I'm working with a fellow and am searching for a passage in the Big Book (I believe it is in the personal stories) where it describes a suggestion for praying for someone toward whom we hold a resentment.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

P. 66-67 says:

This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.  Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too.  We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  When a person offended we said to ourselves, This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry. Thy will be done.

We avoid retaliation or argument. We wouldnt treat sick people that way. If we do, we destroy our chance of being helpful. We cannot be helpful to all people, but at least God will show us how to take a kindly and tolerant view of each and every one.

P. 551-552 (Freedom From Bondage):

I seemed to have a resentment against everybody I had ever known. All but one responded to the treatment suggested in the steps immediately, but this one posed a problem.

This resentment was against my mother, and it was twenty-five years old. I had fed it, fanned it, and nurtured it as one might a delicate child, and it had become as much a part of me as my breathing.  It had provided me with excuses for my lack of education, my marital failures, personal failures, inadequacy, and, of course, my alcoholism.  And although I really thought I had been willing to part with it, now I knew I was reluctant to let it go.

One morning, however, I realized I had to get rid of it, for my reprieve was running out, and if I didnt get rid of it I was going to get drunk - - and I didnt want to get drunk anymore.  In my prayers that morning I asked God to point out a way to be free of this resentment.  During the day, a friend of mine brought me some magazines to take to a hospital group I was interested in. I looked through them.  A banner across one featured an article by a prominent clergyman in which I caught the word resentment.

He said, in effect, If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing you resent, you will be free.  If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperiy, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you dont really want it for them and your prayers are only words and you dont mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks, and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love.

It worked for me then, and it has worked for me many times since, and it will work for me every time I am willing to work it. Sometimes I have to ask first for the willingness, but it too always comes.