February 1 – In Case of Fire, Break Glass
“When it comes to God, I only have one rule: keep an open mind — but not so open that your brain falls out.” — George Carlin
A lot of us grew up learning to treat God like an emergency service. When things were bad, we prayed. When the crisis passed, we moved on. God wasn’t part of daily life — God was something you called when the house was already on fire.
Many of us watched the adults in our lives do this. Trouble hits, suddenly we’re praying again. Things smooth out, and God goes back on the shelf. Over time, we absorbed the self-destructive idea that prayer doesn’t really work — except maybe in a pinch. So we carried that same thinking into adulthood.
Most of us kept using those same 911 prayers. In trouble, pray. Out of trouble, stop. We didn’t think of it as misguided — it was just the God of our understanding at that point in our lives. When life hurt, we reached out. When it didn’t, we hung up.
Then we got to AA and started hearing people say things like, “God removed the desire to drink from me.” And a lot of us thought, How does that make any sense at all? But by the time we got here, we were out of options. Somewhere under the Steps on the wall, many of us started picturing God in one of those little red boxes that says In Case of Fire, Break Glass.
And then one day it hit us — we were sitting in an AA meeting because our lives were on fire.
We stared at that imaginary box longer than we’d like to admit. Because breaking it open felt permanent. If we did that, things would change. We worried we’d have to become someone else — maybe someone we didn’t recognize. A lot of us weren’t trying to get religious. We just wanted the drinking to stop. That tension was real, and it was confusing. Then it came to us, we already broke the glass and AA is the little red box.
Somewhere along the way, many of us had a moment like this: someone pulled us aside and said, “Do you know the only rule of AA?”
We didn’t.
They smiled and said, “Start praying — and don’t stop.”
What if the trick isn’t learning how to pray — but learning how not to stop?
