I've mentioned in the past that I used to be quite the lushy mess...let's just say that party was way over. The floor was mopped and the bartender went home kind of over. (As an aside, if you've got alcoholism in your family line, you might want to think about drinking say, diet coke instead of alcohol. Just a suggestion.)
So roll back the hands of time to big hair, Rob Lowe and Bush Sr. About six girlfriends and I flew (or drove, I don't really remember) down to Los Angeles to visit another friend who was attending UCLA. We all went to high school together and coincidentally, we all worked at Baskin-Robbins together. Lots of the trip was vague, but I do clearly remember deciding that we would all wear black, get really dressed up, spray tons of aqua net and go OUT.
Scary, right?
I can sort of vaguely remember going to one of those places with the velvet rope and hoping against hope that we'd get "picked" to go in. (Ridiculous then and ridiculous now.) After drinking what seemed like a fair amount of white wine, I started to get pretty drunk and knew that I had better find a way home immediately before I passed out or something terrible happened.
After hailing a cab and asking to go "home", I realized that a) I had no idea where home was and b)that I had the wrong person's ID in my pocket and c) I had no money--at least not enough to pay the cab fare. Things could have gone terribly wrong at that point. I was alone, broke, inebriated, and in a distant city.
But God had other plans.
Maybe He knew that I'd be sharing my testimony with you, some 25 years later. Or maybe I just got lucky. I choose to believe the former. Here are some of the 57 reasons that I KNOW that God was with me:
1) I told the cab driver to let me out and I'd figure it all out on my own. He said "NO, THAT WOULD BE TOO DANGEROUS."
2) This stranger drove me around for two hours until finally dropping off at my friend's house (the one whose ID I had.)
3) WHAT MADE ME TAKE HER ID? If I hadn't made that mistake, who knows what would have happened? That was before cell phones. WHAT IF HE HAD DROPPED ME OFF IN DOWNTOWN L.A.?
God watched over me, kept me safe, protected me and delivered me. God is real. If you don't believe that for yourself, believe that I believe. That's a start, right?
Drinking to excess is stupid. Seriously, it's like shutting off your rational thinking and letting an idiot make decisions for you, or even worse, letting a stranger make decisions for you that could affect you for the rest of your life.
My part in this story is lame, but God's part is AWESOME!!!!
Thinking about getting drunk? Say this out loud instead, based on Proverbs 20:1(MSG),
"Wine makes you mean, beer makes you quarrelsome— a staggering drunk is not much fun."
P.S. There are some amazing support groups in case you already think that you may have a problem with alcohol, like www.celebraterecovery.com and www.aa.org and www.teenchallengeusa.com.
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