Bob Weaver 2024
About 50 years ago with floundering efforts to get sober from alcoholism, an old time AA member said to me, "The problem is you are your own highest power and authority in your efforts to get sober, when in fact you are powerless to conquer the disease. The best thinking you can put together won't do it."
He then asked, "Do you believe you are the highest power, or does a power greater than yourself exist?" I answered there must be a power greater than myself. It was slow coming and a transformative change in my belief system.
Attending the Mt. Olive Methodist Church at Hur with some of the finest people, the earliest ministers preaching fire and brimstone, apply describing life in hell and warning of the second coming very soon.
I would awaken in my tiny bedroom after a terrible dream to stare out the window, wondering it that night the world would end.
A great blessing was the coming of the Rev. Glendon McKee, and even-tempered minister. He imbued the lives of a thousand Calhoun kids and even thought I might make a good minister.
He asked me to deliver a sermon at the Mt. Zion Methodist Church, my message was on the value of failure and rising above it. I did cross the threshold to becoming a Christian and being baptized. As a four-year-old boy facing death in St. Joseph Hospital, my parents honored a request from the nuns to give me the last rites.
Perhaps is was a mistake years later to take a college course on the world's greatest religions.
During the years that followed while working in radio, newspaper, being an ambulance provider, fireman and mortician, I was for years a "functional alcoholic," not prayfull, selfishness and self-centerness at the root my problem. Owning a funeral home in Weston WV, I was crashing and burning.
I went to short term detoxes and counseling, likely to keep my wife off my back, and then was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous, two years before I got sober in 1979 and numerous relapses.
My first intro to AA was when my wife called them for help. I was drunk on the living room floor when two local men came to the house. Both were people I did not want to see me in that shape, one was the local Catholic priest (I conducted funerals for nearly all the Catholics), and the other was the president of the bank (I owned the bank lots of money).
It was some time I accepted AAs spiritual kindergarten of personal powerless and working a second step, "Came to believe a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity," and then to "Make a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I could understand Him."
All these years, I have held to a basic and prayful belief in God and honoring the Epistles of Christ, and have great respect for people who cling to their organized religion.
Forty years ago I purchased a book called "Your God Is Too Small" by
J.B. Phillips, which essentially supports the idea that God is more omnipotent than one can imagine, more narrowly defined by the scriptures.
I surely have a feeble mind to stand on any rock and proclaim my spiritual journey would stand before the truth.
I do know AA gave me over 45 years of life that I never expected to have, then starting addiction treatment centers, working for environmental
and educational causes, civil rights movements, county government and creating the Hur Herald.
But most of all trying to stand with my family as a loving and caring provider and meandering the hills and hollers, grateful to their wonderment and the lives of the people I have met along the way.
Etched in my psyche is the Serenity Prayer, a prayer I use every day on how to deal with life and people:
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (most), Courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference."
| 
