My Brother

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Wendy_Ann

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I am asking for prayers for my Brother. My brother is an Alcoholic and a Drug Addict and homeless. He is telling me he is going to AA meetings. He is currently living in a shelter. He does not have a job. The jobs he has found in the past he does not keep for long. He is living about an hour away from me. I have given him money in the past. I can no longer afford to do so, nor am I in a position to have him live with me. I could use any advice and prayers. Thank you.
 
Hi Wendy Ann. I am sorry to hear of your situation. It is quite a difficult sickness to deal with; my own brother struggled with alcoholism, as well.

God our Father, source of all health, be near those who suffer in the time of weakness and pain; relieve them of their burden and heal them, if it be Your will.

Give peaceful sleep to those who need rest for soul and body, and be with them in their hours of silence. Bless those who know not what another day will bring.

Make them ready for whatever it may be. Whether they must stand, or sit or be confined, grant them a strong spirit.

Inspire with Your love those who bring healing and care to the suffering. May they bestow Your gifts of health and strength wherever they may go. Grant this prayer, through Christ our Lord, Amen.
 
join al-anon, the support organization for relatives of alcoholics and addicts. this is the best advice you will get here, they can save your sanity
 
I’m so sorry you are going through this family stress. You aren’t alone… I have a brother who is much the same except that he isn’t homeless and he is on social assistance disability from the government because he is mentally ill. I can’t give him money either and he choses alcohol over groceries. It is a very frustrating, unbelievably difficult situation for you and for your brother. You have my prayers.
 
me, too. I have an alcoholic brother who works rarely. My parents pay his mortgage payment. :rolleyes:

I’ll trade prayers!
 
Ma’am, I am so sorry about your situation. You are absolutely in my prayers!
 
Praying here! Like your brother, I am also an alcoholic. If he is in a shelter, and says he is going to meetings, then you need to keep him in your prayers. He needs them! Hopefully he is indeed going to meetings and has hit his “bottom” and is working on understanding his disease.

I would suggest al-anon for you as well. I have heard wonderful things about their program. Have you ever read the book “Alcoholics Anonymous”? I would also suggest reading it for yourself. It will give you good insight on how to pray for your brother and perhaps gain some perspective of his struggle.

If God can pull any of us up from the mire of our pitiful lives, He can certainly do that for your brother too. After all, He did it for me! 👍

Steph
 
Prayers will be said for you and your brother. I have a nephew going through this too. He is also homeless and has lost everything and living in a shelter. It is very difficult to picture my sweet little nephew as he once was and the man he is today.
 
I thought I’d quote a little bit out of the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s from pages 23 and 24…

… the main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind, rather than in his body. If you ask him why he started on that last bender, the chances are he will offer you any one of a hundred alabis. Sometimes these excuses have a certain plausibility, but none of them really makes sense in the light of the havoc an alcoholic’s drinking bout creates. They sound like the philosophy of the man who, having a headache, beats himself on the head with a hammer so that he can’t feel the ache. If you draw this fallacious reasoning to the attention of an alcoholic, he will laugh it off, or become irritated and refuse to talk.
Once in a while he may tell the truth. And the truth, strange to say, is usually that he has no more idea why he took that first drink than you have. Some drinkers have excuses with which they are satisfied part of the time. But in their hearts they really do not know why they do it. Once this malady has a real hold, they are a baffled lot. There is the obsession that somehow, someday, they will beat the game. But they often suspect they are down for the count.
How true this is, few realize. In a vague way their families and friends sense that these drinkers are abnormal, but everybody hopefully awaits the day when the sufferer will rouse himself from his lethargy and assert his power of will.
The tragic truth is that if the man be a real alcoholic, the happy day may not arrive. He has lost control. At a certain point in the drinking of every alcoholic, he passes into a state where the most powerful desire to stop drinking is of absolutely no avail. This tragic situation has already arrived in practically every case long before it is suspected.
The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink."

THAT is why we go to our meetings. THAT is why we are beyond human aid. That is exactly why your prayers for your brother are SO crucial. He is beyond human help… but we all know there is one who has all power. Only God, working through other alcoholics, can get through to your brother with a believability that he will recognize as “real”. God bless you and keep praying. Prayer works!

Steph
 
I think I may have left you with little hope. So I’m going to post another excerpt from the book. It’s from the chapter entitled “How It Works” starting on page 58. It’s read in many meetings at the beginning of every single one.

Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.
Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it-- then you are ready to take certain steps.
At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.
Remember that we deal with alcohol–cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power-- that One is God. May you find Him now!
Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care wtih complete abandon.
Here are the steps we took; which are suggested as a program of recovery:
  1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable.
  2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
  3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
  4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
  5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
  6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
  7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
  8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
  9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
  10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
  11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry the message to other alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
    Many of us exclaimed, “what an order! I can’t go through with it.” Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.
    Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas:
    a. That we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives.
    b. That probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.
    c. That God could and would if He were sought.
Steph
 
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