book with the gratitude one feels toward a respectable witness who confirms that he, too, has heard the disembodied voice or seen the ghost that has brought one under suspicion of madness. James (whom Bill came to refer to as "one of the founders") seemed to know at first hand the power of alcohol to make one feel uncontested at the center of the universe - to turn any party into your fete, any music into your serenade:

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core.

And when James wrote about the futility of mental effort he seemed to grasp exactly what Bill had undergone in Towns Hospital:

You know how it is when you try to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for it, by mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which the word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name were jammed, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process was starred in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously.

James ratified the value of giving oneself up rather than "pulling oneself together - an ineffably strange reversal for a man like Bill, whose life had once been all about seizing opportunities, looking for the main chance, training, disciplining, driving himself. When Bill read that "something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy," he recognized an account of what had happened to him.

This experience of giving way and breaking down remains the key to every A.A. meeting, as it was at one we attended on a rainy Saturday morning in a Boston mental-health center - one of those nineteen-sixties scored-concrete buildings with all the charm of a highway trestle. On the steps outside, men slept curled in the rain. Inside, the atmosphere was festive. A tidy-looking young man (polo shirt, pressed khakis) was telling a group of about forty men and women how he had stepped, for no apparent reason, in front of a mirrored column in a subway station. Walking around it, as if he had been suddenly vouchsafed the ability to see himself from without, he stared at his own face, yellow and jowly, really seeing it for the first time. For months, he said, he had been drinking two bottles of wine every night in between aperitifs and chasers. In that instant, he knew he would never drink again. But he had no idea why.

One hears as many metaphors for such an experience as there are members who speak. One member at the Boston meeting likened it to the feeling of a runner who gets a second wind - that eerie sensation when exertion suddenly subsides into limpid ease. Another compared it to what happens when you learn to ride a bicycle - to that moment when you stop straining to find your balance and suddenly it's there. One young man at a New York meeting described the splitting away of his old self as if he had been a plank with a fault line running through it until a pressure came that made the board break.

The later editions of the Big Book play down this expectation of "sudden and spectacular upheaval," and report instead that "most of our experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the 'educational variety' because they develop slowly over a period of time." But, whether the release is sudden or slow, public testimony about the hell in which one lived before deliverance is indispensable for both speakers and listeners; and the talking therapy has no designated end.

Like cancer patients in remission, A.A. members think of themselves as "arrested," not "cured." With the possibility of backsliding never far out of mind, they regard each day of sobriety as an merited gift, and each A.A. meeting as a holding action - because "each lapse," as James wrote, "is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again."

As A.A. took form, Bill and Bob had no particular historical model in mind. They were not bookish men. But it is uncanny how closely their new fellowship resembled the first American churches that had been "gathered" three centuries before. The founders of those churches, named Puritans because of their implacable objections to the rituals of England's state church, had instituted in America a practice of public confession, in which each member of the congregation spoke of his or her enslavement to sin and of how the bondage had been broken. The Puritans had called these testimonies "conversion relations" or "professions of faith." A.A. called them "drunkalogues."

In the A.A. view, just as in that of the Puritans, salvation is not something one can possess by means of a penitential act now and then. Rather, it is a state of endless striving. The work of salvation, as the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards wrote in the seventeen-forties, must be, for each person, "not only.., the business of Sabbath days, or certain extraordinary times, or the business of a month, or a year, or of seven years... but the business of his life ... which he perseveres in through all changes, and under all trials, as long as he lives." The convert's obligation to his fellows is not satisfied by a coin in the Sunday collection basket. "Faith has to work twenty-four hours a day in and through us," as the Big Book puts it, "or we perish." There is no evidence that Bill himself ever followed James back to Edwards (in whose writings James found an "admirably rich and delicate description" of conversion), but if he had he would have found more than a congenial spirit. He would have experienced a shock of recognition when he came upon Edwards's list of signs by which the anxious seeker tests the validity of his or her spiritual experience. Did it come from God, or was it hallucinatory? Edwards enumerated twelve signs by which one could tell. They do not match A.A.'s Twelve Steps with the exactness of a stencil, but they come close. Here is the twelfth sign, which he called the "sign of signs" and "evidence of evidences" (the Big Book calls the Twelfth Step "the capstone" and "foundation stone" of all the rest):

Whatever pretenses persons may make to great discoveries, great Love and joys, they are no further to be regarded, than they have influence on their practice.

