Today at the meeting a woman brought up the subject of the Serenity Prayer. She said that she was having trouble with the courage part of it. She said she didn’t have any courage. A lot of us could identify with her. I certainly didn’t have any courage when I came in. I had found my courage in a bottle and after I stopped drinking I found I was scared to death.
I was reminded of my granddaughter Katie, who is seven. She was having a problem with losing her teeth and wouldn’t allow anyone to help her with her top front tooth. She cried a lot because it hurt. Meanwhile she wrote a letter to the Tooth Fairy telling her about her problem. My daughter was supposed to mail the letter and took over the role of the Tooth Fairy and wrote a letter back to Katie telling her to be brave. Katie wrote back saying she couldn’t be brave because he hadn’t been brave since she was three years old.
How does someone like me get the courage necessary to avoid the first drink? I was amazed that the program had the answer to that. Courage came to me through the process of this program. What I had sought through the bottle was in the solution offered in the steps. Looking back, I can see now what I couldn’t see then. That, just like the words in the 12&12 said, “AA’s Twelve Steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole.” They did and I did.
The words in Appendix II in the BB describe it adequately.
Anyway, I was thinking about this this afternoon and how effective this program has been to bring about a profound change in my personality and provided me with the necessary courage to not only avoid that first drink but to be able to live a meaningful life. How’s that for gratitude?