![]() ![]() Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, help me to always say yes to You, even when I’m tired or angry.Īction for the Day: In today’s inventory, I’ll ask myself if there are any ways I’m still saying no to my program and Higher Power. We finally answer yes and no the right way-the right way and at the right time for us. We say yes when somebody wants to give us love. And when we said yes we should have said no. When we said no, we should have said yes. We always said yes when asked if we wanted to have a drink or get high. Friends tried to care, but we said, “No, mind your own business!” Our parents or our kids begged us to stop drinking, but we said no. ![]() Our spouse asked us to help around the house and we said no and went drinking. I have a personal need and responsibility to carry the mess, but I have neither the right nor the responsibility to modify anybody’s behavior. Any concern about another’s behavior takes time and energy away from our own commitment to self-improvement. Ours is a program of attraction, not coercion, and we “change” people only by demonstrating how well it works for us. We might need to review our personal inventory if we’re too concerned about the behavior of others. They learned that negative people can’t drag us down unless we let them. At the very beginning of AA, its pioneers learned how to maintain their own sobriety and serenity even as others rebelled and turned against the program. We discovered long ago that we have no power to change or manipulate others. ![]() “How can I get this person to accept the program?” We hear this often, for example, when a patient at a treatment center complains about another who is so negative toward the program “That he’s dragging all of us down.” Where other people were concerned, we had to drop the word “blame” from our speech and thought. To see how our own erratic emotions victimized us often took a long time. ![]() We had to drink because our nation had won a war or lost a peace. We had to drink at work because we were great successes or dismal failures. We had to drink because times were hard or times were good, We had to drink because at home we were smothered with love or not none at all. We had made the invention of alibis a fine art. For most of us, self-justification was the maker of excuses for drinking and for all kinds of crazy and damaging conduct. members have suffered severely from self-justification during their drinking days. I pray that I may keep striving for these difficult things. I pray that I may have true tolerance and understanding. And with God, we can have the tolerance to live and let live. Instead of those doubts and fears, there will flow into our hearts such faith and love as is beyond the power of material things to give, and such peace as the world can neither give nor take away. In thinking of God, doubts and fears leave us. In praying to God, we find healing for hurt feelings and resentments. The thought of God is balm for our hates and fears. Pray–and keep praying until it brings peace and serenity and a feeling of communion with One who is near and ready to help. I must realize that it’s a good thing for a large group to split up into smaller ones, even it if means that the large group–my own group–becomes smaller. grows by the starting of new groups all the time. Do I feel put out when another group starts and some members of my group leave it and branch out into new territory? Or do I send them out with my blessing? Do I visit that new offshoot group and help it along? Or do I sulk in my own tent? A.A. There is such a thing as being too loyal to any one group. But unexpected things came out of our encounter, and my boss and I were able to agree to interact more directly and effectively in the future. When I approached my boss and owned up to my hand in his difficulties, he was surprised. In discussing the affair, my co-worker tried to reassure me that an apology was not necessary, but I soon became convinced that I had to do something, regardless of how it might turn out. I knew that my report had created the problem, and began to feel responsible for my boss’s difficulty. One day a co-worker informed me that my boss was really sore because a complaint, submitted over his head, had caused him much discomfort at the hands of his superiors. Life was exciting, and I even began to enjoy my work, becoming so bold as to issue a report on the lack of proper care for some of our clients. New friends were cropping up and some of my battered friendships had begun to be repaired. I was beginning to approach my new life of sobriety with unaccustomed enthusiasm. … and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. ![]()
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