Latest / Sober Readings / The Last Promise
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Hey everyone, welcome back to Sober Readings. Today is Monday, the 21st of September. It happens to be my son's birthday today. Happy birthday, Joseph. Alright, let's get started today 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 I'll be reading from Daily Reflections, 24 hours a day. And the third reading today, as promised yesterday, will come from AA Comes of Age. So let's get started with daily reflections for September 21st. The Last Promise. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. That's on page 84 of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. The last promise in the big book came true for me on the very first day of sobriety. God kept me sober that day, and on every other day I allowed Him to operate in my life. He gives me the strength, courage, and guidance to meet my responsibilities in life so that I am able to reach out and help others stay sober and grow. He manifests within me, making me a channel of his word, thought, and deed. He works with my inner self while I produce in the outer world. For he will not do for me what I can do for myself. I must be willing to do his work so that he can function through me successfully. Today's reading from twenty four hours a day. September twenty one, AA Thought for the Day. Let us continue with steps four, five, six, seven, and ten. In taking a personal inventory of ourselves, we have to face facts as they really are. We have to stop running away. We must face reality. We must see ourselves as we really are. We must admit our faults openly and try to correct them. We must try to see where we have been dishonest, impure, selfish, and unloving. We do not do this once and forget it. We do it every day of our lives as long as we live. We are never done with checking up on ourselves. So ask yourself, am I taking a daily inventory of myself? The meditation for the day. In improving our personal lives, we have unseen help. We were not made so that we could see God. That would be too easy for us and there would be no merit in obeying Him. It takes an act of faith, a venture of belief, to realize the unseen power. Yet we have much evidence of God's existence in the strength that many people have received from the act of faith, the venture of belief. We are in a box of space and time, and we can see neither our souls nor God. God and the human spirit are both outside the limitations of space and time. Yet our unseen help is effective here and now. That has been proved in thousands of changed lives. Today's prayer for the day. I pray that I may make the great venture of belief. I pray that my vision may not be blocked by intellectual pride. And for today's final reading, let's go to As Bill Sees It. This is chapter six, which is titled A Friend Looks at Alcoholics Anonymous, and this is on page two seventy nine. Men and women who use alcohol as an escape are not the only ones who are afraid of life, hostile to the world, fleeing from it into loneliness. Millions who are not alcoholics are living today in illusory worlds, nurturing the basic anxieties and insecurities of human existence, rather than face themselves with courage and humility. To these people, AA can offer as a cure no magic potion, no chemical formula. No powerful drug, but it can demonstrate to them how to use the tools of humility, honesty, devotion, and love, which indeed are the heart of the 12 steps of recovery. There is still another paradoxical statement by human society which has special application to AA. That statement is the saying that a chain is as strong as its weakest link. The accepted connotation is that a chain is strong. only if it has no weak links. The paradox of this statement, as applied to AA, is that, in AA, the chain is as strong as its weakest link. For the endless chain of AA grows in strength to the extent that it is able to reach the weak links, the still suffering alcoholic men and women about us. It is upon this paradoxical truth that the assurance of the survival of the fellowship rests. The perpetuation of AA is grounded in the so-called weakness of those human beings who escape the materialistic bases of society through the medium of alcohol. It is because we know of the tremendous impact that AA can have on generations that will follow us that we have been so painstaking in building a structure of service of AA in the General Service Board, the General Service Conference, and the many service agencies that perform the essential daily tasks of carrying the AA message throughout the world. It is with good reason that Bill has described this structure of service as a legacy, deserving of the same attention and understanding accorded to the first legacy of the twelve steps and the second legacy of twelve traditions. But this third legacy of service has a string to it, and the string is that we are granted the use of this legacy for our lifetime upon the condition that we will not only look after it, but increase its spiritual content for the generations that will follow us. Each succeeding generation as it receives this legacy, must similarly protect it if they wish to employ it and gain life by it, and pass it on to the next generation with an enriched spiritual content. And that was a couple of paragraphs from chapter six out of AA Comes of Age, and that chapter is titled A Friend Looks at Alcoholics Anonymous. Let's talk about a sentence that he used in that speech. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link in how that relates to sobriety. So in sobriety and AA, that sentence can be a reminder that the strength of the fellowship depends partly on how well we support the people who are struggling the most, often the newcomers. A newcomer may be the weakest link only in the sense that they haven't yet had time to build the foundation that others have. They may not have a sponsor, a home group, sober friends, experience working in the steps, or the ability to recognize the thinking that can lead them back to a drink. Those of us with more time have something we can give them: experience, encouragement, a phone call, a text message, a ride to a meeting, or simply the reassurance that they don't have to figure out sobriety all alone. But there's another side to the saying that I think is especially important in AA. ⁓ Helping the newcomer strengthens us too. When I reach out to someone who is struggling, I'm reminded where I came from. Their vulnerability can remind me how powerful alcoholism is, and why I still need the program, regardless of how much sober time I have. In that sense, strengthening what appears to be the weakest link can strengthen the entire chain. I also can't forget that I'm never so far removed from the newcomer that I couldn't become one again. No matter how many years of sobriety I have, if I start drifting away from meetings, stop reaching out to other alcoholics, don't work the steps, or convince myself that I no longer need the program, I can find myself right back at the beginning, just like I did one year and nine months ago. I've learned that sober time doesn't make me immune from alcoholism. The newcomer reminds me not only of where I came from, But of where I can return if I stop doing the things that keep me sober. That keeps me humble. I don't wanna look at the newcomer as the weakest link and think I'm somehow stronger. I wanna remember that I'm part of the same chain, and I need AA today just as much as I did when I first walked through the doors. And that's gonna do it for today's episode of Sober Readings. Thank you so much for listening today. I hope I said something or you heard something in the readings. That is gonna help you through your day today. If you'd like to be a guest on the show or leave your comments, you can find a link to my website, soberreadings.com, and you can navigate to the Be a Guest page where you can also just fill out that form with comments or thoughts on today's readings. And if you'd like to drop a dollar in today's virtual donation basket, you can find a link in the show notes. Also, you can find a donation page on the Sober Readings website. So again, thank you so much for listening and as always just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting and keep coming back. Take care of yourselves and each other, have a great day, and as my friend Larry says, best day ever.