Substantially the same as A. A.'s Twelfth Step, this statement contains what James called the whole of Edwards' work. It is "an elaborate working out of [the] thesis [that] the roots of a man's virtue are inaccessible to us," James wrote. "No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians." If, in other words, two people claim they are saved, and one sees Jesus' blood running down the bedroom wall, while the other sees only the swirls and cracks in the plaster, this difference between them has not the slightest significance. The only evidence that one's inner spiritual condition has changed is visible evidence of a new responsibility toward others in one's outward practice.

James repeated this point again and again, as if to rebuke his Harvard colleagues, who thought he had gone soft on God. The question of whether someone s conversion had a supernatural cause or could be explained in purely psychological terms held no interest for James. (Freud, working with a dualistic model of the mind, later described such events as an internal rupture in the psyche through which the unconscious pours into consciousness.) Like Edwards, James was not interested in causes - only in results. It matters not a whit if the convert is transformed by God or by the smile of a child. The only thing that matters is the result of the experience. "If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good," James wrote, "we ought to idealize and venerate it... if not, we ought to make short work with it....

When it comes to applying this standard of results to A.A., not much is known about its aggregate impact on American alcoholics. Most experts estimate the number of alcoholics in the United States at ten to fifteen million, and some believe that nearly one in ten adults has attended an A.A. meeting at some time in his life. In 1968, recognizing that "our communications to the professional community had very little credibility because of a lack of objective data," A.A. began to conduct periodic surveys of its members in order to assess its own efficacy. In a 1989 survey of almost ten thousand members chosen at random, thirty-five per cent of the respondents reported less than a year of sobriety, thirty-six per cent between one and five years, and twenty-nine per cent more than five years.

But what such numbers mean is far from clear. For example, the survey also revealed that about half of newcomers leave A.A. after less than three months, and that "after the first year... attrition continues, but at a much slower rate." If you try to adjust the numbers to reflect these facts, it is still difficult to come up with a true sobriety (or "salvation") rate. The best the editors of an exhaustive recent monograph on research on A.A. can do is conclude that "long-term sobriety occurs within a select minority of those who initially attend A.A." For certain cancers this would represent a good outcome. For most bacterial diseases, it would not. To the theological father of Puritanism, John Calvin, who wrote in 1536 that "the same sermon is addressed to a hundred persons, twenty receive it with the obedience of faith; the others despise, or ridicule, or reject, or condemn it," a "select minority" would seem about right.

It was the test of results that clarified for Bill what had happened to him in Towns Hospital. It gave him a way to answer those who said he had simply substituted a new addiction - A.A. - for his old one When he had been drinking, he had been "at the gates of insanity," he wrote, and other people were obliterated by the intensity of his narcissism. But when, first in Brooklyn and then in Akron, and then through AA., his mind had been directed outward, he was restored to the world persons. Edwards called this new engagement with other people "consent to being." A.A. calls it "Twelve-Stepping."

Twelve-Stepping is based on the in sight that altruism has selfish value, in the charity gives hope to the giver: "When the phone rings at two in the morning," one member told us, "and it's a member in my group who needs help, I get up and go. Anything else in my life I will negotiate. But in A.A. I just do it. It doesn't make any sense to get up at two on a snowy night. But you do it all the same."

In light of the fact that the religious dimension of A.A. has made many prospective joiners uneasy (newcomers sometimes have the self-conscious look of stragglers in the pews when everyone else is taking communion), it is striking how respectfully A.A. is regarded by even the most secular-minded experts in the field of addiction. We spoke with one such authority, Dr. Steven Hyman, who is the director of the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative, at Harvard University, in a squat brick building at the old Charlestown Navy Yard which used to be a storehouse for torpedoes but is now a research facility of the Massachusetts General Hospital, complete with atrium and cafe. Dr. Hyman, who looks like Pavarotti in fighting trim, does not initially impress one as likely to have much tolerance for a movement that began when a patient was seized in his hospital bed by "the Presence." In this respect, he surprised us.

