Had some minor surgery yesterday. I don’t know if it was Mel Brooks or Bob Newhart, who said that if it’s being done to someone else, it’s always minor surgery. Anyway the surgeon reminded me that all good medicine is bitter. That’s after we agreed that pain is invevitable, but suffering is optional.
I was reading a book last night, which said,”We cannot subscirbe to the belief that life is a vale of tears, though once it was that for many of us. But it is clear that we made our own misery. God didn’t do it. Avoid then, the deliberate manufacture of misery, but if trouble comes, cheerfully capitalize on it as an opportunity to demonstrate His omnipotence.”
That’s a thought on which it’s worth spending some time. It certainly was true for me, not only when I was drinking, but also for some time in recovery. It took time, for me anyway, to practice and learn this new way of life. Looking back I have always marveled at the fact of my sobriety. For a long time I was in the manufacturing business.
Someone once told me that we had a twisted point of view toward life. The eighth step tells us in the 12&12, that at some point we suffer from violent twists to our emotions, which discolor or personalities for the worst. If that is true, and I believe it is, it takes a long time and a lot of work on our part, to not only uncover those events, but to turn these things around and back into right focus. We have to untwist our views.
That’s what the application of spiritual principles to our lives, through our efforts in the working of these steps, is able to accomplish. That’s why I sometimes think of those, who were in the front line of this program, the men and women, who came in early on, are such great examples for me. Usually they were people, who had lost everything. In the beginning, the only people sought for entrance into this program, had almost nothing at the end of their drinking. They were desperate. The result was that very few resisted the requirements demanded of them to get sober and stay sober. I met a lot of the second wave and a few of the first. I would always wonder how they were able to be the way they were and believed I could never attain to the level they had achieved.
It took someone like me, who still had some of the things in life, which they had lost, to find a way to stop resisting what they offered. As much pain and trouble I was faced with, it did not compare to the desperate scrambling they endured to get out of the hole they were in. I could read and contemplate and sometimes understand what I was reading and what was being said to me, but I did what the book says, we sometimes do; I balked. Our predecesors did not. Or, if they did, they knew they faced dire consequences. I questioned and they didn’t.
As I was reading the passage above, it reminded me of the old AA joke. If you want to hide something in this program, put it in the Big Book.