DAILY PONDERABLES - Together WE Trudge The Road OF Happy Destiny - Daily Reflections "GUIDANCE" Saturday, 22 February 2014

DAILY PONDERABLES - Together WE Trudge The Road OF Happy Destiny  - Daily Reflections "GUIDANCE" Saturday, 22 February 2014
...this means a belief in a Creator who is all power, justice, and love; a God who intends for me a purpose, a meaning, and a destiny to grow, however .... haltingly, toward His own likeness and image.--AS BILL SEES IT, p. 51
As I began to understand my own powerlessness and my dependence on God, as I understand Him, I began to see that there was a life which, if I could have it, I would have chosen for myself from the beginning. It is through the continuing work of the Steps and the life in the Fellowship that I've learned to see that there is truly a better way into which I am being guided. As I come to know more about God, I am able to trust His ways and His plans for the development of His character in me. Quickly or not so quickly, I grow toward His own image and likeness.--From the book Daily Reflections © Copyright 1990 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
A.A. Thought for the Day
Now we can take an inventory of the good things that have come to us through A.A. To begin with, we're sober today. That's the biggest asset on any alcoholic's books. Sobriety to us is like goodwill in business. Everything else depends on that. Most of us have jobs which we owe to our sobriety. We know we couldn't hold these jobs if we were drinking, so our jobs depend on our sobriety. Most of us have families, which we either had lost or might have lost, if we hadn't stopped drinking. We have friends in A.A., real friends who are always ready to help us. Do I realize that my job, my family, and my real friends are dependent upon my sobriety? 
Meditation for the Day
I must trust God to the best of my ability. This lesson has to be learned. My doubts and fears continually drive me back into the wilderness. Doubts lead me astray, because I am not trusting God. I must trust God's love. It will never fail me, but I must learn not to fail it by my doubts and fears. We all have much to learn in turning out fear by faith. All our doubts arrest God's work through us. I must not doubt. I must believe in God and continually work at strengthening my faith.
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may live the way God wants me to live. I pray that I may get into that stream of goodness in the world.--From the book Twenty-Four Hours a Day © Copyright 1975 by Hazelden Foundation
NA - Just for Today
God's will, or mine?--Page 54
"We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it."--Step Ten
In Narcotics Anonymous, we've found that the more we live in harmony with our Higher Power's will for us, the greater the harmony in our lives. We use the Tenth Step to help us maintain that harmony. On a daily basis, we take time to look at our behavior. Some of us measure each action with a very simple question: "God's will, or mine?" 
In many cases, we find that our actions have been in tune with our Higher Power's will for us, and we in turn have been in tune with the world around us. In some cases, however, we will discover inconsistencies between our behavior and our values. We've been acting on our own will, not God's, and the result has been dissonance in our lives. 
When we discover such inconsistencies, we admit we've been wrong and take corrective action. With greater awareness of what we believe God's will for us to be in such situations, we are less likely to repeat those actions. And we are more likely to live in greater concord with our Higher Power's will for us and with the world around us.
Just for Today: I wish to live in harmony with my world. Today, I will examine my actions, asking, "God's will, or mine?"--From the book Just for Today © Copyright 1991-2013 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Thought for Today
"When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability...
To be alive is to be vulnerable."   
"Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art"--Madeleine L'Eangle 
“I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, 
who did not do better work and put forth greater effort 
under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism. ”--Charles Schwab  (thanks Cheryl)
Buddha/Zen Thoughts
When everything is clean-clear in your own mind,
nobody can create obstacles for you.--Lama Thubten Yeshe, "The Bliss of Inner Fire"
Native American
"In the Indian way, we are connected to that flower if we understand its spirit, the essence of its life."--Larry P. Aitken, CHIPPEWA
Everything on our Earth is alive. Every rock, every plant, every animal, every tree, every bird, every thought is alive. This is true because everything is made by the Great Spirit and the Great Spirit is alive. We need to slow our lives down each day and realize, consciously, that this is true. First we need to realize it, second, we need to acknowledge it, third, we need to appreciate it and, finally, we need to go on.
Great Spirit, let me see life through Your eyes. Today let me be alive. 
Keep It Simple
To thine own self be true.--AA medallions
Sometimes we hear that we have a "selfish program." Being "selfish" means that we ask for help when we need it. We only go to places that are safe for us, no matter what others are doing. Being selfish comes to mean safety for us.