"The great A.A. insight was not just that alcoholism is a disease but that having this disease is not an excuse for anything - not for missing work, messing up your family, killing people in automobiles," he began. "In terms of cause, alcoholism does have genetic causes, cultural causes, circumstantial causes. But there's nothing deterministic about its consequences. That's the strange paradox A.A. understood, and it seems to be more and more difficult for people to accept.

Dr. Hyman added, "I have no problem with the A.A. method," and launched into an explanation of how a spiritual therapy could relieve a physiological affliction. Rummaging through the papers on his desk, he came up with an M.R.I. film of a rat's brain after the animal had been injected with cocaine. It showed a splatter of bright streaks on a dark background, like fireworks against the night sky. This picture, he said, revealed a neurological system that was more complexly developed in human beings but served basically the same function in people as in rats. He described an experiment done in Canada in the nineteen-fifties, in which electrodes were affixed to a succession of sectors of a rat's brain. A lever was placed within reach of the animal so that it could send current into itself by depressing the switch. "In some places, the effect was highly aversive," Dr. Hyman said. 'You can imagine the experience of feeling electrical sensations in your paws. But when the electrodes were attached to certain other locations, the rat would press the lever thousands of times to get more of it - until exhaustion supervened.

"Now, why do we have such a system-a brain that will light up when you charge it with electricity or drugs? Because some things are too important to leave to cognition. If you left them up to people to calculate, they'd get messed up. Nature's experience with sexual reproduction would have been a big failure unless sex were profoundly rewarding. So we have a neurological system that says, That was good, let's do it again.' A few natural substances, including alcohol, tap into this system in the brain that says, 'That was good, lets do it again, and let's remember exactly how we did it.' And, since you're bombarded every day by millions of sensations, the brain is organized in such a way that certain indispensable experiences, like sex, have the greatest affective valence, and become objects of desire."

Dr. Hyman's name for the process by which this system is captured by drugs is "adaptation," which is "a way of making long-term changes in the way the brain works, so that you can remember experience." This kind of "learning" uses many of the same biological processes in the brain as in other parts of the body. "Let's say you wanted to look like Schwarzenegger, and you went to the gym and started pumping iron," he said. "Your arms would really hurt. But eventually you would have an adaptive response. The genes in the nuclei in your muscle cells would start making more messenger RNA and then more protein to build up those muscles, and pretty soon - especially if you also took anabolic steroids - you would look like Schwarzenegger. These adaptive responses are universal. Some are helpful, like hulking up, which is essentially a response to injury. Others are a problem-as when people develop a tolerance for their asthma medicine. In fact, they not only need stronger doses but become dependent. If they don't get their asthma medicine, they have worse asthma attacks.

"Addiction, in other words, is a form of adaptation. Our best current understanding of alcoholic addiction is that, in response to bombardment by the chemical ethanol, chronic adaptations occur in the brain's reward circuitry. There are individual genetic and developmental and environmental factors that help determine who will get addicted to alcohol or how soon - matters we know very little about. But, in the context of individual vulnerability, adaptations will occur in the circuitry in response to the drug. Once this happens, the user becomes dependent on it for his world to be O.K. The brain says, 'That was good, I feel O.K.' If you're an alcoholic, you simply can't imagine a day without drinking. You need that hit. Your brain demands it." With almost reverent intensity, Hyman said, "If you understand addiction, you understand something very profound about the human brain - how it hijacks the cortex in the service of the primordial lizard brain.

Hyman went on, "Now, to help people with these molecular changes in their brain, we have to come up with things that will deliver compensatory pleasure - a requirement that it's tough to get the medical and scientific professions to accept. A.A. understood this. In fact, they're still ahead of us. Most pharmacological research is still focussed on the development of drugs that block pleasure. An example is naltrexone, a long-acting blocker of opiate receptors. If you take it every morning, and shoot up heroin later in the day, you will not get high. It looked terrific in the lab. The trouble is that, once it was approved for heroin users, the compliance rates were about fifteen per cent, because the addicts said it made them feel lousy. Naltrexone has just been approved as a drug for decreasing craving in alcoholism. My prediction is that it won't work, because it doesn't give something back."

