September 30, 2025 - Forgiveness

 It is by forgiving others that we ourselves our forgiven is a line from the Prayer of St. Francis. Another way of saying that is in the Lord's Prayer.  Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us. So, we do, as humans, practice forgiveness. We do not do it as well as Jesus, but we do it as well as we humans are capable of.

September 29, 2025 - Gratitude

 Gratitude. Whenever I am having a bad day, I think of things I am grateful for. It usually takes me out of the self-pity pit I am in. If something is going on that I find negative, I try to find the positive aspects of it. Then, gratitude becomes a useful tool.

September 28, 2025 - Service

 Service comes in many forms. One of the ways I do service is to bake cookies and bring them to meetings or events. Each week, after Sunday service at church, we have a coffee hour. I bring cookies to that as a way to do service in my community also. Sometimes, service can just be a smile and a hello welcome its good to see you. So, never think you can't do service because you probably are already doing it.

September 27, 2025 - Trust

 Trust is my word today. I would have liked an easier one, but I don't really get to decide what the word will be. It's called a god box for a reason. I will "trust" that my higher power knows what he is doing.

September 26, 2025 - Let Go Let God

 Let Go Let God. As long as I don't still think I am God, then that would be an easy slogan.

September 25, 2025 - Hope.

 Hope. Something I try to share with new people. A hope that if they do certain things, then their life will improve.

September 24, 2025 - Anonymity

 Anonymity. Some people are careful never to break theirs and others couldn't give a second thought to protecting theirs. Everybody is different. Bill W, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, once wrote. "Each member of Alcoholics Anonymous should be entitled to the degree of anonymity he or she chooses, and the rest of us should respect that."

One concern in our digital age is when we send an email to multiple recipients, that everyone sees everyone else's email address. However, if a person has given explicit permission for their email address to be used then it is not an anonymity violation.

September 23, 2025 - In All Our Affairs

 In all our affairs. I try to live my life using spiritual principles and this phrase reminds me that I need to practice those principles in all areas of my life. Not just some of the things I do, but in all my affairs.I should always be humble. I should always avoid gossip and anger and dishonesty and selfishness. They are, of course, ideals, and I may not always exercise them to the extent that I would like to. I am a work in progress.

September 22, 2025 - Gossip

 Gossip is the word I got today. I heard many responses this morning, most of them were that gossip is not a good thing. My favorite definition is that gossip, barbed with our anger, is a polite form of murder by character assassination. Charcacter is what we are, reputation is what people who gossip about us thinks we are. This post is mostly other people's wisdom. The rock guitarist Kid Rock sings a song where he says you can try to change me or love me just the way that I am. So, if you don't like the person I am and you would like to create a reputation by spreading stories about who you think I am, then really that isn't about me. That's about you.

September 21, 2025 - Selfishness

 Selfishness. I am told it is the root of my troubles. It is being concerned with one's own agenda, often at the expense of others.

September 20, 2025 - Sponsorship

 I'm pretty sure that without the guidance of my original sponsor, I would never have stopped drinking and would likely have died from alcoholism. I'm also fairly certain that without having sponsored the alcoholics that I have over the past 28 years, that the quality of the life I live would not be as enriched as it has been.

I often tell the Little Johnny joke about sponsorship. Little Johnny was having trouble with math so he told his teacher. In response, his teacher gave him more math homework. I told God that I was having trouble with patience, so God gave me people to sponsor. And so, I learned Patience, and Tolerance, and Forgiveness. They don't always take my direction, but then I did not always take the direction of my sponsor. I still thought I knew what was best for me.

September 19, 2025 - Humility

 Best description I have heard yet for Humility is that it isn't about thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less. I ought to place the needs of others ahead of my own. But, I ought to do so with prudence. If I'm on an airplane and it is in trouble, I should help my fellow passengers, but I ought to first see to it that my oxygen mask is on before I try to help them with theirs.

September 18, 2025 - Keep It Simple

 Keep It Simple. I can very easily complicate things. It is in my nature. But, if I keep things simple right from the start mraning when I wake up I remind myself that I am still powerless over the people places and things in my life. I'll just try to take things as they come today.

September 17, 2025 Service

Service. Talking with my sponsor earlier about how service is an expression of love. She said we have to use love when we are doing service, especially with people we sponsor. Sponsorship of others is a great way to do service. Service in AA is not the only way to help others. We can do service outside of the fellowship, in our community. I'm involved with a ministry that my church does. We make blankets for persons who are less fortunate than us. That's another way I do service.

