![]() We invite love when we freely and honestly give it. And we shall receive love, the less our emphasis is on getting it, the more on giving it. Wanting love is a normal human desire, not one we should deny. Giving love softens our edges, completes us, and connects us to the people with whom we are fulfilling our destinies. Love is selfless, yet it exhilarates the self. Love is placing another’s personal needs above our own, without regret. Love frees others from our grasp-and lets them return on their own. But love is something far different from either attention or control. Even more easily, we trick ourselves into thinking our ability to control someone signifies love-especially theirs for us. ![]() How easily we mistake attention for love. Let the love in my heart be my guide.Īction for the Day: Today, I’ll do something good for someone and keep it a secret. Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, let me be active in a loving, caring way. Let’s always be asking ourselves, “Is what I’m doing something that shows care?” We turn our lives over to the care of our Higher Power. Step Three helps us to look at the world better. It means looking for ways to make the world a better place. It means looking for ways to be more loving to others. To be spiritual means to be an active person. “The Twelve Step program is spiritual, based on action coming from love …” Popular gossip can be just as harmful as personal gossip. I’ll have no interest in the weaknesses or shortcomings of those who might be in the news. But neither did that person make progress over the general problem of gossip. Nobody ever got drunk simply because he or she read gossipy trash. If this sounds a little too stringent, we should remind ourselves that growth in sobriety calls for better management of our thinking and attitudes. We can use our time in better ways if we wish to enhance our sobriety. Reading such trash, even in the daily newspapers, is a form of gossip. It’s never beneficial to find ourselves thinking, “It serves him right.” We may even harm ourselves if we get secret enjoyment over the fall of a celebrity. While some of these disclosures may be true, we don’t help ourselves by reveling in them or reading them. Think of the excitement that’s been generated just over the sexual misadventures of important people running for public office. The newsstands are full of publications that seem to delight in exposing the sins and foibles of celebrities and prominent officials. So why should we drunks crack up over this one?” has already had his own private Pearl Harbor. “Well,” replied the yearling, “each of us in A.A. “How is it that you have nothing to say about Pearl Harbor? How can you roll with a punch like that?” Father Ed saw, with relief, that his companion was perfectly sober. Then a member, sober less than a year, stepped alongside and engaged Father Ed in a spirited conversation-mostly about A.A. Because many of his usually sober friends had already taken to their bottles so that they might blog out the implications of the Pearl Harbor disaster, Father Ed was anguished by the thought that his cherished A.A. Father Edward Dowling was not an alcoholic, but he had been one of the founders of the struggling A.A. On the day that the calamity of Pearl Harbor fell upon our country, a great friend of A.A. ![]() I pray that I may keep my life uncomplicated and free. I pray that I may love the simple things of life. Your standard must never be the world’s standard of wealth and power. Every difficulty can be either solved or ignored and something better substituted for it. You can be swamped by difficulties if you let them take up too much of your time. ![]() Life can become complicated if you let it be so. Simplicity is the keynote of a good life. His sane, sober, respectable self is his real self. “When he came to himself, he said, ‘I will arise and go to my father.'” That’s what an alcoholic does in A.A. We waste our substance with riotous living. The Prodigal Son “took his journey into a far country and wasted his substance on riotous living.” That’s what we alcoholics do. Throughout the day, as I allow outside circumstances to dampen my spirits, I ask God to sear my consciousness with the awareness that I can start my day over any time I choose a hundred times, if necessary. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.”Įvery day I ask God to kindle within me the fire of His love, so that love, burning bright and clear, will illuminate my thinking and permit me to better do His will. “On awakening, let us think of the twenty-four hours ahead.
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