Hyman's account of addiction is an impeccably accurate rendition of the doctrine of original sin as Jonathan Edwards expounded it. What Hyman calls "the reward-circuitry of the brain" Edwards called the "faculty by which the soul.. . is inclined to.. . or disinclined from... sensible objects." Both regard it as inborn, and yet both insist that people are fully responsible for how they act on its inclinations. Edwards thought of this paradox as a war in the soul between the destructive desires that he called sin or self-love ("self-will run riot" is the Big Book's phrase) and the productive love that goes outward, asking no reward, to other people and, through them, to God. Hyman believes that you can actually see the war in a picture. "I suspect that if I could compare scans of the brain of an alcoholic person before and after treatment in a twelve-step program, you would see clear changes. Of course, the altruistic activity affects the brain as much as a drug does," he said.

Edwards would have been delighted with this idea. It has been said, by the historian Perry Miller, that when Edwards preached he deployed words as an "engine against the brain" in order to stimulate in his hearers a "taste," or "relish," for what he called "divine excellency." The point was to use words to "let... light into the soul" by describing vividly the plenitude of nature or the charitable acts of saintly persons or the selfless love of Christ, and thereby to entice the imagination away from its usual focus on worldly glitter. And if Edwards would have liked Hyman's notion that one might actually see pictures of this battle within the soul, he would have loved the metaphoric picture of the lizard brain - of the reptile within getting hold of the leash.

"What A.A. understands is that the essence of dealing with alcoholism is not to blame people for having the disease, yet nevertheless to demand that they take responsibility for themselves," Dr. Hyman said. "That's a hard concept. It is hard to say to somebody, Yes, things are terrible, yes, getting to your present condition involved what was done to you, and it even has something to do with the body with which you were born, but from this day on we have identified the problem, and you have to be involved in the solution.'" Here is Edwards's formula-non of the same compatibility between helplessness and responsibility:

In order to form their notion of faultiness or blameworthiness, [people] don't wait till they have decided .. . what first determines the will.... They don't take any part of their no-ton of fault or blame from the resolution of any such questions. If this were the case ... nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand would live and die without having any such no-don as that of fault ever entering into their heads, or without so much as once having any conception that anybody was to be either blamed or commended for anything. Edwards believed that this idea accorded perfectly with common sense. And Bill Wilson, through his experience in Towns Hospital, came to the same conclusion - that "what first determines the will" to drink has nothing to do with the question of who bears responsibility for the consequences of drinking.

For much of American history, there seems to have been a consensus that this stringent principle should be applied broadly to the moral life. Among modern Western societies, America has been the country where human beings were most exposed to the possibility of advancement, and least protected from the prospect of decline. It was, in Emerson's phrase, the culture of "self-reliance," in which a man was supposed to take his chances and then collect the reward or pay the price for what he had done or had failed to do.

With the Great Depression, however, this kind of uncompromising individualism became insupportable. For millions of people whose best efforts had availed them nothing, the old doctrine of self-reliance was now experienced as a form of cruelty. At that moment - when the exigencies of the exposed life were judged to be intolerable, and the old stress on individual responsibility had come to seem our of balance with valid claims for individual rights - a profound change took place in America. It was a fusion of the old doctrine of the accountable self with a new kind of public responsibility for the fate of individuals. At the level of politic and public life, this new synthesis came be known as the New Deal. Under rha rubric, the government, mainly through programs that would, today be called "workfare," undertook to provide work opportunities for those whom the private economy had abandoned. At the grassroots level, the most important and enduring expression of this same self-help idea of the founding of A.A.

A.A. was a "church" in which right were kept in steady balance with responsibilities through the mechanisms off expression and requisite community set vice. As such, it kept unflinchingly to Edwardsian principle of what the theol gian Reinhold Niebuhr called, in 193 "responsibility despite inevitability," a at the same time committed itself to pr oviding the unconditional help that suffering human beings have a right expect from others. In this sense, A. was both a religious revival with roots an earlier America and a spontaneous depression of the kind of balanced liberalism that emerged in the Roosevelt years.

But the paradoxically symmetrical idea that lies at the heart of A.A. - that helplessness is a fact of human life, yet, at the same time, no one should be spared responsibility for his actions - has proved extremely difficult to sustain. The relation between rights and responsibilities within American liberalism seems to many people to have been thrown out of balance. In response to this apparent distortion, certain liberal institutions (welfare) and ideas (affirmative action) have been charged with misattributing suffering to circumstance rather than to the responsible self. Such an approach to the alleviation of human suffering, its critics say, misleads people into thinking that the world owes them redress, and leaves them in a state of perpetual expectation for a reparation that will never come.

