My Story
My name’s Andy, and I was an alcoholic.
Notice I said was an alcoholic.
I am not a recovering alcoholic, although I was at one time. I am a redeemed alcoholic — redeemed from the curse of alcohol through the atoning work of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
For 17 years — from the time I was about 8 years old until age 25 — I struggled with alcoholism. It began when my mother, herself an alcoholic, began serving me shots of peppermint schnapps to get me to go to sleep at night when I was about 8 years old. My parents had divorced a year before that. The divorce had turned me into a jumpy kid, and I had trouble sleeping at night. The peppermint schnapps solved that problem, though.
(My mother, incidentally, was also an alcoholic. It destroyed her. After spending the last several months of her life in a coma, she died at age 44 of cirrhosis of the liver. I was 10 at the time.)
Even with an alcoholic mother and an unstable family life, alcohol did not play a big part in my life until I was a teen-ager. It began when I was 13. A 16-year-old guy in the neighborhood had a father who would buy him beer, and this 16-year-old would cruise the neighborhood in his Mustang, sipping a can of Busch. I thought that was pretty cool, and I wanted to join him. So I started hanging out with this guy on weekends.
Normally, I’d go to the movies every Friday night, and my grandmother (who I lived with then) would give me two dollars for the show. I soon started skipping the movies and spending the two bucks on a six-pack.
That’s really how I got started drinking.
I also tried drugs during high school. I smoked a lot of pot, took a lot of speed, and even tried acid a few times. But none of them worked for me. Pot was okay, but speed and acid put me too at edge. I wanted the feeling of stupor beer would give me.
I worked at a local fast-food restaurant throughout high school, earning plenty of money to waste on marijuana and alcohol. I would work Friday nights, get off work, and go get high and drunk, then repeat the performance on Saturday.
I started staying out later and later. Occasionally I would black out. Almost always, I would drink until I threw up. As I threw up I prayed to God that if He would get me through this, I would never, ever drink again.
And soon I started drinking weeknights. My grandmother worried about me, prayed for me, but that didn’t stop my recklessness.
Somehow I managed to get through high school. I also worked my way up to assistant manager at the restaurant, and enrolled at the local junior college. And kept partying.
Before I was out of junior college, I had lost my license (on my second DWI), wrecked my car, and spent a lot of the money on lawyers — money that I had saved for my education at the university.
Yet I made it to the university, borrowed heavily, and three years later graduated. I still had no driver’s license, no car, and no job. My life was miserable. I had done many things while intoxicated that I will never commit to writing.
Somehow, a year after graduating, I got my first real job, as a newspaper reporter for a small-town daily. I spent my meager earnings the way I had spent most of my money since high school — buying booze.
But I got even deeper. I started writing bad checks at local bars and liquor stores. The banks would fine me ten bucks for every check, but I didn’t even bother to try to balance my checkbook.
Then, I got another DWI and lost my license again. After spending a thousand dollars on a lawyer, I got it reduced to a BAC (driving with an “elevated” blood-alcohol content). The day I got off on the reduced charges, I celebrated by getting drunk and driving illegally to and from the bar.
And I got arrested again.
I woke up the next morning in jail for the fourth time in my life — all because of alcohol. The bailiff brought me to the courtroom, and there sat my employer’s business manager with a blank check, ready to bail me out. He didn’t have to, though, as the judge, whom I covered as the paper’s county government reporter, released me without bond.
I had to borrow the money from my employer to get a lawyer. I tried to borrow some from my grandmother, but she refused. She’d lent me five thousand dollars already, and I’d never repaid her a dime of it. As much as she loved me, she had to say no.
A co-worker at the paper had been talking to me about Jesus and God, and had been trying to get me to go to church. Every time, I put her off with, “Some time, maybe.”
Well, this time she said: “Andy, you’ve got to come to church with me. God is the only one who can help you now.”
Something deep inside me agreed with her, and so I accepted her invitation. I went to church with her and her husband on Sunday, January 27, 1985.
That night, God changed my life.
I read those words, and think how trite they must sound to you. But I know of no other way to put it.
When we entered that church, I felt the power of God wash over me, and immediately I knew that I was a sinful man. Later, I thought of how Peter must have felt when confronted with the holiness and power of Jesus Christ. “Leave me, Lord! I’m a sinful man!” Peter cried. I knew indeed how Peter felt. My entire being was shaken in the presence of God’s holiness. It was a presence I could feel, though I did not see anything but people — lots of people, friendly, warm. People who had something I did not — but what was it? What did they have?
The pastor preached a powerful sermon, although I don’t remember a word of it. All I remember is holding on to the chair bottom and praying — if you could call it that — that I would get out of that church service in one piece.
At the end of the service came the altar call. I knew then that I should go, but I didn’t. I said to myself, “God, if you’re for real, you’ve got to show me.”
And He did.
The pastor waited patiently, but no one came to the alter. Then he said:
“There’s someone her tonight who doesn’t know whether God loves him or not, and God wants you to know that He does love you, and that he wants you to write about it. He says that you could write about it, and write about it, and write about it, and never tell just how much God loves you.”
My friend turned to me, said, “Are you ready?” I nodded, and we walked to the altar, where I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord.
I immediately felt a warmth wash over me. It was a feeling like no other I’ve ever experienced. Some people say they don’t feel a thing when they’re saved, but I did. I knew that something dramatic had occurred that night in that little church in Salem, Missouri.
And dramatic things continued to happen. The next Sunday night, I met my future wife in that church. We were married seven months later.
And God began to heal my alcoholism. Through the prayer of my fellow church members, and through fellowship with a local Alcoholics Anonymous group, I began to move away from dependence on alcohol — and toward a dependence on God and on people who, for some reason, loved me.
Alcoholics Anonymous was an important part of the healing process. The 12-step AA program helped me to understand my need for total reliance on Jesus.
But for me, it didn’t go far enough.
AA teaches belief in a “higher power” — one “as we understood him.” But AA does not the God of all creation, the One Who became human and took on our human frailties so that we could be rejoined to fellowship with Him.
Furthermore, AA meetings begin with a “confession” of our alcoholism. “I’m Andy, and I’m an alcoholic,” is what I’d say, or “I’m Andy, and I have a problem with alcohol.” That confession is one of the tenets of the AA doctrine.
But as I began to study the Word of God, I saw that this kind of confession would keep me in bondage to my former state of alcoholism. I began to understand that God had redeemed me from the curse of alcoholism, and that “death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). I wanted life to come out of my tongue, so I began to tell myself that I was “redeemed from alcohol.”
This is not to condemn AA. That organization does an important work, and I would not be where I am today without AA. I believe that God has used AA to help many people cope with their dependence on alcohol.
But the only way to become victorious over alcohol, or any other problem in your life, is to turn it over to Jesus Christ, and let Him bring the cure.
Well, that’s my testimony, and it’s longer than I intended. But if it ministers to even one Web-surfer, then it’s been worth it.
Feel free to write to me about this little essay. Send your e-mail to acareaga@umr.edu