Latest / Sober Readings / I Choose Anonymity
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Good morning and welcome back to Sober Readings. Today is Saturday, the twenty ninth of August. Let's begin today's episode with the Serenity Preacher. Use 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. I choose anonymity. We are sure that humility expressed by anonymity is the greatest safeguard that Alcoholics Anonymous can ever have. And that's on page 187 of Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Since there are no rules in AA, I place myself where I want to be, and so I choose anonymity. I want my God to use me humbly as one of his tools in this program. Sacrifice is the art of giving of myself freely, allowing humility to replace my ego. With sobriety, I suppress that urge to cry out to the world, I am a member of AA, and I experience inner joy and peace. I let people see the changes in me and hope they will ask what happened to me. I place the principles of spirituality ahead of judging, fault finding, and criticism. I want love and caring in my group so I can grow. Today's reading from 24 hours a day. August 29, AA Thought for the Day. We cannot get along without prayer and meditation. On awakening, let us think about the 24 hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking. Our thought lives will be placed on a much higher plane when we start the day with prayer and meditation. We conclude this period of meditation with a prayer that we will be shown through the day what our next step is to be. The basis of all our prayers is Thy will be done in me and through me today. Am I sincere in my desire to do God's will today? The meditation for the day. Breathe in the inspiration of goodness and truth. It is the spirit of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. It is readily available if we are willing to accept it wholeheartedly. God has given us two things His spirit and the power of choice, to accept or not as we will. We have the gift of free will. When we choose the path of selfishness and greed and pride, we are refusing to accept God's spirit. When we choose the path of love and service, we accept God's Spirit and it flows into us and makes all things new. The prayer for the day. I pray that I may choose the right way. I pray that I may try to follow it to the end. Today's reading from Day by Day, Daily Meditations for Recovering Alcoholics, for August 29th, Working the Twelve Steps. The twelve steps are numbered because they are meant to be taken in order. For instance, we must admit we are powerless over our addiction before the other steps can help us. Likewise, step four would be too painful if we had not turned our wills and our lives over in step three. And how can we make amends before we realize whom we've hurt? We take step twelve only after we have completed all the other steps. The hop skip jump method of working the steps is not reliable and might hop skip jump us back to addiction. Do I work all twelve steps of the program in order? Higher power, give me the strength to take each step in order. And today's statement for you to finish. Today I will review my progress on each of the steps and re enter the order with and you fill in the blank. And for a final reading today, I'm gonna read out of the Grapevine from April of twenty twenty five. And this story is titled The Way Things Are A Member in Missouri shares his thoughts about the way we talk about how AA used to be. In the last year or so I've heard friends with less than a year sober, maybe after listening to an AA lead, confidently affirm that AA just isn't like it once was. Part of me goes ⁓ yeah, hm, okay. And then later I think, wait, how could you know that? Then I remember how joyful they seem to be in their first month or so on that pink cloud. I was the same way. Then I'd hear members talk about lower recovery rates, about the message getting watered down, about how this or that organization has gotten too much influence on our program, and a part of me would think, yes, I feel that way too. It felt right and true at the time, but it's not, in my opinion, based on experience, something I never used to use. The big book calls this great stuff logic. Part of the gift I've been given in recovery is the chance to go to meetings in different states and other countries. This has brought me a sense of adventure that has helped me get to different meetings even in the areas where I lived. And while I believe my sobriety has been helped by every meeting, I have not been able to predict what would happen at the next meeting based on all the ones I've gone to before. And that, I believe, is a blessing of Tradition 4. Logically, Each group's autonomy means that I won't know before going to it what will happen. So there's no way to say with any certainty, yes, this is happening throughout AA, and it didn't used to. Well, except members have a lot more cell phones and things like that. And maybe that group autonomy was true in the AA Fellowship before the traditions were written. Bill wrote them after seeing just how many conflicting rules there were in AA, didn't he? And that might be why, in the little time I've been blessed with getting to work on archives and learn more about our fellowship's history, it seems like I've heard a number of conflicting claims about how AA used to be. From the start of our fellowship, different groups were applying the program, whatever of it there was, in different ways. There may have been strong similarities and maybe the traditions helped those to grow, but the different stories about how they approached sponsorship, how high the recovery rate actually was, the number of readings that were or weren't used in meetings, how gruff the old timers were, and so on, maybe they're all true, even if everyone didn't agree. And more than once in the last several years I've been tempted to bolster arguments with This is how AA used to be. Then thankfully I'm reminded, hopefully before I've gone through with it, that it might be one of many ways AA used to be. Thank God for autonomy. That's written by Chad P in Saint Louis, Missouri. And this writing is all about Tradition Four, which he even actually mentions in the writing. And Tradition Four is each group should be autonomous, except in matters affecting Other groups or AA as a whole. Have you ever had any issues with group autonomy in your local group or your home group? I'd like to know. I'd like to hear your comments and your thoughts. You can send me an email at sober readings with Scott at gmail.com, and if you'd like to be a guest on my show, just mention it in that email and we can make that happen. And so that's gonna do it for today's episode of Sober Readings. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket for today's readings, just go to my website, soberreadings.com, scroll down a little bit and find the donate button. So thank you so much for listening. Stay sober, keep reading, and I'll catch 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, everyone, and as my friend Larry says, best day ever.