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MajestyJo
Average Member
Canada
590 Posts |
 Posted - 10/11/2007 : 03:51:52
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STEP TWELVE: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
"Even the newest of newcomers finds undreamed rewards as he tries to help his brother alcoholic, the one who is even blinder than he. This is indeed the kind of giving that actually demands nothing. He does not expect his brother sufferer to pay him, or even to love him. And then he discovers that by the divine paradox of this kind of giving he has found his own reward, whether his brother has yet received anything or not."
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 109
This reminds me of what my sponsor told me many years ago, you can't take credit if they stay sober and you are not responsible if they make the decision to pick up. You don't have the power.
You can only give what people are willing to receive. If they have tunnel vision and only see what they want to see or they only see what other people tell them to see, then they can't be helped. I know for me I had to come to a place of "I don't know" and be open to learning the lessons given to me, one day at a time. When I think I know it all, that "I" have the answers, then I am in big trouble. The state of humility is to become teachable. I can't be taught, I can't learn, if I have a closed mind to other ideas and concepts than my own.
The newcomers help me. They make me realize it isn't any better out there and that I need to be ever watchful, because this is a mental, emotional, spiritual and physical disease, and I can start slipping an any or all of those areas before I actually pick up a drink, a drug, a relationship, a job, etc. If I use anything to escape my reality today and stop working the program for me, in today, I stay sick.
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Love Always,
Each Day is a New Beginning, so have a great one. |
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Step Twelve
