"...and became willing to make amends to them all." TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 77
One of the key words in the Eighth Step is the word all. I am not free to select a few names for the list and to disregard others. It is a list of all persons I have harmed. I can see immediately that this Step entails forgiveness because if I'm not willing to forgive someone, there is little chance I will place his name on the list. Before I placed the first name on my list, I said a little prayer: "I forgive anyone and everyone who has ever harmed me at any time and under any circumstances." It is well for me to contemplate a small, but very significant, two-letter word every time the Lord's Prayer is said. The word is as. I ask, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." In this case, as means, "in the same manner." I am asking to be forgiven in the same manner that I forgive others. As I say this portion of the prayer, if I am harboring hatred or resentment, I am inviting more resentment, when I should be calling on the spirit of forgiveness.
"We have an allergy to alcohol. The action of alcohol on chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy. We allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all. We cannot be reconciled to a life without alcohol, unless we can experience an entire psychic change. Once this psychic change has occurred, we who seemed doomed, we who had so many problems that we despaired of ever solving them, find ourselves able to control our desire for alcohol." Have I had a psychic change?
Meditation For The Day
Ask God in daily prayer to give you the strength to change. When you ask God to change you, you must at the same time fully trust Him. If you do not fully trust Him, God may answer your prayer as a rescuer does that of a drowning person who is putting up too much of a struggle. The rescuer must first render the person still more helpless, until he or she is wholly at the rescuer's mercy. Just so must we be wholly at God's mercy before we can be rescued.
Prayer For The Day
I pray that I may be daily willing to be changed. I pray that I may put myself wholly at the mercy of God.
Hazelden
(Let it be a God or Higher Power of your own understanding)
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Progress not perfection.. & Practice makes Progress!
Larry, --------------- We can visit A.A. meetings for years, be a member of our Fellowship for years, but until we have a spiritual awakening, emotional sobriety will elude us.
