Endigar 412 ~ The Easier, Softer Way
From Today’s Daily Reflections;
If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking. (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 72)
I certainly didn’t leap at the opportunity to face who I was, especially when the pains of my drinking days hung over me like a dark cloud. But I soon heard at the meetings about the fellow member who just didn’t want to take Step Five and kept coming back to meetings, trembling from the horrors of reliving his past. The easier, softer way is to take these Steps to freedom from our fatal disease, and to put our faith in the Fellowship and our Higher Power.
END OF QUOTE
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“Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it-then you are ready to take certain steps.
At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.” (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 58)
I had to find an alternative to the way I had been living. I had to find a more sane approach to life. The steps collectively and some in particular, such as the fifth step, I found challenging and difficult. They escorted me through the hallways of internal haunted houses. I tried to create a hybrid creature of my old ways of providing creative and intellectual modifications forged to the simplicity and spirituality of the steps. I kept producing a more complicated but self-justifying version of recovery.
Yesterday I heard someone say in a meeting that if he needed an intellectual answer to his recovery, he would have just taken the Big Book home and studied. He continued that if he was to find the heart of this program, it had to be as he connected with others in the Fellowship. The fifth step takes the mind of the moral inventory and gives it a heart.
Today, I am in agreement with the final statement of the contributor to the reflections; “The easier, softer way is to take these Steps to freedom from our fatal disease, and to put our faith in the Fellowship and our Higher Power.”
Heard in a meeting yesterday; “When I first came into these rooms, the fellowship told me recovery was an inside job, and that they would hold the light while I started digging.”
Daily Reprieve 
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