Made A Decision
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
How It Works is read at our meetings and, inside that lengthy reading, we hear:
We beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas, and the result was nil - until we let go absolutely.
Well, there’s another of those puzzling messages that baffled me in the beginning, but I (slowly) came to understand it means we must get our hands off our problems - and all our old methods of working them out - and hand them over to that greater power, the One that actually knows what to do about them.
It took me a damned long time to learn how to do that. My first sponsor once gave me a mug with these words on it: “Everything I’ve surrendered has my claw marks all over it.” (My first sponsor knew me very well.)
We alcoholics are a stubborn lot. Even in the face of repeated failure we will continue to launch our tried and untrue attacks at situations that have never once yielded to those same old solutions.
The clearest example for us to remember is the way we held onto the idea that WE would ultimately get our drinking under control.
WE didn’t need help with that.
WE would eventually be able to do it.
Only after years (even decades) of suffering were WE - now desperate for help - finally able to recognize, and admit, we were unable to do it alone.
Enter A.A. - where despite oldtimers begging us to be fearless and thorough from day one in our recovery, WE often continue to keep a stranglehold on the idea that WE will find the solution to whatever is troubling us.
Oh sure, I was willing to hand over my problem with alcohol, but only when it became obvious a Higher Power had actually handled that problem for others, so I figured my HP might even be willing to do it for me.
But I wasn't any too sure my HP could or would handle all my other fears and worries. So I held onto them tightly, convinced I could figure them out on my own, despite working one step after another all designed to pry my hands off them.
We continue to repeat what we don’t - or won’t - repair.
“There are two things alcoholics really, really don’t like -
(1) the way things are and
(2) change.”
Changing ourselves takes effort.
Being a victim is easy - at first - but it doesn’t wear well.
If we want God to remove our character defects we have to stop doing them. We must at some point give up our resistance to growth.
(Hint: Sooner rather than later works best.)
We are called to change, because only when we surrender our pride and ego can we win. It becomes a bit easier to do when we start to realize everything our Higher Power sends our way is for our soul’s benefit.
We grow when we let go.
When we let go of our habitual thoughts and behaviors we will finally get onto the path to becoming who we are meant to be.
That earlier self-help guru, Norman Vincent Peale, once wrote: If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.
And a quote from an old Grapevine magazine reads: We neither ran nor fought. But accept it we did. And then we began to be free.
I would love to tell you I figured this all out in the blink of an eye just by applying my keen intellect, but if I’ve learned nothing else in A.A., I’ve learned to be honest. I don’t actually suffer from a keen intellect, rather a quite sluggish one. It took more than one painful, frightening and even dangerous life “lesson” to get my attention that change was even necessary.
One lesson involved my letting go of something I didn’t want to lose. Like most alcoholics I wanted what I wanted, when I wanted it, and what I wanted was not what my Higher Power wanted for me.
Yet I hung on and on until I actually reached the brink of suicide, that permanent solution to a temporary problem.
It took an A.A. miracle to help me to surrender in that instance and I’ll always be grateful it arrived. But any of us stubborn alcoholics are capable of that kind of behavior when we want something, or someone, that our Higher Power knows will ultimately destroy us.
I had been a member of A.A. for a good while before I ran headlong into the realization I wasn’t the star of my little life show; my Higher Power is the star.
It was my Higher Power who got, and keeps, me sober. It is my Higher Power who sends me the lessons I need to become a happier and saner me.
It is our collective Higher Power who gave us the astonishingly wonderful program of Alcoholics Anonymous, our safe place to learn how to live long enough to actually become joyous, happy and free.
The path to that life is to practice our program just the way it was written ... then to keep doing it.
As a qualified graduate of the school of hard knocks, with a doctorate degree in stubborn thinking, I am overly-qualified to beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start of your recovery.
Because living the Program of A.A. is truly “the easier softer way”.
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