September 16, 2025 Acceptance

 Acceptance is the embracing of reality as it is, without resistance or denial. That is the dictionary definition. Applied to my life today, somehow I have gotten too old to work. I have gotten too old to do a lot of things. I could pretend I am still healthy and muddle through things or I can embrace the reality of my situation. The latter seems to be the easier, softer way, and ultimately I am always looking for that.

September 15, 2025 - Open Minded

 I was raised as an Anglican. I went to Sunday School. I practiced the Ten Commandments. When I was in my teens, I joined a street gang, so I stopped going to church. By the time I got to AA, I didn't believe in God, I didn't want to believe in God and I didn't care if you believed in God as long as you did your believing someplace else. My sponsor suggested I try acting as if. He said just go through your day acting as if there was a god. If, when you get to the end of your life, you find out there isn't a God, then all you will have done wrong is live a good life and how wrong is that, really. He then said that if I go through acting as if there isn't a God and I get to the end and find out that there is a god, then I'll be in deep kaka. My sponsor suggested that I try to keep an open mind where spiritual concepts are concerned and that I didn't have to believe in what he believed in because it wasn't God as He understood Him, it was god as I understood him. Admittedly, that was a new concept for me. So, in the beginning my understanding of God was flimsy. It's true that I eventually went back to being Anglican, but I did that as a choice. Nobody forced me to do that. I just became open minded enough to accept that God as being my God.

September 14, 2025 - Responsibility

 Responsibility is my word for the day. I have a responsibility today to represent the district which I serve. There is a service fair happening this afternoon, where the chairs of the central service committees, Public Information, Cooperation with the Professional Community, Corrections, Treatment, etc set up displays about what their committee does and obviously they try to get members interested in what they do maybe get some volunteers to help them out. It is my responsibility as District Committee Member (DCM) to show up, meet with them, let them know that the district supports them in what they are trying to do. I'm also chair of the midwinter roundup committee and I'd like to have them set up displays at our event in February so I'll be talking to them about that also.

One of things I need to always be aware of is the responsibility I have to those I am responsible to and whenever possible to honor that commitment. And hey, I baked cookies for the event. Technically, that wasn't something I was responsible to do. But, I did it anyway, because that's how I roll.

A good way to end a conversation is to start talking about service commitments and then suddenly everyone has something else they need to do right now, because they want to be a member but not that kind of member. I recall from my early days as Chair of the Public Information Committee that one of my responsibilities was to fight apathy within the fellowship, apathy in that context being defined as a lack of interest in service. Really, the only way to fight apathy is to become active in service and hope that others will see how your involvement in service is benefiting you and your recovery and that might enourage them to become involved. Leading by example as it were.

September 13, 2025 - First Things First

  First Things First reminds me to place the important stuff in front of everything else. A friend of mine says "The days that I pray almost always turn out better than the days I don't." So, the first thing I do each day is pray. When I wake each morning and before I'm out of the bed, the first thing I do is remind myself that I am still an alcoholic. I haven't had a drink for 10,149 days but all that means is I have another 24 hours sober. I'm not cured yet. It's called alcoholism not alcoholwasm. After I accept that, I make sure I ask God to give me a little help getting through the day, because I didn't get sober on my own power. 

September 12, 2025 - Love

 Love. It comes in many forms. Self-love and self-care is important. Respecting and caring for oneself is the foundation for loving others. What I come here looking for I must come here looking with. that was a saying an old friend of mine brought to my attention when I was attempting to gain the love of my step-daughter. It was, he said, similar to the St. Francis prayer, that it is better to comfort than to be comforted, to understand than to be understood, to LOVE than to be LOVED. If my desire is for others to respect me, then I should respect others. If my desire is to be loved, then I should love others. The teachings of Jesus encourage us to love our enemies, so it is not something that some new age therapist came up with last week, it has been around for centuries. Don't take my word for it. It's in the Book.

September 11, 2025 - Trust

 Trust. It's something we earn and sometimes it's a thing that can be broken and often lost. It is possible to regain trust. Trust is synonymous with faith which is believing in the unseen. Someone said to me today that they trust the day will be a good one. Of course, we do not know what the day will bring but if we trust our higher power, and perform his work well, chances are we will have a good day. Someone else said trust the process. Again, that speaks to me about having faith in powers unseen.

September 10, 2025 - Willingness

 Willingness. The dictionary definition is the quality or state of being prepared or inclined to do something. It reflects a person's openness, readiness, or eagerness to act, help, or engage in a task or situation. One thing I have learned about being willing is that it is not something I am ever forced to do. That would defeat the purpose of the term.

