A person I know sent this to me. Everything in this story is true. I am amazed how God worked to save this man’s life in a recovery miracle. Here is his story:
So, I’ll tell you this story. It’s the most profound thing that ever happened to me and it truly changed the way I view life, entirely. So, I don’t share it casually.
There are so many different little threads throughout my life that seem to feed into this story. I probably haven’t yet identified them all, and not all that I have recalled is included here.
Anyway, some years ago I came to the realization that I’m an alcoholic. I’d been drinking every day for probably 4 or 5 years and it got to a point where it was getting pretty bad. I went to a treatment center for 30 days, but it didn’t last. I started drinking again immediately. Addiction is that way, and it’s extremely difficult to understand if you’ve never experienced it. Overcoming it is … hard. Anyway, another couple of years went by and it continued to progress. I got to a point where I was going through a liter of straight whiskey every day. For a while I was trying everything to quit. I was in counseling, going to AA, trying all the tricks. I could not shake the booze. My kids avoided me. My wife was ready to leave – she had even started to look for apartments. And I was this close to getting fired. I would wake up in the middle of the night laying in the middle of the floor having passed out and immediately look for whatever booze I still had left. Eventually I had totally resigned myself that this was what the rest of my life was going to be like, there was no point in trying to fight it. So, I gave up on AA and counseling. But sometimes I would wake up and I would literally cry out loud, and loudly, for my mom to please be here and help me. I was in a lot of pain, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and the whole entire world was very dark.
So, back when I was growing up in my hometown, my best buddy lived just a few doors down the block. We’d find all sorts of stuff to do together. Anyway, and as things go, we lost track until, maybe 10 or 12 years ago we reconnected. They say that true friends can go for years with no contact, but the connection never fades. This was one of those times. He was living in a town about 3 hours from where I live now. It just so happened that, during our years apart, we had independently both developed a fondness for collecting and identifying different types of rocks. So now having reconnected we would get together sometimes and go through each other’s collections and talk and laugh about our old adventures.
Well, being in contact and good friends, it became clear to him that I was drinking myself into an early grave. It also happened that during our years apart that he, too, struggled with addiction and for a time he was active in the recovery community, helping other addicts and alcoholics. And so, one weekend he came for a visit. He brought a couple bags of rocks and I had a bunch of mine out, as usual. But his real reason for visiting this time wasn’t to look at rocks, it was to talk to me. Anyway, we spent a couple of hours going through the rocks and afterward we both sat down in the living room and he started telling me his addiction story. He talked for a long time and said a lot of the same things that I’d heard for years attending AA meetings. At first, I was annoyed, and then bored with it, but then as he went on, I realized that, coming from my life-long best friend, it all seemed a little different. You need to understand, dear reader, this was not a casual conversation. There were no other sounds except his voice and my voice. Mostly his voice. I didn’t say much. But it was one of those moments when there is no longer need for pretense or carefully chosen words. All the bits of our persona that we don’t let the world see were there exposed. It was completely genuine.
Midway through, he went off on a tangent and talked a little about my mom. So, while the subject changed, the tone of the conversation didn’t. It was still completely genuine. Words were coming straight from the heart.
Because we grew up living just down the street from each other, my friend knew my folks well and they knew him well. Especially my mom. His parents went through a divorce when we were in high school and it really hit him hard. And he would come over sometimes when no one else was there and he’d talk with my mom (which I did not know about at the time). And as I learned that evening in my living room, those talks meant a great deal to him and he told me about some of them. One of the things he had told her was how much my friendship meant to him. And that evening as he was describing his conversations with her, I recalled the times he’d call, and I’d grumble that I didn’t want to go do this or that. But then my mom would say something like, “oh why don’t you go, you’ll have fun and make another adventure,” or something to that effect.
Through all the years, my mom never let on that she had become his safe place. She kept his confidence faithfully to her dying day, which does not surprise me; it’s the kind of person she was.
But that evening he talked about her for probably a half hour, which might not seem like a lot, but it was intense and emotionally draining. Eventually he got back around to addiction. Again, mostly it was him talking and me listening. Shortly afterward, the conversation faded and we sat silently for a while.
Now, my mom passed away years ago, on my daughter’s birthday as a matter of fact, who was a quiet and very thoughtful little girl at the time. Anyway, in her later years, mom had a sunroom that she had filled with potted plants and she would sit in her rocker and knit. And she would lay stones all around the top of the soil in the pots, for decoration. Some of the stones were those found by my brother’s kids when they were little. They would scrounge in the landscaping around the house and pick out the stones that caught their eye and give them to her for her plants. When mom passed, I brought home some of her plants home and put them in front of the big window in the living room, stones and all.
So, the plants were there in the living room where my friend and I had been talking that evening. And after he finished talking, he got up and went to my mom’s potted plants and started poking through the stones. I asked what he was doing, and he said, “just seeing what you have here.” They were mostly just smooth gray stones and pieces of granite that, as you might imagine, caught a child’s eye in the bright sunshine. They had been in the pots for years to the point where some had gotten nearly completely buried. I never gave them much thought. But, my friend hunched over and with one finger he poked and flipped over one of the gray stones in my mom’s potted plant, and under it, half buried in the soil was this amethyst crystal. It was a remarkable surprise and it seemed incredibly odd that this beautiful crystal would have been buried under those stones so … what the heck?
