Daily Reprieve

From Today’s Daily Reflections;

During this process of learning more about humility, the most profound result of all was the change in our attitude toward God.  (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 75).

Today my prayers consist mostly of saying thank you to my Higher Power for my sobriety and for the wonder of God’s abundance, but I need to ask also for help and the power to carry out His will for me. I no longer need God each minute to rescue me from the situations I get myself into by not doing His will. Now my gratitude seems to be directly linked to humility. As long as I have the humility to be grateful for what I have, God continues to provide for me.

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I had difficulty with the concept of humility. My mind would envision someone with head bowed and spirit beaten down into mindless servitude. This reminded me of the humiliation of alcoholism. Such a view of humility was not helpful to my recovery.

So I looked at its opposite. An antonym for humility is arrogance. In my own mind I would often stand high above all others and imagine myself in a fantasy of isolated superiority. I regularly became guilty of contempt prior to investigation and rejected any challenge to my delusion. Now I can see that humility is not demeaning myself, but lifting up others in my own estimate. My personal perspective is to be considered on an equal field with those of my fellows. Because I have been accustomed to withdrawing to the fantasy world where I alone reign supreme, humility will involve some ego deflation.

I have discovered that my needs and desires can never really find fulfillment in the isolated fantasy of addiction. I have to enter the interactive reality of the human family through the gateway of humility.  I can never settle for the life of the lazy skeptic. It has been a long road getting from there to here, but I am grateful to those who have stayed with me throughout this process to include the loving God of my understanding.

This entry was posted on July 18, 2015 at 11:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Daily Reflections, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.