Thought to Consider . . .
Willingness without action is fantasy.
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
The alcoholic is in no greater peril than when he takes sobriety for granted.
*~*AACRONYMS*~*
E G O = Easing God Out
S P O N S O R = Sober Person Offering Newcomers Suggestions On Recovery
Change
How many of us would presume to declare, “Well, I’m sober, and I’m happy. What more can I want, or do? I’m fine the way I am.” We know that the price of such self-satisfaction is an inevitable backslide, punctuated at some point by a very rude awakening. We have to grow or else deteriorate. For us, the status quo can only be for today, never for tomorrow. Change we must; we cannot stand still.
Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.
Alcoholics who still had their health, their families, their jobs, and even two cars in the garage, began to recognize their alcoholism. They were spared that last ten or fifteen years of literal hell the rest of us had gone through. Since Step One requires an admission that our lives have become unmanageable, how could people such as these take this Step? It was obviously necessary to raise the bottom the rest of us had hit to the point where it would hit them. By going back in our own drinking histories, we could show that years before we realized it, we were out of control, that our drinking even then was no mere habit, that it was indeed the beginning of a fatal progression.
It is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us.
Out of the Dark
“Self-searching is the means by which we bring new vision, action, and grace to bear upon the dark and negative side of our natures. With it comes, the development of that kind of humility that makes it possible for us to receive God’s help. Yet it is only a step. We will want to go further. We will want the good that is in us all, even in the worst of us, to flower and to grow. But first of all, we shall want sunlight; nothing much can grow in the dark. Meditation is our step out into the sun.”
Satisfaction
No satisfaction has been deeper and no joy greater than in a Twelfth Step job well done. To watch the eyes of men and women with wonder as they move from darkness into light, to see their lives quickly fill with new purpose and meaning, to see whole families reassembled, to see the alcoholic outcast received back into his community in full citizenship, and above all to watch these people awaken to the presence of a loving God in their lives – these things are the substance of what we receive as we carry A.A.’s message to the next alcoholic.
“We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired. If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try.”
Unity
In many self-governing countries we are now seeing the inroads of ignorance, apathy, and power-seeking upon democratic systems. Their spiritual resources of right purpose and collective intelligence are waning. Consequently, many a land has become so helpless that the only answer is dictatorship. Happily for us, there seems little prospect of such a calamity in A.A. The life of each individual and of each group is built around our Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. We very well know that the penalty for extensive disobedience to these principles is death for the individual and dissolution for the group. An even greater force for A.A.’s unity is in the compelling love that we have for our fellow members and for the principles upon which our lives today are founded.
Dianne