As part of the feeding frenzy on the corpse of liberalism which now passes for political debate, this critique is often a pretext for mean-spirited attacks on "freeloaders" - people who are deemed unworthy beneficiaries of a misguided paternalism. Yet even some defenders of liberalism agree that, at least in such conspicuous areas as criminal law, regulated speech, and normative sexual behavior, American society has moved too far toward rights and away from responsibilities. Some of the more spectacular "don't blame me" defendants who have entertained and disgusted Americans in recent years - Lorena Bobbitt, the Menendez brothers - seem to represent a moral decadence in which a once dignified liberalism has been reduced to the claim that maimers and murderers are entitled to sympathy and exoneration if only they can show that they were victims, too. 'The architecture of [their] self-defense plea," as Elizabeth Hardwick has put it, is most often organized around the claim of having suffered sexual abuse - "as pertinent to the therapist," she says, "as a kidney to the urologist." These are people who claim, in contrast to Edwards, that "what determines the will" not only means something but means everything.

It is not surprising that, as this exculpatory idea of the coerced will grows rampant in American life, the balance within A.A. between rights and responsibilities has also shifted. "It's getting harder all the time just to find a volunteer for setting up the coffeepot before the meeting, or scrubbing it out after," one member told us. "The idea of helping others in order to help yourself is in trouble." And some members, pointing to circumstantial factors, remark that the practice of Twelve-Stepping is on the decline. "In the days of Bill and Bob, everyone knew a drunk whom you could seek out and Twelve-Step in what used to be your favorite bar," one member said. "But today they're hidden away in rehab centers and dealt with in a medical setting. The expectation that every A.A. member will seek out someone to help seems to be fading."

There are members who believe that the fellowship actually has begun to break apart into schisms. On the one side, there are the proliferating victim groups ("Shoplifters Anonymous, Tight-Shoes Anonymous, Edsel-Owners Anonymous" was the list offered by Marc Galanter), a sort of endless Oprah Winfrey show that claims the A.A. Twelve Step method as its inspiration, but in which the real meaning of the Twelfth Step is lost amid an incessant whine about the injured self. "There's been an influx of doubletalk from these groups," one veteran remarked. "I've heard about an A.A. meeting in New Jersey where the old-timers have taken to yelling out 'Tough [feces], don't drink!' whenever the whiners get started."

On the other side, there is a rival group, called Rational Recovery, which began in 1986 and publishes a guide entitled "The Small Book," in which the addict is promised "sobriety..., without depending on other people or Higher Powers to help you our." This dilute version of the A.A. original seems, to A.A. true believers, a vestigial church, where members make no real commitment to helping others, yet refuse to face the irremediable loneliness of helping only themselves.

How A.A. will respond to these challenges remains an open - and for many members an urgent - question. It is a fellowship based on the proposition that human beings can overcome their existential fear only by recognizing their responsibility for themselves and their obligations to others. To contemplate the history and the destiny of this idea in a culture that seems to be losing its grasp of it is to understand what Bill Wilson meant when he wrote that "bottles were only a symbol" of the endless human struggle against self-deception.

*

In 1993 Dave Thomas moved his family from Florida to escape creditors and legalized gambling.

He knew his family had suffered there from his gambling addiction and that he needed to curb his gambling, especially on horse racing.

Having moved to Tennessee where there is no legalized gambling, Thomas nevertheless found illegal gambling was available through card games and playing numbers.

After a few years in Nashville, Thomas was offered a dream job by a man he met while working as a truck driver for a chemical company. The man was anxious to help Thomas who had won him money while gambling.

The dream job, however, would allow Thomas to drive to Illinois so he could gamble there on the weekends at the casinos. His route also would take him through states where he could buy lottery tickets.

On Aug. 2, 2000, however, Thomas made a profession of faith while attending a service at Nashville's Two Rivers Baptist Church. That decision changed his life and he turned down the "dream" job.

When Thomas sees former fellow gamblers, they often comment on the fact that he no longer gambles. He lets them know, "The Lord changed me."

