Today is the opportunity to build the tomorrow you want, the meme declared.
Right –
Somebody thought of that bromide before 2020!
But, you know what?
God offers to everyone the choice between truth and repose. Take which you please–you can never have both. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Choices I make today can be the opportunity that will help me tomorrow, assuming I wake up on the right side of the sod.
An Opportunity
Almost forty years ago . . . I know longer than most of all y’all have been alive. . . I was introduced to the Serenity Prayer, and the concept of powerlessness to control any body or things except myself.
Who knew these would be the tools of today’s building opportunity?
Nine months into 2020 and if I ever thought I could control anything beyond my habits, attitudes, and actions, I have been disabused!
What is more, this disabusement is an ongoing continuing ed class, right along with learning to care for myself physically, mentally and spiritually.
The homework is the same, whether I can get to meetings or not:
- Be willing to be willing (to infinity and beyond)
- Ask for help
- Accept help –
- Put others first – even the stinkers
- Skip the grumbling and be grateful.
I could not have done any of these assignments without a power greater than I am. (And I borrowed my sponsor’s until I found my own.)
Plus, homework, along with prayer, also includes:
- Annual Physicals,
- Daily exercise, monitoring food and water intake
- REST
- Resign as ruler of the known world. Today anyway.
Finally, expect pop-quizzes
Pop quizzes are life’s way of showing us how much we are mastering, and how to keep on. 2020’s quizzes have been . . . challenging.The times in which we may live make living in sobriety and serenity harder – Can that be a choice, too?
Doing the right thing, for the right reason and in the right spirit feels like an upper level course – maybe post-grad work. Not picking up, though, or letting go of people places and things is not rocket science.
I came to believe, and have not changed my opinion, that powerless does NOT mean useless.
Working the Twelve Steps is an opportunity to build the tomorrow I want.
From
humbling myself to asking for help;
changing what I can;
letting go of what I can’t.
staying on my side of the street, and offering love and help when I can;
To
believing God, whom I can’t see, will work in ways many will see.
In the almost four decades of recovery,
- Many people I know changed – even the ones whose problems seemed insurmountable.
- I changed.
- Even wholly dysfunctional situations changed; some disappeared!
- I can see that a changed attitude in me really did make an opportunity for better tomorrows.
In all that changed, God didn’t . . . He has remained on call, even as my need for wisdom and courage increases, daily.
Love in Christ,
Sober and Grateful
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