Today was a busy day. We had a thanksgiving lunch at my daughter's preschool from 11 - 1. Before that I tried to rewrite my story in order to get my thoughts in order for a talk that my wife and I were scheduled to give at a treatment center on their family night. I found myself struggling to focus and needing to change many things. But I couldn't stay on track and I kept wanting to go in depth on things that would just have made the talk way too long and irrelevant to this crowd. I also didn't seem to have that creative sense of inspiration that I usually have for this.

All day long it just didn't seem right and I was deeply distracted. All I could think about was a discussion I had with my wife in the morning in which she opened up to me about her lack of a spiritual life. Since this talk was to the family I felt like a fraud and hypocritical. I felt like we would be up there talking about how great sobriety and the spiritual life was but knowing that maybe things weren't all that great.

Then I got an intuition that this was a spiritual attack. I stopped and asked God for help. I realized that I was placing too much expectation on my wife and that I might just be going through a low point in the biorythmic cycle. I decided that I would take it easy and that however imperfect our talk might be that just our presence would be helpful.

As we pulled up there tonight I felt stressed about the timing of trying to do this talk while my wife is in school, and our daily lives are so busy especially with the holidays. Then I thought about what it must be like being in treatment at this time. I became grateful for the opportunity.

Our talk went well. I was a little disappointed at some things I left out. I told the story of how I considered that the God idea might be a mind trick or purely a psychologically powerful idea. I spoke of how this gave me enough to work with and find belief. What I left out was that when I thought of this idea that I realized that this resonated deeply within me. That I realized that I had an innate desire to believe. I thought of the ideas by the observations of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung of the psychological archetypes.

In the end the evidence for God that convinced me was not from cosmology or biology. It is not that the universe seems fine tuned for life or that the body seems fine tuned by a creator. It was the God idea itself that convinced me. It was the idea that a person convinced of directives from God had the power to achieve a level of self control that would exceed what he could achieve himself.

This did not require evidence in the material world but rather it came from within.

I felt a lot better about myself and my wife after our talk.

Thanks be to God.