Feb 10th 2010

[MOUSIE]

Daily Reflections

I DON'T RUN THE SHOW

When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed
crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to
fearlessly face the proposition that either God is
everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or
He isn't. What was our choice to be?
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p.53

Today my choice is God. He is everything. For this I
am truly grateful. When I think I am running the show
I am blocking God from my life. I pray I can remember
this when I allow myself to get caught up into self.
The most important thing is that today I am willing
to grow along spiritual lines, and that God is
everything. When I was trying to quit drinking on my
own, it never worked; with God and A.A., it is
working. This seems to be a simple thought for a
complicated alcoholic.

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Twenty-Four Hours A Day

A.A. Thought For The Day

Since I realize that I had become an alcoholic and
could never have any more fun with liquor and since
I knew that from then on liquor would always get me
into trouble, common sense told me that the only
thing left for me was a life of sobriety. But I
learned another thing in A.A., the most important
thing anyone can ever learn, that I could
call on a Higher Power to help me keep away from
liquor, that I could work with that Divine Principle
in the universe and that God would help me to live
a sober, useful, happy life. So now I no longer care
about the fact that I can never have any more fun
with drinking. Have I learned that I am much happier
without it?

Meditation For The Day

Like a tree, I must be pruned of a lot of dead
branches, before I will be ready to bear good fruit.
Think of changed people as trees which have been
stripped of their old branches, pruned, cut and bare,
but through the dark, seemingly dead branches flows
silently, secretly, the new sap, until with the sun
of spring, comes new life. There are new leaves, buds,
blossoms and fruit, many times better because of the
pruning. Remember, I am in the hands of a Master
Gardener, who makes no mistakes in His pruning.

Prayer For The Day

I pray that I may cut away the dead branches of my
life. I pray that I may not mind the pruning, since
it helps me to bear good fruit later.

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As Bill Sees It

Membership Rules?, p. 41

Around 1943 or 1944, the Central Office asked the groups to list their
membership rules and send them in. After they arrived we set them all
down. A little reflection upon these many rules brought us to an
astonishing conclusion.

If all of these edicts had been in force everywhere at once it would have
been practically impossible for any alcoholic to have ever joined A.A.
About nine-tenths of our oldest and best members could have never
gotten by!

<< << << >> >> >>

At last experience taught us that to take away any alcoholic's full chance
for sobriety in A.A. was sometimes to pronounce his death sentence, and
often to condemn him to endless misery. Who dared to be judge, jury,
and executioner of his own sick brother?

1. Grapevine, August 1946
2. 12 & 12, p. 141

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Walk In Dry Places

What is rightfully mine___Personal Gains
One of the hard lessons of life is that we can't always "win" in the worldly game for prestige, power, and property. It is especially galling to see rewards going to others that don't seem to have earned them. Much of the world's conflict, in fact, grows out of disputes over what rightfully belongs to whom.
In sobriety, we need a higher perspective than what we're likely to find in the brawling world around us. Rather than demanding rights to anything, we should know that everything is part of a spiritual world. The real meaning of the last line of The Lord's Prayer is that all power, prestige, and property belong to our Higher Power. Whatever we have or will acquire is only temporary, at best, and can easily be lost through wrong thinking and bad actions.
Emmet Fox, whose writings guided the early A members, taught that we possess things only through "rights of consciousness." In perfectly legitimate ways, we will always possess whatever is necessary for our real work in this life. If one door closes, another will always open. We do not have to envy anything that others possess, nor should we attempt to wrestle it from them. God will always lead us to whatever we need for our highest good.
I will not fret this day about any lost property or opportunities. My needs will be met in a satisfactory manner as I continue to seek the highest and best in every situation.

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Keep It Simple

Life didn't promise to be wonderful. ---Teddy Pendergrass
Life doesn't promise us anything, except a chance. We have a chance to live any way we like. No matter how we choose to live, we'll have pain and we'll have joy. And we can learn from both.
Because of our recovery program, we can have life's biggest wonder---love. We share it in a smile, a touch, a phone call, or a note. We share it with our friends, our partners, our family. Life didn't promise to be wonderful, but it sure is full of little wonders! And we only have to open up and see them, feel them, and let them happen.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, help me see the wonders of life today, in nature, in people's faces, in my own heart.
Action for the Day: I can help make a wonderful things happen for others, with a smile, a greeting, a helping hand. What "little" things will I do for somebody today?

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Alcoholics Anonymous - Fourth Edition

Doctor Bob's Nightmare

A co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The birth of our Society dates from his first day of permanent sobriety, June 10, 1935.
To 1950, the year of his death, he carried the A.A. message to more than 5,000 alcoholics men and women, and to all these he gave his medical services without thought of charge.
In this prodigy of service, he was well assisted by Sister Ignatia at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio, one of the greatest friends our Fellowship will ever know.

The next three years I spent in Boston, Chicago, and Montreal in the employ of a large manufacturing concern, selling railway supplies, gas engines of all sorts, and many other items of heavy hardware. During these years, I drank as much as my purse permitted, still without paying too great a penalty, although I was beginning to have morning "jitters" at times. I lost only a half day's work during these three years.

pp. 172-173

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Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

Step Three - "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."

So how, exactly, can the willing person continue to turn his will and his life over to the Higher Power? He made a beginning, we have seen, when he commenced to rely upon A.A. for the solution of his alcohol problem. By now, though, the chances are that he has become convinced that he has more problems than alcohol, and that some of these refuse to be solved by all the sheer personal determination and courage he can muster. They simply will not budge; they make him desperately unhappy and threaten his newfound sobriety. Our friend is still victimized by remorse and guilt when he thinks of yesterday. Bitterness still overpowers him when he broods upon those he still envies or hates. His financial insecurity worries him sick, and panic takes over when he thinks of all the bridges to safety that alcohol burned behind him. And how shall he ever straighten out that awful jam that cost him the affection of his family and separated him from them? His lone courage and unaided will cannot do it. Surely he must now depend upon Somebody or Something else.

p. 39

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"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind." --Henry James

"You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime." --Dale Carnegie

"You will regret many things in life but you will never regret being too kind or too fair." -–Brian Tracy

In the process of growing to spiritual maturity, we all go through many adolescent stages. --Miki L. Bowen

Love is not an exchange of favors. Love is something you give away.

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Father Leo's Daily Meditation

INSIGHT

"Nothing is more terrible than
activity without insight."
-- Thomas Carlyle

I believe that recovery can only begin when we "see" or start to get a
glimpse of who we are and what we are dealing with . . . insight; an
insight into self.

However, the moment we begin to see must be followed by a
determined effort to discover more; digging through the denial, pain
and manipulation to the disease. Then after discovering the disease in
our lives, we must be prepared to risk talking about it --- on a daily
basis.

Recovery requires a daily desire to see, discover and talk about our
addiction --- with this insight comes recovery.

You are the light of the world; shine through my honesty.

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"Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord!" Psalms 150:6

"Remember to welcome strangers, because some who have done this have welcomed angels without knowing it." Hebrews 13:2

"Love your neighbor as you love yourself." Galatians 5:14

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Daily Inspiration

Each morning gives us one more chance to pray, one more chance to help another and one more chance to make this a better world. Lord, thank you for working in and through everything.

Not one day passes without receiving wonderful blessings from our loving and generous God. Lord, may I forget the irritations that distract me from Your happiness.