J. Keith Miller - A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth

Why would a seriously committed Christian write a book about the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as a means of spiritual growth for Christians?

To answer this I must tell you a little of my own personal story. When I was a very small boy I didnt think my father loved meat least he could not love me in a way I was able to understand. He was a good man, but he loved my only brother, Earle, five years older than I. Earle was named after my father and went on hunting and fishing trips with him. But I was too little to go along. I would stand at the door and cry when they left. My father evidently didnt like me around, although I wanted very much for him to love me and play with me. My mother said my time would come, so I waited. But when I was older and my brother began spending time with his friends, my father was going through a difficult period financially and lost interest in hunting and fishing. He traveled for weeks at a stretch. When he got home he was often tired and discouraged and didnt have time for me. I felt very lonely, and I thought there must be something wrong with me.

Unable to get love from this distant man, I turned to achievement at a very early age. When I would do well in sports, he would mumble, Good boy. I dont know how many young men in this country have substituted achievement for love in this way, but I am one. I went out to win the world through hard workcompulsive work as it turned out. I now know that I worked so hard for recognition because underneath I was terrified of being rejected by others, as I felt I had been by my father.

Things went very well for me in the world of school. But beginning the summer I graduated from high school a series of tragedies hit our family. My brother was killed in a plane crash in 1945; my father developed serious heart disease in 1949 and died in 1950; and my mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1950.

In 1956, while nursing my mother through the final stage of her illness, I was at a very low point.

By this time I had been through college and was in the oil exploration business in Tyler, Texas. I was twenty-eight years old, married, and had two beautiful little girls. And my mother was dying of cancer. I had been feeling great anxiety and fear about my own future for years; finally, on a roadside in the tall pine woods country in east Texas, between Tyler and Longview, I turned to God in a desperate moment and offered him my life. As soon as I did, I was relieved of my sense of shame, fear, and failure and was given new meaning in my life: to tell people that there is hope if one will surrender to God as revealed in Jesus Christ. For the next few years I knew some peace and a strong sense of direction. Before long I started to speak, to witness to what I was discovering in trying to live for God.

I kept looking for books to give people that described my new experience of faith. Most of the contemporary books I found at that time said, in effect, If you commit your life to Jesus Christ, your problems will disappear. But my experience was that I got a whole new set of problems. Things that hadnt been issues at all before had to be considered now.

In 1962 I was asked to be the first director of a conference center for laypeople, Laity Lodge in the Texas hill country. As the center grew, the need increased for a book to hand people, a book about the actual problems of living a life committed to Christ. Finally I produced a manuscript made up of talks I was giving at conferences in the lodge: The Taste of New Wine.

This book was one of the first two published by Word Books in Waco, Texas. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies overnight (over two million ultimately). Suddenly I was thrown into the spotlight. I became a Christian star. In the next few years I was asked to speak all over the world. I was available to people night and day. My old work addiction kicked back in, only now it was a Christian work addiction. I thought I was doing all that work for God, but to do it I neglected my familyjust as my father had neglected me. Because I was doing it for Jesus, it was hard to criticize.

After several more successful books and much traveling and speaking, I began secretly to suspect that I was a special and gifted person. And because I was consciously so sincere and committed to Christ, I couldnt understand why all those around me werent thrilled with all that was happening. But of course some of them were not happy with my almost total absorption with my work. At some level I knew I wasnt handling my relationships very well, but I couldnt see my compulsive behavior. I was filled with resentment, frustration, and rebellion. Finally, in 1976, my wife and I were divorced.

Overnight a large part of the church said, Bye, bye, and disappeared from my life. The thing I had feared most since I was a little boy had finally happened. Id been rejected. Bruce and Hazel Larson and some friends in a Christian small group held me while I wept and tried to sort out my life. I was filled with shame and a sense of failure and didnt want to see anyone in the Church.

But then I got angry. I heard that someone had written a book with a title like The Church Is the Only Army That Shoots Its Wounded! And I shouted, Yes! and shook my fist at the Church.

But one morning during that time, when I was praying, a quiet voice said inside me, Keith, quit blaming the Church for your sins. You re the one who behaved sinfully and got the divorce. You deal with your own sin, and Ill take care of my Church!

And so I did. I eventually confessed and made what amends I could. I read the Bible again to see what sin and salvation were all about. I realized that I was like many people who have been converted or healed by Christ, like the man Jesus spoke of who was healed of a demon and had a spiritual clean house. Because the man didnt put a healing program in place of the demon, it came back and brought seven more demons, and the man was in worse condition than he had been before Jesus touched him (see Luke 11:2426).

My spiritual search, as well as my deteriorating personal relationships and some frightening stress-related heart symptoms, led me to a treatment center for my compulsive and addictive behavior, and there I was advised to get into a Twelve-Step program. As the acid of my pain began to eat through the wall of my denial, I started to perceive my dishonesty with myself, my incredible self-centeredness and need for attention, and my grandiosity.

As I was reading the Bible and working the Twelve Steps, I began to see that here in this secular program, a bunch of former drunks had taken some biblical principles, many of which the Church has largely neglected or eliminated, and had formed a spiritual way. This path has not only brought me into a deeper and more realistic relationship with Christ than I had ever known but has also turned out to be a way of calming and healing the driven compulsive life of intensity and fear that (after the first exciting honeymoon years) my Christian faith had not been able to touch.

I have been in a Twelve-Step program for over five years now, and some of us have started a Twelve-Step group for Christians in our church to work on our blocks to loving God, other people, and ourselves. My experience in Twelve-Step groups has convinced me that God has provided a way of spiritual healing and growth that may well be the most important spiritual model of any age for contemporary Christians. I wrote this book because I have found more self-worth in God, more serenity than I have ever known, and a way to deal specifically with the personal problems that have kept me anxious and afraid all my life. I sense that there are many other Christians who know their lives and relationships are in trouble but dont know how to change.