Contemplations

Thirty-One Years

On May 26, 1995, I took my last drink.

Thirty-one years later, I find myself thinking less about sobriety and more about grace.

That surprises me a little, because when I first came into recovery, I wasn’t looking for grace. I wasn’t looking for wisdom. I wasn’t looking for spiritual growth, self-discovery, or some grand reinvention of my life. I wasn’t thinking about becoming an author, counselor, chaplain, spiritual director, life coach, or someone who would someday sit across from other wounded people and help them believe their story wasn’t over.

I was just trying to stop my own life from bleeding out.

That was it.

Nothing fancy or polished. Nothing that would have looked good on a treatment center marketing brochure next to the image of the hot blonde.

I was tired of the lies, tired of the chaos, tired of waking up and wondering how I was going to live with myself. I was tired of being trapped inside the same shame, the same fear, the same spiritual exhaustion, and the same desperate need to escape my own life.

Recovery began as an act of survival.

I didn’t come crawling into sobriety because I had suddenly become enlightened. I came because my life was not working. Somewhere deep inside me, underneath all the noise, pride, fear, and wreckage, there was still one small part of me that wanted to live.

Looking back now, maybe that was grace.

Maybe grace was there before I even knew what to call it.

The years have a way of changing your perspective. Today, when I look back over these thirty-one years, I do not see a straight line. I do not see some clean, heroic story where I figured everything out and marched nobly into a better life. That would be too easy. And not very honest.

What I see is a thousand ordinary days.

Meetings. Coffee cups. Late-night conversations. Awkward prayers. Hard truths. Failures. Amends. Tears. Laughter. Losses. Lessons learned the hard way. I see people who loved me when I was difficult to love. I see people who told me the truth when I desperately needed to hear it. I see people who sat beside me when I had no idea how to sit with myself.

That is what recovery has been for me.

I shun the spotlight.

I'm not performing on a stage.

This isn't a trophy I can polish.

It's just a thousand ordinary days of not giving up.

The Big Book says that selfishness and self-centeredness are the root of our troubles. That line irritated me when I was younger. I had plenty of explanations for my problems, and most of them involved somebody else. I could tell you who hurt me, who misunderstood me, who disappointed me, who failed me, who didn’t show up, who said the wrong thing, and who didn’t say the right thing.

I had a whole courtroom inside my head, and somehow I was always the prosecuting attorney.

Recovery slowly taught me that the greatest prison I ever lived in was the one inside my own head. Fear, resentment, shame, control, self-pity, and the exhausting need to manage everybody else’s opinion of me had narrowed my world until I could barely see beyond myself. And that is a lonely way to live, even when you are surrounded by people.

Maybe especially then.

Over time, I began to understand that recovery was not just about putting down alcohol. It was about learning how to live without needing alcohol to manage my feelings, excuse my behavior, or hide from the truth. It was about becoming honest enough to admit where I was wounded and humble enough to see where I had wounded others.

That kind of honesty does not arrive all at once.

It comes in pieces.

A truth here. An admission there. A moment when the old explanation no longer works. A conversation you do not want to have. An apology you can no longer avoid. A quiet morning when you realize the person you most need to face is yourself.

That is where grace kept meeting me.

Not above my life, but inside it.

Not after I got everything cleaned up, but while I was still standing in the mess.

I used to think grace meant being rescued from consequences. Now I think grace is more often the courage to face them without running. Grace is the hand on your shoulder when the truth is hard. Grace is the voice that says, “You can survive this honestly.” Grace is the strength to make the next right choice when every old instinct in you wants to escape.

Thirty-one years later, I understand that sobriety is both a miracle and a practice.

The miracle is that I am still here.

The practice is how I live with that gift.

I do not stay sober by glorifying or glamorizing my past. I dislike war stories and drunkologues. I'm not into trauma bonding over trauma porn either. I stay sober by remaining teachable in the present. I stay sober by remembering that addiction is patient, and my ego is clever, and isolation can dress itself up as independence. I stay sober by staying connected, by telling the truth, by praying even when my prayers are awkward, by listening when I would rather defend myself, and by serving when I would rather retreat into my own concerns.

Service has become one of the great teachers of my life.

When I was younger, I thought helping others meant having answers. I thought I needed the right words, the right credentials, the right explanation, the right spiritual insight. But life has taught me that sometimes the most healing thing we offer another person is our presence.

To sit with someone in pain and not try to fix them too quickly.

To listen without turning their story into ours.

To tell the truth without cruelty.

To offer hope without pretending the road will be easy.

To let someone borrow our faith until they can find their own.

That is sacred work.

