I find it astounding that the Promises have indeed been fulfilled in my life--if that ain't a miracle, I don't know what is! Like Gonee highlights, we are willing to grow along spiritual lines---willingness is the key. It's hard sometimes, tho, to sustain a state of being where I am not, on some level, eventually trying to run my own show, or worse, someone else's. The God pulls me back and I can get a grip and yet again re-start my walk of willingness.

True so true Gonee, it's funny, without the fourth step process, well 4th through 10, I notice ...How do I put this, I just give -real- change lip service, I say I want to change but what I really want is for the negative consequences to stop happening without doing the work or actually making any changes, I am afraid to change and I really don't want to, I just want to do the same thing and get different results

I think MrSponsorpants addressed this pretty well today

 

 

You would think, with the desire to be healthier, different, better, more recovered, free from emotional pain and mental anguish and crippling fear and needling ego, that I would be eager to change.

You would think.

And I am.

But what I think is change and what is really change are sometimes two different things.

Yes, I want to change... yet how often is it that what I really want is a different result -- absolutely! -- but from my same, comfortable process?

Or yes, I want to change, but on my time table -- which is not a very realistic one -- certainly not on God's.  And if it doesn't happen in the time I decree, then I give up.  Not with a big, dramatic temper tantrum -- so easy to clock for what it is -- oh no, the much sneakier -- and in its own way sicker -- slow fade back to same old same.

Or yes, I want to change... but what I really want is to feel like the kind of person who wants to change, I want to look like the kind of person who wants to change... I want to look like the kind of person who is working to change... but I really don't want to change.  I'm just posing.

The real challenge for me today is to be deeply willing to be different, and by deeply I mean in my secret heart, not on the surface where it's all the Mr. SponsorPants Show -- for myself more than anyone else, actually.

As many wiser than I have observed, it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful.  I always thought that was about external changes thrust upon me -- and certainly, it applies -- but lately I've come to see how with the help of a Higher Power it is I who can be my own catalyst for real, substantive change in my outlook and behavior... and it is also I who can be my own saboteur, my own stumbling block... my own jailer.

I don't drink, one day at a time, and that is enough powerful transformation for any one drunk to experience.  But to settle for that alone, as I stay sober day by day, is throwing the gift back in God's face, I believe.

Some days this kind of thinking does indeed qualify as being too tough on myself.

But other days, if I'm not ruthlessly honest about these things, I'm just living in the bullshit.