" 'But,' the skeptic will say, 'if there is Divine intervention, why does God seem to restrict his attention to recovering drunks and junkies? Aren't there other people who are at least equally deserving? We hardly hear such incidents reported by other people.'

"Of course other people have such incidents, and if you ask people who are not in recovery, they can tell you of happenings, in their lives that they ascribe to Divine intervention. However, many people hesitate to talk about such things because in a scientific era, where everything has a logical explanation, it is just not acceptable to talk about such things because someone will accuse you of being 'wacky' or of being a religious fanatic. In respectable circles, Divine providence is given lip service, and one goes through the motions of praying to God, but His intervention in one's life is not to be taken seriously. Among many recovering people this taboo does not exist, and they talk freely of incidents where Divine intervention is the only reasonable explanation for what happened.

"Most recovering addicts achieve remarkable transformations and refuse to accept the credit for their remarkable changes in values and health. 'There is no way I could have done this,' is a common remark. 'I know that this is the work of God. All that I did was get out of His way.'

"The third step of the recovery fellowship reads, 'We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him,' and the eleventh step reads, 'We 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.' When a person sincerely adopts these steps in his life, he is indeed more likely to interpret chance and coincidence as Divine intervention, whether or not he is an addict, and by so doing he builds upon his faith and his level of spirituality rises accordingly."