Latest / Sober Readings / Grateful For What I Have
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Welcome back to Sober Readings. My name is Scott. Today is Saturday, the 18th of July. Let's begin with the Serenity Prayer. God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Today's reading from Daily Reflections. Grateful for what I have. During this process of learning more about humility, the most profound result of all was the change in our attitude toward God. And that's on page seventy five of Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. 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. Today's reading from twenty four hours, july eighteenth, AA thought for the day. Two things can spoil group unity gossip and criticism. To avoid these divisive things, we must realize that we're all in the same boat. We're like a group of people in a lifeboat after the steamer has sunk. If we're going to be saved, we've got to pull together. It's a matter of life or death for us. Gossip and criticism are sure ways of disrupting any AA group. We're all in AA to keep sober ourselves and to help each other to keep sober. And neither gossip nor criticism helps anyone to stay sober. And today's question for the AA Thought for the Day is: Am I often guilty of gossip or criticism? The meditation for the day. We should try to be grateful for all the blessings we have received and which we do not deserve. Gratitude to God for all his blessings will make us humble. Remember that we could do little by ourselves. And now we must rely largely on God's grace in helping ourselves and others. People do not care much for those who are smug and self-satisfied, or those who gossip and criticize. But people are impressed by true humility. So we should try to walk humbly at all times. Gratitude to God and true humility are what makes us effective. Today's prayer for the day. I pray that I may walk humbly with God. I pray that I may rely on his grace to carry me through. Today's daily meditation from Touchstones. How should one live? Live welcoming to all. That's a quote from Metchild of Magdeburg. And I'll get into who that is after the readings. Welcoming is a spiritual practice we met when we came to this program. We may recall our first meetings and how welcome we felt in this group of fellow sufferers. The group gave us hope when we felt desperate and continues to provide us with a nourishing place to grow. To be welcoming means to accept others as they are without passing judgment on their worth. It means to encourage them when they are despairing and to accept that they have a rightful place in the world. Welcoming is being generous with our resources. We do not have to feel close to someone to be welcoming. We can welcome a stranger. As we practice this attitude toward others, regardless of their status in life, regardless of their good or bad actions, we are changed inside. We learn from the people we welcome, and we are reminded that in the sight of God, we are all loved as equals. Today I will practice a welcoming attitude toward everyone I meet. And for today's final reading, I'm gonna read from the Grapevine of September of 2022. And this article is titled Lighting the Way. Though her last day of drinking was rudderless and dark, she found a beacon to point the way. My last drunk was july twenty sixth, two thousand five. I was living mostly out of my car because I had just moved back to Florida for the fifth or sixth time in twenty years. I had a job that an old friend got me at a local bar right by a baseball stadium. He said I should be able to make a lot of money and get myself squared away with a place to live. What he didn't know was that I was a mess on the inside. I couldn't think, couldn't eat, couldn't concentrate on anything. My mind only thought about drinking. Basically, I was unemployable, though I didn't know that until I came to AA. That day, I went to work around 10 a.m. I set the bar up for the day's business, and by one I sat down at the bar and had my free shift drinks. Tommy had made them pretty stiff, and with no food in my stomach, I got drunk on just those two drinks. I barely remember walking to my car where I sat in the driver's seat and put one hand over my right eye to test whether I could see clearly, and I guess I made the decision that I could. Then I counted my earnings for the day. I was very upset to find that I had only a nickel to drink on until four, when my brother Kyle would get to the bar for happy hour. I truly don't remember anything more until the next day when I woke up at Kyle's place. I tried to piece together the day before. I was so sick with dread and despair. I only remembered two things about the night before. First, a man had told me that if I wanted help, I should go to the Lighthouse Museum at seven o'clock in the morning. And people there would help me. The second thing I remembered was coming to in a truck in the parking lot of my brother's place. Suddenly the interior of the truck lit up bright with light, and I heard a voice say, You don't have to live this way anymore if you don't want to. It was now morning, and I got out of bed and went into my brother's living room and asked him what time I had gotten to his house and how I'd gotten there. He said that I had arrived at 11 p.m. and that I had driven there. Kyle was not happy with me, as I had gotten a DUI in two thousand one, and I really hadn't driven drunk since then. I was confused by my odd memories from the previous night and mortified that I had driven drunk again. Not knowing what to do, I called Chris, a good friend of mine at the time. I told her what the man had told me about the people at the lighthouse, and she agreed to go there with me. The next morning Chris and I went to that meeting. I had no idea it was an AA meeting. Going to as we rounded the corner of the building where the meeting was held. We entered and right away I experienced an overwhelming sense of belonging. My decision to go into that meeting turned out to be a fateful one, as I met people there who would change my life. I had no idea I would make the decision to not drink that day. I picked up a white chip and haven't had a drink since. Was my last drunk the worst drunk I ever had? I don't think so. All I know is that my life had become unbearable and I just couldn't live that way anymore. I know it to my core of me. Somehow the God of my understanding reached down inside me and showed me the way to AA. A man called Preacher Jim approached Chris and me after that meeting and asked which one of us was the alcoholic. I am, I said. He then turned to Chris and said, You don't have to come with her anymore. We will love her until she can love herself. My heart sang at his words. I believed him. My heart keeps singing with gratitude for those words because I never again want to live the way I used to. I heard so many uplifting words at the lighthouse that day. I heard a woman named Cindy say, We made mistakes, but we are not mistakes. Simple words of love kept lifting me up, and that's all I had ever wanted to feel loved. I've found my place in the world through my last drunk. I'm forever grateful for all the people who've cleared the way for me and other alcoholics to find our place. And that was written by Tina W. in Hobe Sound, Florida. And I apologize if I did not pronounce that correctly. And that's it for today's readings. But before I close, let's go back to Touchstones and talk about that quote from Metchhild of Magdeburg. So she was a prominent 13th-century German Christian mystic. Poet and spiritual writer. And so you might be asking yourself, what does she have to do with modern day sobriety? And the answer is her life and theology are frequently utilized today in spiritual frameworks for addiction, recovery, and modern sobriety. And here's a couple examples of that. So the admission of powerlessness. She wrote extensively about facing her own weaknesses, describing herself as a worthless vessel. Unable to withstand her struggles without divine intervention. And this sounds a lot like step one in our twelve steps. Also, a a famous quote by MechHield is whoever is sore wounded by love will never be made whole unless she embraced the very same love which wounded her. And so in recovery spaces, this is often used to address the root psychological trauma or emotional voids that drive people towards substance abuse. And one last example, Metchild's Bridal Mysticism utilized incredibly intense euphoric and passionate language to describe spiritual ecstasy. And addiction is sometimes described in psychology as a misplaced search for transcendence or an escape from a painful reality. So recovery programs often use her writings to show that the euphoric piece or the high an individual might have sought through a substance. can be found safely through meditation, community, and higher power connection. And so although she wasn't talking specifically about sobriety, she was talking a lot about spirituality, and that, as we know, is a big part of our 12-step program. So I hope that little history lesson for you was interesting. I will admit, I did have to look up who that was and do a little research before I before I talked about her. And so that's gonna do it for today's episode of Sober Readings. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, click that like button and share this episode with someone you might like and also subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. If you'd like to leave a comment down below, that would be great. I would really appreciate it. Also, you could send me your comments at soberreadings with Scott at gmail.com. If you'd like to be a guest reader, include it in that email. Also, if you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket for today's readings, you can go to my website, sobereadings.com, and click the donate button. So again, thank you so much for listening. Stay sober, keep reading, and I'll see you in the next episode. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other. And remember, just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day. And as my friend Larry says, best day ever.