We looked at it, I must have said something, but I don’t remember what. A thought immediately came to me: “Mom. This is mom getting my attention.” but I didn’t say that out loud. We looked at each other and after a moment or two we sat down again, and I just sat there looking at that crystal. We were both completely quiet.
For the briefest moment I thought it somehow magically materialized there in that pot presto! But that thought was quickly dismissed. Then I thought that my friend had somehow hidden it there so I would THINK it was mom. But I figured through the events since he had arrived that afternoon and there’s no way he could have done that. Then I thought he must have mailed it to my wife and my wife hid it there so BOTH of them would get me to think it was mom. That made even less sense. Besides, it had obviously been buried in the soil for quite some time.
The more I thought about it, and it started to occur to me, the things he’d been saying about my drinking, and then my mom, and just the unusual tone and atmosphere of the whole conversation, there was something important going on. I started to recall a phone conversation I had with my mom from 40 years ago, and I came to believe that finding the crystal in that pot was exactly what I thought it was: a message. It was a message to me from my mother saying, “Listen to what your friend is telling you.”
Years ago, shortly after I finished high school, I had moved to a large city to work in a management job. I hated it there. Hated the job. Occasionally I would have a party, all by myself, and this was decades before I ever thought I might be an alcoholic. I was a young 20-something and that’s what I’d do. And during that time, talking to my mom on the phone one night we somehow got on the topic and she asked me when I drink, what do I drink? I told her whiskey. Well, now years later as I thought about that phone conversation it occurred to me that mom knew about alcoholism because it ran in the family. It must have been on her mind because I have never forgotten her reply on the phone that day. She said, “please, if you’re going to drink, don’t drink hard liquor. The hard liquor will make you sick. It will damage your liver and you could get very sick and I might not be there to help you.”
But you know what? Some 40 years later, and 11 years after she died, she WAS there to help me. Exactly when I needed it. She heard me cry for her in the middle of the night and she was there in the room with my buddy and me that evening and she knew exactly what was happening. And she wanted me to know it, and she wanted me to understand that my friend came there for a purpose that day. None of this was happening by accident.
So, I got the message. I did listen to what my friend said to me and a couple of weeks later I went back to the treatment center. The day after I arrived there I walked into my counselor’s office and she asked what made me decide to go for treatment. I told her this story. The expression on her face when I told her it was an amethyst crystal got my attention. She told me that, in metaphysical healing, amethyst is known as the recovery stone.
I’m not a believer of metaphysical healing, but I certainly understand the symbolism involved. And moreover, it is not a coincidence because I have come to recall how the crystal ended up in that pot to begin with. Anyway, I stayed at the treatment center for 60 days. I’ve not had a drink since. Not one drop. I know that if I dare to have one sip it will set in motion a cascade of chemicals in my brain and it will be the beginning of the end. And while I was in that treatment center, I came to learn to pay attention to things and events that suddenly sort of pop up. I also learned very importantly too look for the answers to prayer. Maybe there are some things I need to pay attention to that might seem less-than-obvious, but with a prayerful mind, reasons sometimes become obvious.
So how did the crystal get into the potted plant? One day after I got back from treatment, I was looking through photo albums of when the kids were little, and we’d visit Nona and grandpa. Once when we were visiting them, my daughter who was maybe 4 years old, tagged along with her cousins to go look for stones in the landscaping as they would do. And there she found that amethyst. Mixed in with all the relatively non-descript gray and granite stones, my little girl found that beautiful crystal. Such an odd occurrence and something that surprised everyone there. My daughter did exactly what her older cousins would do. She held it out to my mom and in her soft, quiet voice said, “here Nona, I found this for you to put in your plant.” And my mom took it and stood it on end among the gray stones. Over the years apparently it had toppled over and became mixed in and finally covered over and forgotten, until that December evening some 15 years later when Mom decided the time for its purpose had come. And today my daughter is also very much aware of the role that she played in my recovery all those years ago.
So that’s my story. There is more, and more that involves my daughter and more of the role both she and my son played in other parts of this story. But this has gotten too long and tedious already so that’s enough for now. Thank you for listening.
Epilogue:
The events of our lives, create our lives, and the people shape who we are. All things we encounter are ordained by God and have specific purpose in our lives. This story was my lived experience. These people and events were directed for a purpose that became very clear to me. But even if the reasons for people and events remain hidden from us, they are no less ordained and have no less purpose. Very often we pray for God’s guidance or grace, but then forget to look for His answer. Or maybe we don’t know how to recognize it. He directs us in many ways; in many ways he reaches us and wants us to pay attention. Jesus told us to seek first His Kingdom and all else will be given to us. I believe that God’s Kingdom here, in our physical lives, is our relationship with Him. So, if we simply live each day to seek the Kingdom, His blessings and His Will, will be revealed to us.
