Latest / Sober Readings / Love Without Strings
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Good morning and welcome back to Sober Readings. Happy Monday, everyone. Today is the twenty-eighth of September. My name is Scott, and I am glad you're here with me today. Let's get started with the Serenity Prayer. God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference. Today's reading from Daily Reflections. Love without strings. Practical experience shows that nothing will so much ensure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics. And that's on page eighty nine of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Sponsorship held two surprises for me. First, that my sponsees cared about me. What I had thought was gratitude was more like love. They wanted me to be happy, to grow and remain sober. Knowing how they felt kept me from drinking more than once. Second, I discovered that I was able to love someone else responsibly, with respectful and genuine concern for that person's growth. Before that time, I had thought that my ability to care sincerely about another's well being had atrophied from lack of use. To learn that I can love without greed or anxiety has been one of the deepest gifts the program has given me. Gratitude for that gift has kept me sober many times. Today's reading from twenty four hours a day september twenty eighth, AA Thought for the Day. For the past two months we have been studying passages and steps from the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous. Now why not read the book itself again? It is essential that the AA program become part of us. We must have its essentials at our fingertips. We cannot study the big book too much or too often. The more we read it and study it, the better equipped we are to think AA, act AA, and live AA. We cannot know too much about the program. The chances are that we will never know enough, but we can make as much of it our own as possible. And today's question is how much of the big book have I thoroughly mastered? Today's meditation for the day. We need to accept the difficulties and disciplines of life so as to fully share the common life of other people. Many things that we must accept in life are not to be taken so much as being necessary for us personally as to be experienced in order that we may share in the sufferings and problems of humanity. We need sympathy and understanding. We must share many of the experiences of life in order to understand and sympathize with others. Unless we have been through the same experiences, we cannot understand other people or their makeup well enough to be able to help them. And today's prayer for the day. I pray that I may accept everything that comes my way as a part of life. I pray that I may make use of it in helping other people. The next reading for today is from Touchstones, a book of daily meditations, for September 28th. Life itself is the proper binge. That's a quote from Julia Child. The twelve steps are a suggested program of recovery, not a cure. We can follow them and live a healed life, but we never develop immunity to our addictions and codependency. We remain vulnerable to slips, binges. And a return to old behaviors. If that has happened to us, our first need is to find a way back to the program. A slip may speak the blatant truth we avoided before. A man's complete honesty following a slip has sometimes been the way to renewed knowledge of his powerlessness. There is no value in feeling more shame and self-hate in the aftermath of a slip. We need to accept we are incomplete and imperfect human beings. Recovery will come not from shame, but from honestly accepting our powerlessness and the help we need. The promise of recovery in this program, a healed life, is just as available after a slip as it ever was. It takes absolute commitment, a willingness to face the pain and hardship. Then we are freed again to engage fully. In the joy and the awe of life. I ask that my compulsions and my weaknesses be lifted from me. I am not able to cure myself, but I pray for help. And for today's final reading, let's go back to Asbel sees it, and we are on page twenty-two. Fear as a stepping stone. The chief activator of our defects has been self centered fear, primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed, or would fail to get something we demanded. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands. That's on page seventy six of the twelve and twelve. For all its usual destructiveness, we have found that fear can be the starting point for better things. Fear can be a stepping stone to prudence and to a decent respect for others. It can point the path to justice as well as to hate. And the more we have of respect and justice, the more we shall begin to find the love which can suffer much and yet be freely given. So fear need not always be destructive. Because the lessons of its consequences can lead us to positive values. And that was written in a grapevine article in January of nineteen sixty two. And now it's time for my take on today's readings. Let's go back to twenty four hours a day, the AA Thought for the Day, and there's a line in there that says Why not read the book itself again? And that line is obviously talking about the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the things I've learned about the big book is that it's not something I can read once, put back on the shelf and say, Okay, I got it. I've read parts of it many times, but somehow I can come across the same paragraph years later and it hits completely different. The words haven't changed, I have. Where I am in my sobriety, what I'm struggling with and what's going on in my life can completely change what I take away from a passage. Sometimes I'll read something I know I've read ten times before and wonder how I've never noticed it. For me, rereading the big book is also a way of remembering. I have a built-in forgetter when it comes to alcoholism. The longer I'm sober and the better life gets, the easier it can be to forget just how bad things were, and more importantly, what I had to do to get better. I know from experience what can happen when I start drifting away from the things that keep me sober. Going back to the big book reminds me what alcoholism looks like in me, why just one is such a dangerous thought, and why I still need a program no matter how much sober time I have. I don't reread it because I've forgotten every word. I reread it because I never want to forget what those words are trying to teach me. And so that's gonna do it for today's episode of Sober Readings. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to share your thoughts and your comments on today's readings, or if you'd like to talk about the big book and how many times you've read it and what new things you learn every time you read it, just scroll down into the show notes and you'll see a link to my email. Or you can navigate over to sobereadings.com and click on the Be a Guest page. And while you're there at the website, if you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket, just click on the support page and find the button that says drop a dollar in the basket. So again, thank you so much for listening today. Remember, just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day, everyone, and as my friend Larry says, best day ever. And don't forget to ask yourself today, where are my feet?