One drink wasn’t enough

The thing is though, a night out wasn’t just a couple of drinks in the pub. It was seeing how many treble vodkas we could sink before we had to go hug a toilet. Any drama turned a decent night into a legendary one. A fight in a kebab shop, an injury from jumping down half a flight of stairs, or waking up with unexplained scratches. A drink was not enough – what we wanted was drunkenness. The thought of just chatting in a pub and going home at 11pm was appalling to me. I remember asking someone who suggested going out for one drink ‘what’s the point?’ I hoped I wouldn’t become so boring when I finished my degree.

There was a big lie I believed that motivated a lot of this behaviour. I wanted my life to be an adventure. I wanted to squeeze in as much fun as I could, and I thought each drink I had was a bit more fun squeezed in. Drinking less seemed like sacrificing fun. When I tried to imagine my life without binge-drinking, it just seemed bleak, boring and miserable. That’s probably because my life was a bit bleak and boring. Perhaps because my only real interest was drunkenness, but that never occurred to me at the time.

Growing up in the church

I grew up going to Church and would have said I was a Christian. The Bible said ‘do not get drunk with wine…but be filled with the Spirit’. But I didn’t want to sacrifice my ‘fun’ life. So, I rationalised my behaviour with lies like ‘This is just trying to prevent debauchery”. “It’s not about how much you drink but how you behave when you’re drunk – and I’m not an angry drunk or a womaniser”. I’d tell myself this while conveniently forgetting all the fights and failed attempts to charm women. There were also all the productive days lost because I was nursing a hangover. I’d ignore the middle of the verse, which totally undermined my ‘interpretation’: ‘do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit’. 

Some things are sacred

Binge-drinking doesn’t just lead to immoral behaviour, it is immoral behaviour. Many of us in the West have a moral compass that is shaped by whether or not we are causing harm to others. The rest of the world is also comfortable with a morality shaped by reverence for sacred things, like our bodies and our lives. We actually do have this on some level as well. That’s why most of us were disgusted by news stories in the 2010s about David Cameron’s alleged encounter with a pig’s head. Sex is special and should not be profaned. Also, animals also deserve to be treated better than that, whether they are alive or dead.

Immoral is a broader category than harmful. So, putting aside the fact that my binge-drinking was harming my health and also was harmful to some of the people around me, it was wrong of me to treat my body so profanely. I had turned my body’s reaction to alcohol into some sort of sport.

When my life changed

I didn’t clearly understand all this back then. But I did have a moment when my life changed and I stopped abusing alcohol. While at a Christian event, I was singing a hymn, and some of the words struck my heart: ‘prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.’ I realised that I was treating God as a source of amusement. It was similar to how I treated alcohol and various other things.

In that moment I knew something needed to change. I knew I needed God to make that change (I’d tried and failed so many times before!). Also, it hit me that it was senseless to say there is a God who knows all things, and then disagree with him about what is right and wrong. On some level I’d known all along my self-justifications were my own opinions. They weren’t real interpretations of the Bible.

In that moment, I didn’t know why binging alcohol was wrong (it didn’t make sense to me yet) but I was ready to agree with God. I still feared that my life would become boring, but I was ready to accept the risk. What I discovered in learning to follow Jesus and accept his rule in my life was the opposite of boring. That desire for an adventurous life was fulfilled by the call to follow him.

‘I still enjoy a beer’

You might be wondering if I drink now. The answer is yes – but my relationship with alcohol has been transformed. The Bible says not to get drunk, but it doesn’t forbid drinking. Paul told Timothy to take a bit of wine to help with a stomach problem. The Psalms say ‘wine gladdens the heart’. Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding so the celebration could continue. Wine is part of the Lord’s Supper, one of the most important parts of Christian life and worship. Alcohol, like sex, is celebrated rather than forbidden – but both are easily abused outside of their proper context. I enjoy a beer or a glass of whisky with my friends – it gladdens the heart. But drunkenness is debauchery.