Latest / Sober Readings / Our Group Conscience
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Good morning, welcome to Sober Readings. Today is Monday, March 30th. Today's reading from Daily Reflections. Our group conscience. Sometimes the good is the enemy of the best. That's a line from Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, page 101. I think these words apply to every area of AA's three legacies. Recovery, unity, and service. I want them etched in my mind and life as I trudge the road of happy destiny." That line is from Alcoholics Anonymous page 164. These words, often spoken by co-founder Bill W., were appropriately said to him as the result of Bill's conscience. It brought home to Bill W. the essence of our second tradition. Our leaders are but trusted servants. They do not govern. Just as Bill W. was originally urged to remember I think that in our group discussions we should never settle for the good but always strive to attain the best. These common strivings are yet another example of a loving God as we understand him, expressing himself through the group conscience. Experiences such as these help me to stay on the proper path of recovery. I learned to combine initiative with humility, responsibility with thankfulness, and thus relish the joys of living my 24-hour program. Today's reading from 24 Hours, March 30, AA Thought for the Day. Before I met AA, I was very unloving. From the time I went away to school, I paid very little attention to my mother and father. I was on my own and didn't even bother to keep in touch with them. After I got married, I was very unappreciative of my wife. Many a time, I left her flat while I went out to have a good time. I paid very little attention to our children and never tried to understand them or make pals of them. My new friends were only drinking companions, not real friends. So ask yourself, have I gotten over loving nobody but myself? the meditation for the day. Be calm, be true, be quiet. Do not get emotionally upset by anything that happens around you. Feel a deep inner security in the goodness and purpose in the universe. Be true to your highest ideals. Do not let yourself slip back into the old ways of reacting. Stick to your spiritual guns. Be calm, always. Do not talk back or defend yourself too much against accusation, whether false or true. Accept abuse as well as you accept praise. Only God can judge the real you. and today's prayer for the day. I pray that I may not be upset by the judgments of others. I pray that I may let God be the judge of the real me. And for today's final reading, I'm going to read a page out of my book. It's called, I Love You, Don't Do Anything Stupid. And this is from chapter 11, and it begins on page 98. If I always do what I always did, I'll always get what I always got. If nothing changes, nothing changes. No matter how you say it, the point is that my bad behavior and addictive lifestyle always got me the same result, pain and suffering. Eventually, I would run out of money and start stealing from the pizza shop cash register. I would get drugs from dealers and promise to pay them the next day, then avoid them altogether. I stopped making car payments. I was shoplifting again wherever I could and would be arrested several more times over the next six months. I was writing hot checks to get cash back from any store that would let me. It wasn't uncommon for drug dealers to come to the pizza shop late at night looking for payment, which would always end in a fight and me usually getting my ass kicked by one or two guys. Dylan saved me more than once and I'm not sure how we all got out of that place without getting shot. One night, a dealer showed up at our apartment looking for me and his money. He pulled a gun on me, Dylan pulled a gun on him, and the neighbors called the police. The guy left before the cops arrived, and Dylan hid the gun. But that wouldn't be the last time we saw that dealer or the police. The bank repossessed my car soon after that. My credit was completely destroyed long before that, and I had no money to pack my stuff and run away as I always did. But somehow, through it all, I found money every day for drugs. It didn't take long for Larry to realize that I was stealing money from the register, which ended my employment at the pizza shop. With no money for rent, Dylan told me to leave the apartment. For the next two years, I lived with a girl I had been dating in a small town not far from Fayetteville. She got me a job doing concrete work for her brother. I managed to stay relatively clean during that period. It helped that she was completely against drugs and didn't drink the way I was used to drinking. Shoveling wet concrete all day is hard work, and that probably helped keep me clean. Move a muscle, a thought is a mantra that I've used very often in sobriety, but I think it was working for me back then too without my noticing. Hard physical labor or exercise has always made me feel better and kept me positive, even as far back as middle school when my father would get a truckload of firewood to and dumped on the front yard for us to stack. I always felt good when we were done. This after hating life during the job and cussing dad out under my breath for making us work. Running quiets the noise in my head so I can think clearly. I think of it as my meditation. I've always had a hard time meditating because I can't get my mind to stay quiet long enough to calm down. For that very reason, I have given up on meditation many times, assuming I was doing it wrong. The truth is that whatever you enjoy doing that allows your mind to be quiet can be a meditation. It's just a matter of listening for what comes naturally. It could be sitting in a lotus position with legs crossed, palms up, forefinger and thumb touching. It could be running cross country, or could be crocheting or knitting. The point is, I found what worked for me. Back then, before I knew any of this, shoveling concrete all day was my meditation. and it kept me clean and relatively sober long enough to deal with the next shitstorm coming my way. It wouldn't be long. That's the end of chapter 11 in my book. I love you. Don't do anything stupid. I'd love to hear your thoughts and your comments. If you'd like a copy of the book, can go to my website soberreadings.com. There's a link there down at the bottom of the page. And while you're at the website, you can click the link to follow the show if you haven't already. And if you'd like to drop a dollar in the donation basket, just click that donate button. So again, thanks for listening everyone. 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.