Nov. 9, 2019 - Readings in Recovery: Today's Gift from Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation

Saturday, Nov. 9, 2019

Today’s Gift from Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation is:

All real living is meeting. — Martin Buber

Sharing coffee with a friend or playing a game of golf with him provides a little relaxation, a little fun, and a chance to catch up on each other’s lives. Such things are the meetings of life. Holding a small child on one’s lap, even walking the dog are meetings too. They are relationships with other lives based on sharing time with one another.

Meetings—this sharing of time—can be with the full range of our existence. A tree, a lake, a mountain, the stars meet with us in solitude and enlarge our lives. Meeting is more than driving by. We meet a neighbor, a woman walking down the sidewalk, a driver in the next car. Each meeting inspires different responses in us. With some, we may be open and receiving; with others, fearful; and yet with others, we want to exploit and use. If all life is meeting, perhaps I do not wish to meet in the way I have been. The way I meet others changes me. Maybe I am missing something. I can have more life by making more contact.

God, please guide my awareness in this day to each meeting as it occurs so that I can make contact more fully.

Hazelden Foundation

May 29, 2015 - Readings in Recovery: Twenty-Four Hours a Day

The Serenity Prayer

Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Friday, May 29, 2015

AA Thought for the Day
We who have learned to put our drink problem in God's hands can help others to do so. We can be used as a connection between an alcoholic's need and God's supply of strength. We in Alcoholics Anonymous can be uniquely useful just because we have the misfortune or fortune to be alcoholics ourselves. Do I want to be a uniquely useful person?

Will I use my own greatest defeat and failure and sickness as a weapon to help others?

Meditation for the Day
I will try to help others. I will try not to let a day pass without reaching out an arm of love to someone. Each day I will try to do something to lift another human being out of the sea of discouragements into which he or she has fallen. My helping hand is needed to raise the helpless to courage, to strength, to faith, to health. In my own gratitude, I will turn and help other alcoholics with the burden that is pressing too heavily upon them.

Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may be used by God to lighten many burdens. I pray that many souls may be helped through my efforts.

Hazelden Foundation

Aug. 22, 2014 - Step by Step

The Serenity Prayer

Step by Step
Friday, Aug. 22, 2014

" ...I never got into jail. I didn't get into a sanitarium, either. I wanted to die, and often I would think of ways. ...Once, when I called my analyst and told her I was contemplating death, she came over and tried to get me into a sanitarium. Frightened and shamed, I refused and sobered up temporarily. I was not mugged or manhandled. I did not resort to semi-prostitution for the price of a drink. But all these things could have happened. The sanitarium should have happened. I was not fit to be on the loose, and there was no one to commit me." - Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, 1976, "They Stopped in Time," Ch 13 ("Stars Don't Fall"), pp 411-12.

Today, I remember what came when I was drinking: jail, psychiatric hospitals, electroshock, getting mugged, whoring myself for booze, a botched suicide attempt with whiskey and anti-depressants. These are things that can happen again, and such is the life that looms if I cave into temptation to drink again. Do I really want to even risk going back there? No, and I don't have to! I'm in AA now, and it's given me the choice not to drink. If temptation or whatever other weak moment catches me off guard, God grant me the wisdom to remember what active alcoholism is really about and not to romanticize those drinking days with any so-called good times. If those times had really been good, I would have had no reason to reach out to AA. But I did have a reason; pray I never forget it. And our common journey continues. Step by step. - Chris M., 2014

Recovery and the long road back to self-respect

The Good Men Project: May 30, 2014 -The Road to Self-Respect -