He is still glad he lives in Tennessee, where it is more difficult to gamble than in most states. Thomas also is glad because he can join in the fight to keep the lottery from becoming legal in a statewide vote Nov. 5.

Thomas is committed to helping fight the lottery because it played a key role in his addiction to gambling.

He recalled when he moved to Florida he saw signs as they crossed the state line: "Welcome to Florida. Play the Florida Lottery."

Thomas, who had already begun to gamble before moving to Florida, began spending $2-$3 a week on lottery tickets. He justified it because of the low cost of the tickets. His other justification was to help his family. He dreamed of buying his parents a better house.

Soon, however, the few dollars he spent weekly on lottery tickets grew to $50 by playing the daily "Cash 3, Cash 4, or Pick 5" tickets.

Then Thomas was introduced to dog racing where his addiction increased.

He began asking for advances on his salary and borrowing money from friends and family.

In the 10 years Thomas and his family lived in Florida, they moved 11 times, often in the middle of the night, to avoid landlords. Many times utilities were cut off and they didn't know the source of their next meal. All this happened despite the fact that Thomas worked in well-paying jobs the entire time and never missed a day of work.

After moving to Tennessee, Thomas' life changed dramatically on that August night at Two Rivers when he heard evangelist Ken Freeman of Texas speak about freedom robbers.

Although he was "scared to death," he committed his life to God.

He did it although he believed he wouldn't have anything to live for without gambling and the adrenaline rush he received while gambling.

But he soon realized he would get his adrenaline rush from his relationship with Jesus.

That decision to accept Christ not only changed his goals. It also changed his way of thinking.

As a result Thomas developed a ministry of helping former gambling friends, gamblers and other people God leads him to.

He goes to Kentucky convenience stores and gives people buying lottery tickets a tract he developed.

While working as a truck driver in Kentucky, Thomas heard a Christian radio station broadcasting information about gambling. He called the show and developed a relationship with the staff. As a result he has been interviewed on the radio several times and has spoken in churches in the area. He also has given his testimony about his gambling addiction at several churches in Tennessee.

Thomas admits life without gambling is not easy. "I'm still fighting it, still staying with it."

He asked his wife, Zarona, and his daughter to write about their experiences when he gambled. He keeps them with him to remind him of the pain he inflicted and he often reads them when he speaks. He has tried to make restitution to friends and family by paying them money he borrowed and apologizing. He realizes some of those relationships will never be mended on earth.

What motivates him, Thomas said, are the victims of gambling, especially the children. If Tennessee legalizes the lottery in 2002 he asks, "How many church people will start playing the lottery who do not think there's anything wrong with it?"

"Everything comes at a price," he said.

Concerning the upcoming vote, Thomas knows he's on the winning team no matter what happens.

"I won't lose because God doesn't ever lose." A state lottery, he said, with its costs to addicts and their families, will just allow him to witness to more gamblers.

*

A young woman I'll call Susie Smith has a weight problem: She's five feet, six inches and weighs 270 pounds. Why does she weigh twice her healthy weight? Genetics? Poor nutrition? Lack of exercise?

No! McDonald's. Smith claims that she is obese because “her regular diet included an Egg McMuffin for breakfast and a Big Mac meal for dinner.” And that is why she and other overweight people are suing McDonald's.

Their complaint may sound ridiculous, but it points to a serious problem: the increasing amorality of the law.

Chris Rangel, a physician who also runs a website devoted to medicine and public policy, doubts Smith's description of her eating habits. He writes, “There is just no physical way for [her] to reach ... 270 pounds ... by eating an Egg McMuffin for breakfast and a Big Mac for dinner.” Basic nutritional guidelines lead Rangel to estimate that Smith is probably consuming close to three times the calories she alleges in her complaint.

But even if Rangel is right, it won't matter -- at least not in today's courts. Historically, even if you assumed that fast food like McDonalds' caused obesity, plaintiffs like Smith could get nothing in court. That's because of legal doctrines known as assumption of risk and contributory negligence. If a plaintiff knew the risks and acted anyway, or if she, through her own negligence, contributed to her injuries, she was barred from recovering damages.

