Yesterday, an old friend of mine was talking and I remember I sat straight up when she talked. She was responding to a person, who rarely comes to meetings, but comes when she’s in trouble. She said that the reason she comes to meetings regularly was because sometimes you can’t put a bandaid on your problems. But, if you come regularly and listen you are really preventing or minimizing the trouble we tend to get into. She said it was like preventive medicine.
By doing what she said, she was telling us that it keeps us in good mental, emotional, and spiritual health. I believe her, because it has been my experience, also.
But, I can see how others can drift away from the experience of meetings. It’s easy isn’t it. I can see how people can get into the thinking that I’ve heard this before. It’s old hat. Repeating the same thing over and over again. I know it and I can take care of this myself, until I run into real trouble. And then, I can run back and ask others to help me fix what’s wrong.
The truth is that though we may say much of the same things, it’s not really what we say. There is somethng going on in these meetings, which is really unspoken. It’s often what we don’t hear in those rooms, which is the most important. Often it’s the idea behind these meetings. Something which we don’t put into words. It’s invisible to the eyes and the ears. It’s something which can only be heard with different “ears”. The “ears” which are opened only after we have been practicing this program for a while. We call it “openmindedness”. When the program has opened our “eyes” and allows us to see what we couldn’t see before, because we were blinded to it.
One spritual writer said that God talks to us in the language of silence. We have to come to meetings and practice this program in order to learn how to listen for the first time. We need the time to learn how to come to understand what is really going on. Because sobriety is more than just not drinking. If we are serious and committed to this program, we’ve had a spiritual awakening, which opens our hearts and our minds to the spriitual life.
The words spoken by those in the rooms convey a number of things to us. They remind us of what we need to remember, if we want to stay sober and away from a drink one day at a time. But it’s the idea behind what we say which is transmitted to us. It sends us a message, which words cannot. How many of us, who have come to meetings, weighed down by the cares and worries of the world, have found them melting away as we sit there. Often we find that the solution to our problems is no longer important. And just as often, we have found that the solution we were seeking comes to mind, either shortly afterward, or in a few days or a short time later.
How do I know this? Because the promises made to us in the BB come true. That has been my experience and the experience of so many I have been in contact with over the time I have been in here. It comes from the daily practice of these principles in all of our affairs. It comes from being imperfect and making mistakes and not even perfectly working this program, but in the trying.
So, when that woman spoke the other day, I listened carefully. She was telling the truth. Anyway, I was thinking about this today.
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