And it is not limited to titles or offices or formal ministry. It happens at kitchen tables, in church basements, over coffee, through phone calls, in hospital rooms, in treatment centers, in quiet conversations after everyone else has gone home. It happens whenever one wounded person tells another, “You are not alone, and your story is not over.”

I have needed those words many times.

I still do.

That is another thing thirty-one years has taught me: recovery does not make a person untouchable. It does not remove grief, fear, disappointment, temptation, loneliness, or pride. It does not mean old patterns never knock on the door. It does not mean I have graduated from being human.

I have not. I am still learning.

Still being humbled, being invited to forgive, being asked to release old resentments.

Still discovering places inside me that need healing, or finding out that surrender is not something I did once in 1995. It is something I am asked to practice again and again.

That used to frustrate me. I wanted recovery to be a finish line. I wanted healing to mean I would never struggle with certain things again. I wanted spiritual growth to feel like steady progress upward, one clean step after another.

But life is not that tidy.

Recovery is more like returning.

Returning to honesty and humility. Returning to prayer and contemplative community. Returning to service, and to the simple truth that I am not God, and I do not have to be.

There is great freedom in that.

For many years, I tried to manage life through force. I tried to think my way out of pain, charm my way out of consequences, defend my way out of shame, and control my way into peace. None of it worked. The harder I tried to save myself on my own terms, the smaller my world became.

Recovery invited me into a different way of living.

A way that begins with surrender, that asks me to tell the truth, that teaches me to make amends where I can, accept what I cannot change, and keep my side of the street clean.

A way that reminds me that I do not have to be impressive to be useful.

That may be one of the greatest changes in me.

When I first got sober, I wanted relief. Later, I wanted answers. Later still, I wanted purpose. Now, after thirty-one years, I think I mostly want to be useful, not admired and applauded. Nor seen as someone who has it all together.

Useful.

I want my pain to have been compost, not just wreckage. I want the things that nearly destroyed me to become part of the soil where compassion grows. I want to remember that every person I meet is carrying something I cannot see. I want to be gentle with the struggling, honest with the dishonest, patient with the wounded, and humble enough to know that I am still all of those things too.

That is one of the surprises of long-term recovery. The longer I stay sober, the less interested I am in pretending I am beyond the need for grace.

Grace is not a reward for getting everything right.

Grace is the presence of God meeting me in the truth of where I am.

And the truth is, I am grateful.

Grateful for May 26, 1995.

Grateful for the desperation that became a doorway.

Grateful for the people who showed me how to live sober before I believed I could.

Grateful for meetings and mentors, sponsors and friends, hard conversations and quiet miracles.

Grateful for the chance to make amends.

Grateful for the privilege of sitting with others in their pain and saying, with my life if not always with my words, “There is still hope.”

Grateful that the story did not end where it could have ended.

Thirty-one years is a long time.

It is long enough to see that recovery is not simply about escaping the past. It is about allowing the past to be redeemed. Not erased. Not denied. Redeemed.

The wounds become windows, failures become teachers, and my shame becomes tenderness.

The survival becomes service, and the life I once tried to escape becomes the very place where grace keeps appearing.

So I do not celebrate thirty-one years as a monument to my own strength. I celebrate it as evidence of mercy. I celebrate the God who did not abandon me when I had abandoned myself. I celebrate the people who loved me until I could begin to love myself. I celebrate the daily practices that continue to keep me grounded. I celebrate the quiet miracle of being sober, present, and alive.

I took my last drink on May 26, 1995.

I did not know then what was beginning.

I only knew something had to end.

Thirty-one years later, I can see that the ending was also an invitation. An invitation into honesty. Into healing. Into community. Into service. Into grace.

And grace, I have learned, is not finished with me yet.

A simple prayer has become my mantra:

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi (Prayer for Peace)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

I leave you with that.

For what it's worth.

Shalom,

Jeremy E.

I also want to thank Dr. Dana Leigh Lyons, DTCM and Soberstack for amplifying voices in recovery.

About the Author

Jeremy Evans writes stories that live between worlds, where struggle and grace collide, and imagination does the heavy lifting. He is an author in long-term recovery, the founder of Between Worlds Indie Publishing, and the creator of The Gentle Way, offering life coaching and spiritual direction rooted in presence, compassion, and grace.

His work is shaped by lived experience, trauma, faith, and years spent walking alongside people in prisons, treatment centers, hospital rooms, and other sacred, difficult spaces where presence often matters more than answers.

Jeremy is the author of A Ragamuffin Saint, Steps to Freedom, and The Orbitas Chronicles. Whether writing about recovery, spirituality, or science fiction, his work returns to the same essential questions: What breaks us? What heals us? And what makes us human?