Latest / Sober Readings / Shortcomings Removed
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Hey, welcome back to Sober Readings, everyone. Thanks for joining me today. My name is Scott. Today is the 20th of July. It is Monday. Let's begin today's episode 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 Shortcomings Removed. But now the words, of myself I am nothing, the Father doeth the works, began to carry bright promise and meaning. And that's on page 75 of Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. When I put the seventh step into action, I must remember that there are no blanks to fill in. It doesn't say, humbly asked him to fill in the blank, remove our shortcomings. For years I filled in the imaginary blank with help me. Give me courage to and give me the strength. The step says simply that God will remove my shortcomings. The only footwork I must do is humbly ask, which for me means asking with the knowledge that of myself I am nothing. The Father within doeth the works. Today's reading from twenty four hours AA Thought for the Day. We must be loyal to the group and to each member of it. We must never accuse members behind their backs or even to their faces. It's up to them to tell us themselves if anything is wrong. More than that, we must try not to think bad things about any members, because if we do, we're consciously or unconsciously hurting that person. We must be loyal to each other if AA is going to be successful. While we're in this lifeboat trying to save ourselves and each other from alcoholism, we must be truly and sincerely helpful to each other. So ask yourself today, am I a loyal member of my group? Meditation for the day. Carry out God's guidance as best you can. Leave the results to Him. Do this obediently and faithfully, with no question that if the working out of the guidance is left in God's hands, the results will be alright. Believe that the guidance God gives you has already been worked out by God to produce the required results according to your case and in your circumstances. So follow God's guidance according to your conscience. God has knowledge of your individual life and character, your capabilities and your weaknesses. Today's prayer for the day. I pray that I may live according to the dictates of my conscience. I pray that I may leave the results to God. Today's daily meditation from touchstone. Without solitude there can be no real people. The measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion. And that is a quote from John Eudes. If we listen in those moments when we hear a message from ourselves, we become true men, real human beings. The message comes in our solitude, when our defenses against truth are set aside. It comes popping out without our planning it. Our solitude is a relationship with ourselves and it might occur in silent meditation, or driving down the street, or during a dinner conversation. The message might be a painful truth such as you just acted like a small child, or a frightening fact such as you are deeply loved by another person. Letting another person know what messages we are getting in solitude helps us deal with the messages. As we accept our imperfections and make peace with ourselves, we increase our sense of solitude. We become real men, full partners and relationships and in our communities. Today I will welcome solitude. When the messages from myself are painful or frightening, I will be gentle with myself. And for today's final reading, I'm gonna go to Living Sober. This is one of my favorite books in sobriety. And a lot of people don't like it because it's very common, very plain, but the message is very clear and I love it. So let's go to chapter twenty of Living Sober, and it's called Remembering Your Last Drunk. That's not a typographical error. The word is drunk, not drink, as you'll see. A drink is a term which has awakened pleasurable echoes and anticipations in millions of people for centuries. Depending on our age and on circumstances which surrounded our first experiences with alcohol, we all have various memories and hopes, sometimes anxieties, aroused by the thought of a cool beer, a martini, a ginantonic. A scotch and soda, a sip of wine, or whatever. Repeatedly, in the early drinking of most people, the anticipations were fully met by the desired drink. And if that happened often enough, we naturally learned to think of a drink as a satisfying event. Whether it gratified our need to conform to a religious custom, quenched our thirst, graced a social occasion, relaxed us, stimulated us. Or gave us any other kind of satisfaction we sought. It is not difficult for a 55-year-old Finn, for example, when he hears someone suggest a drink, to recall the flush of the warmth that a shot of vodka or aqua vit brought on a cold day in his youth. One young woman may instantly visualize an elegant crystal glass of champagne, glamorous surroundings, new clothes, a new lover. Another may think of a pull from a bagged bottle. Toted by the long bearded youth in denim at her side while the music rocks, the strobe lights flash through the sweet smoke, and everybody screams in ecstasy. One AA member says a drink makes him almost taste pizza with a brew. A seventy eight year old widow among us is inevitably reminded of the sherry eggnogs she began to like at bedtime in a nursing home. Although perfectly natural, some mental images are now for us misleading. Those were the ways some of us began to drink, and if that had been the whole truth of our drinking history, it is unlikely that we could have developed much of a drinking problem. A searching, fearless look at our complete drinking record, however, shows that in the last years and months our drinking never created those perfect magic moments again, no matter how often we tried for them. Instead, over and over we wound up drinking more than that, and landed in some kind of trouble as a result. Maybe it was simply inner discontent, a sneaky feeling that we were drinking too much, but sometimes it was marital squabbles, job problems, serious illness or accidents, or legal or financial worries. Therefore, when the suggestion of a drink comes to us, we now try to remember the whole train of consequences of starting with just a drink. We think the drink all the way through, down to our last miserable drunk and hangover. A friend who offers us a drink usually means simply that one sociable glass or two, but if we are careful to recall the full suffering of our last drinking episode, we are not deceived by our own long ago notion of a drink. The blunt, physiological truth for us, as of today, is that a drink pretty surely means a drunk sooner or later, and that spells trouble. Drinking for us no longer means music and gay laughter and flirtations. It means sickness and sorrow. One AA member puts it this way. I know now that stopping in for a drink will never again be, for me, simply killing a few minutes and leaving a buck on the bar. In exchange for that drink, what I would plunk down now is my bank account, my family, our home, our car, my job, my sanity, and probably my life. It's too big a price, too big a risk. He remembers his last drunk, not his first drink. And that is chapter 20 from Living Sober: Remembering Our Last Drunk. That chapter is so important to me, it reminds me that instant gratification, as in that first drink, is never the end of it. I must think it through to the end. Or the next morning, or sometimes in my case, three days later. It's true that some things do remind me of a drink. For me, it's the cold beer after a long hike, or the glass of wine while cooking dinner. But I have to be careful not to romanticize those times because they rarely ever ended there. And so I hope you enjoyed that reading out of Living Sober. As I said, that's one of my favorite books in sobriety, and I hope you enjoy it too. So that's gonna do it for today's episode of Sober Readings. I hope you enjoyed it. Hey, if you'd like to be a guest reader on Sober Readings, I'd love to have you. Just send me an email at soberreadings with Scott at gmail.com, and we can certainly make that happen. If you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket for today's readings, just go to my website, soberreadings.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.