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All We Do Is Try · Sober Readings

• Scott Hayes: Good morning everyone and welcome back to Sober Readings. Today is Saturday, june sixth. Let's begin today's episode like we always do 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. All we do is try. Can he now take them all? Everyone? That's in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous page seventy six. In doing step six, it helped me a lot to remember that I am striving for spiritual progress. Some of my character defects may be with me for the rest of my life, but most have been toned down or eliminated. All that step six asks of me is to become willing to name my defects, claim them as my own. and be willing to discard the ones I can just for today. As I grow in the program, many of my defects become more objectionable to me than previously, and therefore I need to repeat step six so that I can become happier with myself and maintain my serenity. Today's reading from 24 Hours. June 6, AA Thought for the Day. Alcoholism is usually a symptom of some underlying personality problem. It's the way we alcoholics express our maladjustments to life. I believe that I was a potential alcoholic from the start. I had an inferiority complex. I didn't make friends easily. There was a wall between me and other people, and I was lonely. I was not well adjusted to life. Did I drink to escape myself? The meditation for the day. According to the varying needs of each person, so does each person think of God. It is not necessary that you think of God as others think of Him, but it is necessary that you think of Him as supplying what you personally need. The weak need God's strength. The strong need God's tenderness. The tempted and fallen need God's saving grace. The righteous need God's pity for sinners. The lonely need God as a friend. The fighters for righteousness need a leader in God. You may think of God in any way you wish. Men usually do not turn to God until they need him. Today's prayer for the day. I pray that I may think of God as supplying my needs. I pray that I will bring all my problems to Him for help in meeting them. And for today's final reading, we'll go back to AA Comes of Age. This is chapter two, and we're we're gonna pick up where we left off, and I'm gonna read the last line where I left off last time. It's Bill W. giving a speech and ⁓ it's a bit it's about one of his last relapses. And he says, If there is a God, let him show himself. I am ready to do anything, anything. And then I'll pick it up from here. Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me in the mind's eye that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air, but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there were a wonderful feeling of presence, and I thought to myself, So this is the God of the preachers. A great peace stole over me, and I thought, no matter how wrong things seemed to be, they are still alright. Things are alright with God and his world. Then, little by little I began to be frightened. My modern education crawled back and said to me, You are hallucinating. You'd better get to the doctor. Doctor Silkworth asked me a lot of questions. After a while he said, No, Bill, you're not crazy. There's been some basic psychological or spiritual event here. I've read about these things in the books. Sometimes spiritual experiences do release people from alcoholism. Immensely relieved, I fell again to wondering what actually had happened. More light on this came the next day. It was Ebbie, I think, who brought me a copy of William James variety of religious experience. It was rather difficult reading for me, but I devoured it from cover to cover. Spiritual experiences, James thought, could have objective reality, almost like gifts from the blue. They could transform people. Some were sudden brilliant illuminations. Others came on very gradually. Some flowed out of religious channels, others did not. But nearly all had the great common denominators of pain, Suffering calamity. Complete hopelessness and deflation at depth were almost always required to make the recipient ready. The significance of all this burst upon me deflating at depth. Yes, that was it. Exactly that had happened to me. Dr. Carl Young had told an Oxford group friend of Ebbie's how hopeless his alcoholism was, and doctor Silkworth had passed the same sentence upon me. Then Ebbie, also an alcoholic, had handed me the identical dose. On doctor Silkworth's say so alone, maybe I would never have completely accepted the verdict. But when Ebbie came along and one alcoholic began to talk to another, that clinched it. My thoughts began to race as I envisioned a chain reaction among alcoholics, one carrying this message and these principles to the next. More than I could ever want anything else, it was I now knew that I wanted to work with other alcoholics. As soon as I was discharged from the hospital, I associated myself with the Oxford groups. We worked at Sam Shoemaker's Cavalry Mission and also at Towns Hospital. Ebbie came to live with Lois and me in Brooklyn. I started out after drunks on jet propulsion. My sudden spiritual experience, however, had its disadvantages. I was soon heard to say that I was going to fix up all the drunks in the world, even though the batting average on them had been virtually nil for the last five thousand years. The Oxford groupers had tried and mostly failed, and were fed up. Sam Shoemaker, in fact, had just had a run of bad luck. He had housed a bunch of drunks in an apartment near his church, and one of them, still resisting salvation, had peviously thrown a shoe through a fine stained glass window in Sam's church. No wonder my Oxford group friends felt that I had better forget about alcoholics. But I was still mighty cocksure and I ignored their advice. Mine was kind of a twin engine power drive consisting of one part of genuine spirituality and one part of my old desire to be a number one man. This posture didn't pan out well at all. At the end of six months, nobody had sobered up. And believe me, I had tried them by the score. They would clear up for a little while and then flop dismally. Naturally, the Oxford groupers became very cool indeed toward my drunk fixing. Lois, meanwhile, was still working in the department store, and folks were beginning to say, is this fellow Bill going to be a missionary for life? Why doesn't he go to work? Even to me, this began to look like a good idea. I began to hang around Wall Street again and And through a chance acquaintance I had scraped up in a brokerage shop, I insinuated myself into a proxy row that involved control of a little machine tool company in Akron, Ohio. In May of 1935, a party of us went out to Akron, fighting for control of the company. I could already see myself as its new president. But when the chips were down, the other side had more proxies, and our side got licked. My newfound acquaintances were discouraged. And they left me in Akron's Mayflower Hotel with only about ten dollars in my pocket. They departed on Friday. On Saturday, Mother's Day Eve, I was pacing up and down the hotel lobby, wondering what I could do. The bar at one end of my beat was filling up rapidly. I could hear the familiar buzz of conversation in there. Down at the other end of the lobby, I found myself pausing before a church directory. Then I was seized with a thought. I'm going to go get drunk. Or no, maybe I won't get drunk. Maybe I'll just go into that bar and drink some ginger ale and scrape up an acquaintance. Then I panicked. That was really a gift. I had never panicked before at the threat of alcohol. Maybe this meant that my sanity had been restored. I remembered that in trying to help other people, I had stayed sober myself. For the first time I deeply realized it. I thought, you need another alcoholic to talk to you. You need another alcoholic just as much as he needs you. And that is where I'll end today's reading of AA Comes of Age. And that again, that was Bill W. speaking live at an event. And so that's gonna wrap up today's episode of Sober Readings. I hope you enjoyed that reading. If you did, do me a huge favor and hit that like button and share this episode with someone you think might need it. And also if you'd like to be a guest on Sober Readings, I would love to have you. Send me an email at sober readings with Scott at gmail dot com. And if you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket, just go to my website soberreadings.com and click the donate button. So thank you so much for listening today. 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.