Daily Reprieve

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

Can we bring the same spirit of love and tolerance into our sometimes deranged family lives that we bring to our A.A. group?   (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, pages 111-112)

My family members suffer from the effects of my disease.  Loving and accepting them as they are just as I love and accept A.A. members—fosters a return of love, tolerance and harmony to my life. Using common courtesy and respecting others’ personal boundaries are necessary practices for all areas of my life.

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I have entered the social laboratory of A.A. looking to develop in me a successful design for living based on the guidance of Gomu, the principles of the program, and the interaction with the fellowship.  I identify powerful events in the rooms and reproduce them in my intimate environment.  We are spiritual scientists of self-transformative power.

From Yesterday’s Daily Reflections;

When we developed still more, we discovered the best possible source of emotional stability to be God Himself. We found that dependence upon His perfect justice, forgiveness, and love was healthy, and that it would work where nothing else would. If we really depended upon God, we couldn’t very well play God to our fellows nor would we feel the urge wholly to rely on human protection and care.  (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 116)

All my life I depended on people for my emotional needs and security, but today I cannot live that way anymore. By the grace of God, I have admitted my powerlessness over people, places and things. I had been a real “people addict”; wherever I went there had to be someone who would pay some kind of attention to me. It was the kind of attitude that could only get worse, because the more I depended on others and demanded attention, the less I received.

I have given up believing that any human power can relieve me of that empty feeling. Although I remain a fragile human being who needs to work A.A.’s Steps to keep this particular principle before my personality, it is only a loving God who can give me inner peace and emotional stability.

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Gomu (God of my understanding) is the God of the Result, the God of the Big Picture.  I am the embryonic God of Task Performance, being trained to turn courage into action, discarding guilt for serenity.  I cannot be a child of the Infinite Father and not have the divine flowing through my veins.  I am not a fully developed deity and will not pretend to be one by demanding control over the results of living life.  The reality of being a godling exists only in my connection to the One that loves me.  In disconnected isolation I am a needy stillborn parasite moving from one hapless host to the next.  It seems to me that all this is the design of Gomu. Today, I accept that.

From Daily Reflections of 21 August;

My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.  (The Best of Bill, page 46-47)

As long as I try, with all my heart and soul, to pass along to others what has been passed along to me, and do not demand anything in return, life is good to me. Before entering this program of Alcoholics Anonymous I was never able to give without demanding something in return. Little did I know that, once I began to give freely of myself, I would begin to receive, without ever expecting or demanding anything at all. What I receive today is the gift of “stability,” as Bill did: stability in my A.A. program; within myself; but most of all, in my relationship with my Higher Power, whom I choose to call God.

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If Bill Wilson had not been thinking about his own self interests when he went on that business trip to Akron, a critical moment in A.A.’s history would not have occurred.  When he felt his own sobriety threatened after the failed business venture and available bar room, he was filled with a powerful sense of self-preservation and this motivated him to find someone to help.  It was then that he met Dr. Bob.  The martyr’s religion, which teaches to give to the point of self-death, had failed to keep Dr. Bob sober.  It was the paradoxical mystery of selfishly helping others that Bill shared with Bob saving them both from alcoholic tragedy, and laying the foundation for A.A. meetings that have saved my life.

When we talk about giving in recovery, we are not talking about playing a martyred messiah.  So come down from the cross, we need the wood to build our meeting place.

“This is the how and why of it. First of all, we had to quit playing God.” (Alcoholics Anonymous, page 62)