|
|
Be strong and take heart,
|
|
I stood poised with one footstep over the edge of the abyss, about to step forward into the void and lose everything near and dear to me, and the hellish thing was I couldn’t see it! Frozen with fear, I stood transfixed by the vision before me and knew with an awful certainty that was where my life was heading . . . A forty-two-year old man, having the outward appearances of achievement: a large comfortable home and my own business with all the material benefits that brings. Yet for all this confident assurance, I was lost in my own materialistically driven world, and blind to all the problems caused by my alcohol-fuelled life-style. I stood poised with one footstep over the edge of the abyss, about to step forward into the void and lose everything near and dear to me, and the hellish thing was I couldn’t see it! Let me take you back in time and tell you the circumstances leading up to this miraculous life-changing experience. I was forty-two years of age, married with three children and managing director of my own printing company. A member of the You often hear it said that, ‘If you remember the sixties you weren’t there.’ That’s just clever talk. In truth, outside the ‘beatnik, hippy’ life-style of a minority, the majority were enjoying the new-found freedom of cultural revolution in the swinging sixties. The newly available wealth brought almost unlimited job prospects and opportunities for those who were ambitious and eager, in the phrase of the day, ‘to get on’ in booming Like many of my generation I had attended Sunday school in the 1940s and enjoyed the companionship of the Boys’ Brigade in the 1950s, but I had never experienced what born-again Christians call a ‘personal relationship with Jesus’. To me religion was a ‘crutch for those who needed it’. I certainly did not, and by the 1960s I was aiming for all the things the world counts as important and had no time for church. With leisure activities such as sailing and golf, and sufficient disposable income, life was to be enjoyed. The companionship of like-minded friends encouraged me in the play-hard, work-hard philosophy of life, and business entertaining encouraged drinking to excess. In retrospect, I now see how I failed to realize that in my early twenties I had all the obvious symptoms of a potential problem drinker: binge drinking, alcohol always present and a tendency to gravitate towards friends with similar views on alcohol consumption. As the years passed, the combination of the Scottish drink culture, business entertaining, the pressure of leading my company through the vicious manufacturing recession of the eighties and a busy social and family life, meant my personal consumption of alcohol grew to alarming proportions. And while in my heart of hearts I knew I was drinking too much, I really couldn’t get off the carousel. On the occasions when well-meaning friends would warn me about the damage I was causing to my marriage, family, health and business, I would tell them, ‘It was none of their business, it was my life and I would live it as I chose, I worked hard and I would play hard!’ I often look back and reflect with amazement at the stubborn blindness of men and women who, like me, sense their lives are sliding out of control but are unable to admit their weaknesses or accept their need of help. I guess it’s all the more difficult when you have some of the trappings of success and appear to have achieved much of what society admires and aims for. Later I would understand the deception of living to the world’s agenda and what the apostle Paul called the ‘veil over our minds’ that prevents us from seeing the truth (see 2 Corinthians 4:3–4). (An excerpt from I Did It His Way by Hugh Hill, ex-Pastor and member of TCM Baptist Church.) |
