If anything in life doesn’t go according to my plan, it’s a catastrophe. At least that’s what my disease tells me. So when I took my lunch out of the fridge at work and it smelled funny? I panicked. A disaster of cataclysmic proportions: My vegetable went bad.  

I hadn’t prepared for this happening. I didn’t have a back-up vegetable at work, or even a food scale. I had trusted my careful meal prep to keep me safe. Now it was almost lunch time and I was decidedly unsafe. I was at code red.

I called call my sponsor. Thank God she picked up. Just hearing her voice made me feel safer. I told her about the bad-smelling vegetable, and I recited to her the contents of the office freezer. There was a frozen vegetable that would be okay for me, she said. I flushed with relief. But then I panicked again: how would I know how much to eat?

“Read me what it says on the bag,” she said. I told her the brand and the size of the bag, which was way more than my portion size.

 “Do you have a cup measure at work?” she asked.

I found a cup measure in the cabinet.

“I have the exact same product in my freezer,” she said. “Hold on and I’ll weigh it for you.”

The next thing I heard over the phone was a beautiful tinkling sound. Like a heavenly waterfall. It was the sound of frozen vegetables hitting a glass measuring cup perched on top of a scale.

I breathed a sigh of relief. I was safe.

My sponsor told me exactly how many cups to eat and how to heat it up. But it wasn’t the information that made me okay. It was the sound I’d heard over the phone. The cascade of vegetables crashing onto my sponsor’s scale. That sound traveled from my sponsors kitchen to my office counter and spoke directly to my soul. It said, “Someone cares about you. Your recovery matters. You’re safe.”