Being selfish doesn't mean we act like brats. We must act in ways that show respect and love---for ourselves and for others. being selfish means we do what is good for us. What is good for us? First, we have to save our lives by stopping our drinking and drugging. Next, we start working the Steps. We come to know a loving Higher Power. This is how we come to know our true self.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, help me be true to myself and my values. Help me be "selfish" about spending time to talk with You each day.
Action for the Day: I'll list ten ways I need to be "selfish" in recovery. If I get stuck, I'll be "selfish" and ask for help.
Big Book
"Burn the idea into the consciousness of every man that he can get well regardless of anyone. The only condition is that he trust in God and clean house."--Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, Working With Others, page 98
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Ready to Remember Grapevine February 1958 (thanks Ronny H)
I REMEMBER DRIVING along the Old Montauk Highway at eighty miles an hour, at night, and coming out of a blackout just as I missed a man walking along the curve of the road. Until I remembered that, I forgot that I had ever driven while even slightly intoxicated.
I remember myself as a fun drinker--loud, funny, and sociable--and always being around people. . .until I remembered the unsociable, un-fun, empty mornings, the lonely summer weekends in a hot and beachless city bar. And the next morning the things I remembered were black and blue and foggy and crystal clear and awful.
I remembered only a "few" bad nights in the last "few" bad years of my drinking. . .until I remembered the whole insidious progression of years of bad drinking in which a total picture of acute alcoholism was recalled to my mind.
As a drunk some days of my life in a twenty-four clock were mangled except for one hour. Out of some weeks the fragments of a day may be hazily recollected. Months of drinking days melted one into the other, with such monotony. . .hangover--drunkenness--drunkenness--hangover--to-the-bar--sleep--sleep--to-the-bar. . . . So much monotony that one year can hardly be distinguished from the year before except that the monotony of the drunkenness seems intensified, the hangover longer, the sleep less, the need for the bar greater--a daily-weekly-monthly-yearly rendezvous with some further monotony. Certainly a thing to forget. . .and forget it is what I did.
If Tuesday is like Thursday and next Tuesday promises more of the same and a year ago Sunday was just like last Thursday except for the indignity of a punch in the nose, or some great crying jag that lasts for two swollen-eyed days and changes that day by a hair, what is there to remember anyway?
I was incapable of viewing my past except as a maudlin creature of fantasy in which things always looked better if not beautiful yesterday. Pass out--blackout--or just refusal to remember a blistering piece of truth--all helped to erase the pain. If the memory of a bad night persisted, I trimmed all the rough edges by neatly obliterating a detail here, a fact there, until only a half painful picture remained. . .and it was "their" fault anyway.
How many of us even think we have a story to tell when we first come to AA--how lucky we are that memory is what it is and nothing more. The human memory is a tricky mechanism. It deserts us at the tip of remembrance, it will recall the dimmest facts, long forgotten, for survival. It betrays us at times and is limited at best, where some details are concerned; yet it will keep, graphically and dramatically etched, one day which seems to have lost any real importance, so far as conscious memory goes.
Even without liquor, memories have the humane faculty for obliterating that which is intolerable. To forget an important date or meeting is temporary amnesia, self-induced to be sure, forgotten for reasons unknown even to us perhaps that they come under the heading of protection of life, limb or ego. Those who have made a study of the mind are not sure where the seat of memory lies. At the end of a long life our memories are stored with information totaling more details than the nine million volumes in the Library of Congress. To remember is an important part of intelligence. How we manage to tell in fifteen or twenty minutes an impression of our ten or twenty or thirty years drinking past--to piece together the jig-saw of our drinking days--is a miracle of the memory.
Only in AA has the freedom been given us to reach far back into our memory and pull out the truth. . .separate the fantasy from the real. . .evaluate ourselves now sober. As we hear other alcoholics tell the truth of their drinking days our memory begins to uncoil and unscramble. It's a slow, creaking process which picks up tempo as the truth becomes easier to bear. Thank God we don't have total recall at our first meeting or twenty-four-hours later--we couldn't take it. It would flood us back into the bottle.
We remember as we are ready to remember. When the shame is removed and the terror diminished our memory relaxes and allows us new ease hitherto unknown in our puzzled and frightened minds. We start to recover. I have heard it said that gratitude is the memory of the heart. We for some reason have been given back the gift of life. In order to match this gift of life with the gift of love--love that is born of gratitude--it seems that we, once recovered, have some wonderful things to remember. . .things not so much measured by where we were at two o'clock last Christmas as by the magnificent comparisons of yesterday's life with today's. This gift is given us by memory.--L. A., New York
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If you're not enjoying your sobriety it's your own damn fault!
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