Daily Readings
Daily Reflections
April 27
JOYFUL DISCOVERIES
We realize we know only a little. God will constantly disclose more to you and to us. Ask Him in your morning meditation what you can do each day for the man who is still sick. The answers will come, if your own house is in order. But obviously you cannot transmit something you haven’t got. See to it that your relationship with Him is right, and great events will come to pass for you and countless others. This is the Great Fact for us.
–ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, p. 164
Sobriety is a journey of joyful discovery. Each day brings new experience, awareness, greater hope, deeper faith, broader tolerance. I must maintain these attributes or I will have nothing to pass on.
Great events for this recovering alcoholic are the normal everyday joys found in being able to live another day in God’s grace.
Twenty-Four Hours
A Day
April 27
A.A. Thought For The Day
By submitting to God, we’re released from the power of liquor. It has no more hold on us. We’re also released from the things that were holding us down: pride, selfishness, and fear. And we’re free to grow into a new life, which is so much better than the old life that there’s no comparison. This release gives us serenity and peace with the world. Have I been released from the power of alcohol?
Meditation For The Day
We know God by spiritual vision. We feel that He is beside us. We feel His presence. Contact with God is not made by the senses. Spirit-consciousness replaces sight. Since we cannot see God, we have to perceive Him by spiritual perception. God has to span the physical and the spiritual with the gift to us of spiritual vision. Many persons, though they cannot see God, have had a clear spiritual consciousness of Him. We are inside a box of space and time, but we know there must be something outside of that box, limitless space, eternity of time, and God.
Prayer For The Day
I pray that I may have a consciousness of God’s presence. I pray that God will give me spiritual vision.
As Bill Sees It
Prelude to the Program, p. 118
Few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have “hit bottom,” for practicing A.A.’s Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking. The average alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme, doesn’t care for this prospect–unless he has to do these things in order to stay alive himself.
<< << << >> >> >>
We know that the newcomer has to “hit bottom”; otherwise, not much can happen. Because we are drunks who understand him, we can use at depth the nutcracker of the-obsession-plus-the-allergy as a tool of such power that it can shatter his ego. Only thus can he be convinced that on his own unaided resources he has little or no chance.
1. 12 & 12, p. 24
2. A.A. Today, p. 8
AA Grapevine Daily Quote
“Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life.”
AA Co-Founder, Bill W., January 1958“The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety”, The Language of the Heart
Thought For The Day: Call your sponsor.
Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book) In Short
Takes
PART 3
They Lost Nearly All
Empty On The Inside
She grew up around A.A. and had all the answers—except when it came to her own life.
I was surrounded by people talking about sobering up. My bartender wanted to quit drinking. The guy I was shooting pool with talked about going back to A.A. Someone next to me at the bar was talking about being at the local clubhouse for A.A.’s. I did stop drinking (sort of) for a few months but eventually went on the bender that would end it all.
Credits.
Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book), The Daily Reflections and As Bill Sees It are published by The General Services Office (GSO) of Alcoholics Anonymous. These and other A.A. literature can be purchased here.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day is Published by Hazelton Publishing. It and other Hazelton literature can be purchase here.
The AA Grapevine is published by The AA Grapevine, Inc. You can subscribe here.
