The Temptation — Gone: One Man's Battle with the Bottle

By Marc Massery
Jesus saved Anthony Munster of La Crosse, Wisconsin, from alcoholism. Anthony is sure of it.

From 1994 to 2011, he was consumed by that which he consumed. “I tried everything in regards to fixing my life: Alcoholics Anonymous, Celebrate Recovery, outpatient treatment, medications. But I had started drinking when I was about 16 years old. Alcohol was entrenched,” he said. 

Late in his addiction, Anthony was living in what he described as a roach-infested, extended-stay motel where he fed his alcoholism. Around this time, his older brother, Dan, a successful lawyer, started sending him daily prayers via email. “His persistence in prayer helped me to understand what my problem was and to go to Christ with it,” Anthony said. 

In 2010, Dan asked Anthony if he wanted to go on a retreat. “I said ‘no.’ There was a wall there,” Anthony recalls. But the next year, he accepted the invitation. “For whatever reason, our Lord had removed the internal obstacles to allow me to say ‘yes,’” he said.

The moment Anthony walked into the retreat center, he felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, just as he had experienced when he received the Sacrament of Confirmation decades earlier. “It was a sense of closeness, like I was with an old friend,” Anthony recalled. “So I realized that I could trust in whatever was going to happen.” 

During the retreat, Anthony was directed to spend time in silent prayer. “I was thinking about all the people who harmed me, hurt me, betrayed me,” he said. 

He said he felt that God was asking him to forgive.

 “I went down the list of people and tried as deeply as I could to forgive them from my heart,” Anthony said. “At the end, I felt a sense of a weight off my shoulders.”

As he made his way back to the retreat house, he felt as though something had physically stopped him in his tracks. “My mind was filled with light. I had to close my eyes,” he said. 

He felt in his heart God saying, “I will give you everything you need to get through this.” After that encounter with the Lord, Anthony saw the world a little differently. 

At the end of the retreat, he stood up in front of the 150 other retreatants and told them about what the Lord was doing within him. “I said that I had been walking away for many years, but all I had to do was turn around, and He was right there.”  

Following the retreat, some doubts started creeping in. He made it only one week without drinking. The night he faltered, he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and said, “Tony, you’re going to die from this.” 

Amid his distress, he heard the Lord speak to him in his heart once again, “Be obedient.” This is when things really changed. “I got on my knees and said, ‘Lord, I don’t know how to do this, but I’m going to try it your way, and I’m going to trust in your way,” he said. 

For the next two months, Anthony managed to stay alcohol free. “It was a major challenge,” he recalled. “But I found it remarkable that every day when I got home from work, as soon as I walked into the door of my roach-infested, extended-stay motel, suddenly everything got better, the thoughts and desires to drink disappeared. … I went to sleep every night almost in joy knowing that I was being healed.”

Those two months of sobriety have since turned into about nine years. 

“Alcoholism is a disease of the mind,” Anthony said. “People suffer horribly for their entire lives dealing with it. They can’t escape it, and in two months — two months — I couldn’t care less about alcohol. I could leave and go out into the world and do whatever I wanted without any worry that I was going to be assaulted with temptation to drink. All carnal thoughts related to alcohol were removed, and that is where I think the actual miracle within me happened.”

“There’s some really bad stuff I’ve experienced on the dark side of things, some things that I know I’ll never talk about. So, I know the really deep strength in saying, ‘Jesus, I trust in You.’ I might not fully understand. But I know I’m on a pathway of learning. My life is really just beginning.”  

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LAMDVD

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