For many years these doctrines allowed tobacco companies to prevail in court. Everyone who smoked after 1964 when warnings appeared on packs of cigarettes knew the dangers and risks associated with smoking. This changed, however, when lawyers went outside the Anglo-American legal tradition and borrowed a concept from our therapeutic culture: addiction.

John Banzhaf, who played a key role in tobacco litigation, told USA TODAY that the concept of addiction was “a breakthrough” that led to their success in court. Portraying plaintiffs as addicts allowed juries to disregard questions of individual self-control and assumption of risk. Instead, they held the corporations responsible.

What's more, the concept of “addiction” is so elastic that it can cover almost any activity we find pleasurable. Thus, it was only a matter of time before it was applied to other areas where defendants have deep pockets -- like the food industry. In January, a federal judge dismissed the original lawsuit against McDonald's. However, he carefully explained why and then gave the plaintiffs thirty days to amend their complaints, which they did.

Even if the case is dismissed again, it is probably only a matter of time before someone gets to trial. Fast-food companies stand to become the Big Tobacco of the new millennium.

While this may please Banzhaf and the woman we call “Susie Smith,” it should concern the rest of us. Our confidence in the law stems, in large measure, from the belief that law is about justice and is grounded in objective morality. Because of this, we know what is expected of us, and, just as important, we know when we have fallen short.

But when slippery ideas like “addiction” overrule common sense and prudence, confidence and certainty erode and, with them, confidence in the rule of law itself.

FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION

Jonathan Wald, “Lawyers revise obesity lawsuit against McDonald's,” CNN, 21 February 2003. http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/21/obesity.lawsuit/

Chris Rangel, “The attack on the Big Mac is back!”, blog posted on February 23, 2003. http://rangelmd.com/2003_02_01_archive.html#90363693

Sally Satel, “Fast food 'addiction' feeds only lawyers,” USA TODAY, 11 March 2003. http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-03-11-satel_x.htm

Bruce Horovitz, “Obesity suit against McDonald's dismissed,” USA TODAY, 22 January 2003. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2003-01-22-mcdonalds-lawsuit_x.htm

“McDonald's targeted in obesity lawsuit,” BBC NEWS, 22 November 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2502431.stm

Julia Sommerfeld, “Fat suits: Who's to blame for flab?”, MSNBC, 2 August 2002. http://www.msnbc.com/news/788799.asp

Bruce Bartlett, “Targeting 'Big Food,'“ National Center for Policy Analysis, 3 April 2002. http://www.ncpa.org/edo/bb/2002/bb040302.html

Visit Overlawyered.com's page titled “What happened to personal responsibility?” for more commentary and links on frivolous lawsuits. http://overlawyered.com/topics/responsib.html

Roberto Rivera, “Beyond Freedom and Dignity: Under the Arches,” BREAKPOINT ONLINE, 15 August 2002. http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/ColumnsGroup/RobertoRivera/Beyond+Freedom+and+Dignity.htm

BreakPoint Commentary No. 020822, “'It's Not My Fault': A Nation of Victims.” http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/FeaturesGroup/BreakPointCommentaries/Its+Not+My+Fault.htm

J. Budziszewski, WRITTEN ON THE HEART: THE CASE FOR NATURAL LAW (InterVarsity, 1997).

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Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5274]

God can cleanse us and make us whole. God can supply our needs if we but trust in him.

That’s exactly what happened for Dawn Weiss. Her life was falling apart. Dawn, a recovering alcoholic, moved to Tennessee after the California earthquake in 1994. She got a job there as a waitress and enrolled in school. But Dawn never really dealt with the stress of the earthquake, of moving, of leaving loved ones and the strain of working while going to school. One night Dawn was ready to give up. She prayed for help, but didn’t feel any better. That day at the end of her rope, Dawn decided that after work that night she was going to go out drinking.

When Dawn got to work, she noticed that every single customer in the restaurant was wearing a button that read, “I am a friend of Bill W.” Bill W. is the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and this slogan helps AA members discreetly recognize one another. To Dawn’s surprise, there was a huge Alcoholics Anonymous convention in town that weekend. All the customers in her restaurant that night were attending it. After Dawn shared her own struggle with addiction with one of them, a group of customers offered to stay with her that night and protect her from drinking. Dawn Weiss had prayed for help and God sent her a whole convention of people who understood her problem.