Fireman Norm On Prayer

When I was newly sober and hadn't completed all 12 Steps yet, fear was a common problem for me. At one point, I found myself out of job and full of fear, so I started attending daytime meetings as well as evening ones.

At one of those meetings, the leader asked if anyone was having a problem staying sober today and I told them I was often afraid.

An old-timer named “Fireman Norm” came up to me afterwards and asked if I was praying on a regular basis. I replied that I had seriously thought about it.

“Only alcoholics confuse ‘thinking’ about something with actually doing it,” he said, chuckling. Then he proceeded to tell me how difficult it was for him to learn how to learn how to pray every day.

Fireman Norm explained that when he was newly sober, his sponsor suggested he hit his knees in the morning and ask his Higher Power to help him stay sober, just for today, and if he succeeded, to hit his knees again that night, to simply say “thank you.”

Norm said he was okay with that when he was sleeping in his own bed, but he didn’t want to kneel down next to his bunk at the firehouse because his buddies would make fun of him.
His sponsor said he understood, but that in Norm’s line of work, the day would eventually come when he would have to choose between hitting his knees and hitting the bottle again.

Sure enough, about a week later the company returned late from a multi-alarm fire with some very close calls and Norm found himself shaking as he took off his gear and got ready for the sack.

In a fit of desperation, he dropped to his knees, shut his eyes and lowered his head over folded hands. “Thank you, God, for keeping us all safe tonight,” he said quietly to himself, over and over, determined to stay down out of sight until the coast was clear.

After what seemed like forever, the room finally got quiet and Norm rose slowly to slide into his bunk but then froze and blinked his eyes. For all around him, he saw all the other firemen were now silently kneeling next to their bunks, quietly saying their own prayer of thanks for returning safely from the perilous call.

Telling the story, years later, Norm said that was the moment he realized his sobriety was not really about him... that, to some extent, his life was no longer his own. His job, he said, was now to simply show up and do the footwork and let his life be a message that speaks for itself.