Daily Reflections
May 26
TURNING NEGATIVE TO POSITIVE
Our spiritual and emotional growth in A.A. does not depend so deeply upon success as it does upon our failures and setbacks. If you will bear this in mind. I think that your slip will have the effect of kicking you upstairs, instead of down.
-AS BILL SEES IT , p. 184
In keeping with the pain and adversity which our founders encountered and overcame in establishing A.A., Bill W. sent us a clear message: a relapse can provide a positive experience toward abstinence and a lifetime of recovery. A relapse brings truth to what we hear repeatedly in meetings – “Don’t take that first drink!” It reinforces the belief in the progressive nature of the disease, and it drives home the need for, and beauty of, humility in our spiritual program. Simple truths come in complicated ways to me when I become ego driven.
Twenty-Four Hours
A Day
May 26
A.A. Thought For The Day
In twelfth-step work, the fourth thing is conversion. Conversion means change. Prospects must learn to change their way of thinking. Until now, everything they’ve done has been connected with drinking. Now they must face a new kind of life, without liquor. They must see and admit that they cannot overcome drinking by their own willpower, so they must turn to a Higher Power for help. They must start each day by asking this Higher Power for the strength to stay sober. This conversion to belief in a Higher Power comes gradually, as they try it and find that it works. Do I care enough about other alcoholics to help them to make this conversion?
Meditation For The Day
Discipline of yourself is absolutely necessary before the power of God is given to you. When you see others manifesting the power of God, you probably have not seen the discipline that went before. They made themselves ready. All your life is a preparation for more good to be accomplished when God knows that you are ready for it. So keep disciplining yourself in the spiritual life every day. Learn so much of the spiritual laws that your life cannot again be a failure. Others will see the outward manifestation of the inward discipline in your daily living.
Prayer For The Day
I pray that I may manifest God’s power in my daily living. I pray that I may discipline myself so as to be ready to meet every opportunity.
As Bill Sees It
“Privileged People”, p. 133
I saw that I had been living too much alone, too much aloof from my fellows, and too deaf to that voice within. Instead of seeing myself as a simple agent bearing the message of experience, I had thought of myself as a founder of A.A.
How much better it would have been had I felt gratitude rather than self-satisfaction–gratitude that I had once suffered the pains of alcoholism, gratitude that a miracle of recovery had been worked upon me from above, gratitude for the privilege of serving my fellow alcoholics, and gratitude for those fraternal ties which bound me ever closer to them in a comradeship such as few societies of men have ever known.
Truly did a clergyman say to me, “Your misfortune has become your good fortune. You A.A.’s are privileged people.”
Grapevine, July 1946
AA Grapevine Daily Quote
“In the Twelve Steps, AA offers not a theory, not a hypothesis, not a pious hope, not — thank God — wistful or wishful thinking, but an historical record of how more than 25,000 [now over 2,000,000] alcoholics achieved sobriety.”
Thought For The Day:
Some days, it’s one hour at a time.
Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book) In Short
Takes
PART 3
They Lost Nearly All
Grounded
Alcohol clipped this pilot’s wings until sobriety and hard work brought him back to the sky.
The trial judge had put sanctions on me that made it impossible for me to fly again because of my age. My lawyer had become my friend and worked for three years after my conviction without taking a cent from me. He was one more person who entered my life in a manner I could only ascribe to some kind of Divine Providence. He took a motion to the judge to lift the sanctions, and the tears came flooding down my cheeks when he called to let me know the judge had approved it. With the lifting of those sanctions, the impossible became slightly less impossible. An extraordinary amount of work was left to do, but at least the attempt could now be made.
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Credits.
Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book), The Daily Reflections and As Bill Sees It are published by The General Services Office (GSO) of Alcoholics Anonymous. These and other A.A. literature can be purchased here.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day is Published by Hazelton Publishing. It and other Hazelton literature can be purchase here.
The AA Grapevine is published by The AA Grapevine, Inc. You can subscribe here.