September 9, 2025 - Amends

 Once, while going through steps eight and nine with a man I sponsored, when we got to the eighth step and it says, in the book, we made a list of the people who harmed us, we already have the list, we made it when we took inventory, the man said uh-oh. I asked him to please explain. He then told me that at another meeting he heard a guy with long term sobriety say that when he had done his fifth step, he burned his fourth step. I said so you burned your fourth step. He said no but I buried it under a tree in North Carolina. It reminds me that although members with long term sobriety sometimes say things that sound like something we should do, we should probably mention it to our sponsor before we do them.

Many years ago, before I had a sponsor and before I had actually read the book, the whole book, not just the parts I thought applied to me, I made amends to my first wife. I told her that I had been unfaithful to her and when she asked me with who, I told her. I don't know how much harm I did to her relationships with those women but I should not have mentioned them because I was trying to exonerate myself.

September 8, 2025 - Anonymity

 Anonymity. Coincidence is how God protects his anonymity. 

In regards to personal anonymity, some people would say I should keep my membership in an anonymous fellowship a secret. I do not. I never was very concerned with anyone seeing me stumbling home after a drinking binge. Why should I be concerned with anyone knowing I am trying to do something about my drinking problem? Bill W, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous is reported to have said. "Each member of AA is entitled to the degree of anonymity that he or she so chooses and the rest of us should respect that." So, if I don't want to tell you any more than my first name, you should respect that. If I don't mind telling you my full name, my phone number, my email, my facebook, instagram, whatsapp or whatever, you should respect that also.

September 7, 2025 - Honesty

 Honesty is the word I picked from the god box today. I don't think it means cash register honesty although that is good, also. I also don't think it means truthfully answering questions like "Does this dress make me look fat?" Every morning when I wake up, just before I get out of bed, I remind myself that I'm still an alcoholic, that just because I stopped drinking does not mean I don't have alcoholism. It's not called alcoholwasm. Since there are many good things in my life now, it would be easy to convince myself that I'm okay now, that I don't have to do the things that got me to where I am today. That type of thinking would be dishonest. Why would I want to stop doing something if it's working?

September 6, 2025 - Humility

 I heard a definition of Humility once that has stuck with me. Many people confuse the word Humility with the term Humiliation. But the definition said that Humility is not about thinking less of myself, it is about thinking of myself less.

September 5, 2025 - Let Go Let God

 Whenever I have something in life that I start to worry about, I try to remind myself that I am no longer running the show. I try to Let Go of being in control of the situation and Let God handle the outcome. Most good ideas are simple.

September 4, 2025 - Anger.

 Anger. A strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility. It’s a natural response when we feel wronged, threatened, or frustrated. It can range from mild irritation to full-blown rage. I had a lot of anger growing up. Anger toward others and sometimes anger directed at myself. Since working this spiritual program, I have less anger, but I am still human. I still get frustrated, but no longer do I have rage.

September 3, 2025 - Tolerance

 Tolerance. I used to think it was how much I could drink. My sponsor told me to look up words in the dictionary whose meaning I was not clear on. Nowadays, you can just google it, but we didn't have google back then. Tolerance is defined as the willingness to accept or respect opinions, behaviors, or identities that differ from your own. I saw another definition once that called it the readiness to allow others to think, feel, and act as they choose to. Readiness and willingness are almost synonyms. Concerning the behaviour of others, I might not like their behaviour, and the definition does not ask me to like it, just to accept and respect it.

September 2, 2025 - Hope

 Hope is both a feeling and a force. The dictionary definition is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. I am convinced that there are no coincidences in life. My intention last night was to bring someone I am sponsoring to a speaker meeting so she could hear someone share their experience strength and hope and it ended up being me that did the speaking. When I shared, there was some hope within what I said, hope that if I did certain things then good events would come to pass for me. Whenever I do share, I try to tell people how I established a relationship with the god of my understanding and how the development of that relationship enabled me to overcome my obsession to drink and use and to become as it says in our literature "happily and usefully whole". My hope last night was that I might have said something that helped someone else on their journey to sobriety. Time will tell. 

September 1, 2025 - Faith

 Faith. One definition says a kind of inner conviction that things will work out, even when logic says otherwise. For many, faith is how they make sense of suffering, joy, purpose, and morality. I acquired faith when I realized that there was a Power greater than my own which could solve my problem. My problem was quite simply a lack of the power needed to make the right choices. Now, I have faith that the power greater than my own can guide me to make better choices.