This is definitely not a fun book to read, too much craziness and painful experience with addiction. And from literature point of view, the book is nothing. However, it still strikes me as it’s a perfect verdict that we use our whole life to fill the hole from childhood, and as desperate as some of us, we could easily choose the wrong solutions that would make things worse. Besides numerous names of drugs, words used most frequently in the book are “abandoned”, “unwanted”, “loneliness”: “One who was on the edge of a deep crater of flames, haunted by the lack of answers, by being unaccompanied, by wanting love but being terrified of abandonment, by wanting excitement, but being unable to appreciate it…”
What strikes me even more is, from all the struggles, pains and multiple near-death experience, here is our almighty God, who finally saved the “unsavable”:
“I had never seen anything like it before in my life. It was real, true, tangible, concrete. Is this what you see at the end? Was I dying? … I frantically began to pray—with the desperation of a drowning man. “God, please help me,” I whispered. “Show me that you are here. God, please help me.”
As I prayed, the little wave in the air transformed into a small, golden light. As I kneeled, the light slowly began to get bigger, until it was so big that it encompassed the entire room. It was like I was standing on the sun. I had stepped on the surface of the sun. What was happening? And why was I starting to feel better? And why was I not terrified? The light engendered a feeling more perfect than the most perfect quantity of drugs I had ever taken. Feeling euphoric now, I did get scared and tried to shake it off. But there was no shaking this off. It was way way bigger than me. My only choice was to surrender to it, which was not hard, because it felt so good. The euphoria had begun at the top of my head and slowly seeped down throughout my entire body.
My blood hadn’t been replaced with warm honey. I was warm honey. And for the first time in my life, I was in the presence of love and acceptance and filled with an overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be OK. I know now that my prayer had been answered. I was in the presence of God.
After about seven minutes the light began to dim. The euphoria died down. God had done his work and was off helping someone else now. I started to cry. I mean, I really started to cry– that shoulder-shaking kind of uncontrollable weeping. I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I was crying because for the first time in my life, I felt OK. I felt safe, taken care of. Decades of struggling with God and wresting with life, and sadness, all was being washed away, like a river of pain gone into oblivion.
Some might write it off as a near-death experience, but I was there, and it was God. I was certain of it. And this time I had prayed for the right thing: help.
God had shown me a sliver of what life could be. He had saved me that day, and for all days, no matter what. He had turned me into a seeker, not only of sobriety, and truth, but also of Him.”