My kids and I are sailors. Our sailboat is a modest sloop – less than thirty feet long and almost 30 years old. Were you to jump off the side of our sailboat, you would fall at least three feet until you hit the water. The distance between the waterline and the deck of my boat – the freeboard – is almost three feet. If I lie on my stomach and dangle my arm over the side, I cannot touch the water.

Why am I telling you about the depth of the freeboard on my boat? If you were in the water by the side of my boat there is no way I could lift you directly out of the water. The deck of my boat is easily three feet above the waterline. Were I to try to lean down and grab you, I would be pulled into the water myself.

So, after reading this, you might be asking yourself whether you’d want to sail with me. What would I do if you went over the side? Leave you in the water? The answer is, “of course not.”   While I may not be able to lift you out directly if you went into the water, there are many things I could do to help you lift yourself out.

There are tools that I could offer you to help you climb out of the water. I could throw you a lifeline to keep you near the boat. The kayak could be lowered over the side and you could pull yourself onto it. There’s a ladder that could be lowered over the side that you could swim to and climb.

And there are suggestions I can offer – based on my own experience – for how to use these tools to rise. I could stand on the deck and offer suggestions for how to follow the lifeline to the bow of the boat to find purchase and pull yourself up out of the water and onto the deck using the anchor chain, mooring ball or the bowlines. I could lead you to the engine mount and explain how to use it and the rails to lift yourself up. Specific instructions could be offered for how to climb onto the kayak and use it’s tether to drag it to the side to climb into the sailboat’s cockpit. Encouragement and suggestions could be given while you use the ladder to climb up the sloped and slippery side of the boat.   There are many suggestions I could make to help you pull yourself from the water and back to the deck – all based on my own experience.

Why am I telling you this?

In the 1500s, a Spanish monk named St. John of the Cross wrote a profound thought:

“There is a river which all souls must cross to reach the kingdom of Heaven.  The name of that river is suffering.  But there is a boat which ferries souls across that river.  The name of that boat is love.”

In my experience, for people immersed in the river of suffering, climbing onto the boat called love is very similar to climbing out of the water surrounding my sailboat.

First and foremost: No one can lift you out – you have to lift yourself.

As much as you may want other people to lift you, as much as you may feel that someone else “should” help you, as much as you may be telling yourself that you’re not capable or not really getting the help you need because you are being told to lift yourself – at the end of the day, your journey toward sobriety and sunlight will be determined by your willingness to do the work necessary to lift yourself from the river of suffering. Remember the language: “are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but they will ALWAYS materialize if we work for them.”

ALWAYS is a strong term.

Which leads to the next similarity between pulling yourself onto the deck of my sailboat and pulling yourself out of the river of addiction and suffering: take direction from the people who are on the boat as they might just be able to explain to you how they successfully achieved the deck!

As my book has illustrated, there is a great deal of natural resistance to doing things a different way – particularly when you are in challenging waters. In order to be willing to embrace new ideas, you must first drop the rock of your old ideas. You must become willing to grab firmly to the the lifeline offered with both hands.  You cannot pull yourself up using the anchor chain and bowlines with only one hand free. You will not move into a sober future whilst desperately clinging to the past.

And yes, I know that some of the suggestions that are being offered are unappealing and may even seem threatening.

What do you mean you want me to let go of the behaviors that have kept my head above water for years?

What do you mean you want me to remove layer after layer of wet clothes that I’ve kept around me for decades to protect me from the real or perceived predators around me in the river?

Seriously? How can looking at and cleaning off the slimy, slippery, creepy-looking biology experiment that is growing on the anchor chains that I have avoided my entire life going to help me climb out of the water?

Remember – you are still in the river – you only have theories about what it means to live a sober life. And you have the evidence that the theories you subscribe to don’t work because you are still in the river of suffering. The people on the deck, they have demonstrated experience – whatever they did clearly worked because they are standing on the deck. Look to the outcomes – they have what you want – do what they did and you will get what they got.

And here’s a question for you: why would the folks on the boat called love spend hours, days, months, years, standing by the rails to offer suggestions and support to complete strangers who are trying to turn their lives around?

The answer is really simple: everyone standing on the boat called love at one point started in exactly the same place that you are. Every single one of us – no matter how much time we have – we all started at day one – in the river trying to keep our head above water while the wreckage created by our disease of addiction tried to suck us under.

We understand that behind the resistance and the struggle is a miracle waiting to be revealed. We understand that you are where you are because no one helped you to develop the skills to live any other way. The folks standing at the rail offer to help because they know the beauty of the spirit behind the story, we see so much more than the wreckage – we see the miraculous truth about you because we have learned the miraculous truth about ourselves.

So for those of you that are still struggling – turn toward the voices on the boat – toward the people who love unconditionally and will foster your journey because they recognize the miracle that you are.  They understand that there is nothing you have done that cannot be redeemed and that there is no place you have gone that you cannot return from. Follow those voices.  Follow the voices of the people who know the river of suffering but made the commitment to themselves to climb onto the boat called love.