Indeed, all alcoholics need to cross-examine themselves ruthlessly to determine how their own personality defects have demolished their security. will find that these questions often apply to them, too, and the alcoholic housewife can also make the family financially insecure. Surveying his business or employment record, almost any alcoholic can ask questions like these: In addition to my drinking problem, what character defects contributed to my financial instability? Did fear and inferiority about my fitness for my job destroy my confidence and fill me with conflict? Or did I overvalue myself and play the big shot?īusinesswomen in A.A. possessiveness, and pride have too often done their worst. In our behavior respecting financial and emotional security, fear. I pray that I may not expect things until I have earned the right to have them. I pray that I may learn the lesson of waiting patiently.
We can believe that God has a plan for our lives and that this plan will work out in the fullness of time. We can believe that all our life is a preparation for something better to come when we have earned the right to it.
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A great lesson we have to learn is how to wait with patience. We waste our energies in trying to get things before we are ready to have them, before we have earned the right to receive them. We should learn to wait patiently until the right time comes. I have learned not to hold back and wait for friends to come to me, but to go half way and to be met half way, openly and freely. Friends are now people who understand me and I them, whom I can help and who can help me to live a better life. Friends are no longer people whom I can use for my own pleasure or profit. My drinking companions could hardly be called my real friends, though when drunk we seemed to have the closest kind of friendship. I have real friends, where I had none before. 176ĭo I remember that I have a right to my opinion but that others don’t have to share it? That’s the spirit of “Live and Let Live.” The Serenity Prayer reminds me, with God’s help, to “Accept the things I cannot change.” Am I still trying to change others? When it comes to “Courage to change the things I can,” do I remember that my opinions are mine, and yours are yours? Am I still afraid to be me? When it comes to “Wisdom to know the difference,” do I remember that my opinions come from my experience? If I have a know-it-all attitude, aren’t I being deliberately controversial?
“So long as we don’t argue these matters privately, it’s a cinch we never shall publicly. It could almost be said that we were born with it. This, however, has been no earned virtue. Nor has our Fellowship ever publicly taken sides on any question in an embattled world. Never since it began has Alcoholics Anonymous been divided by a major controversial issue.