TOPICS – 6 / 20 / 2025
1.RELEASE FROM FEAR
The problem of resolving fear has two aspects. We shall have to try for all the freedom from fear that is possible for us to attain. Then we shall need to find both the courage and grace to deal constructively with whatever fears remain. Most of my decisions were based on fear. Alcohol made life easier to face, but the time came when alcohol was no longer an alternative to fear. One of the greatest gifts in A.A. for me has been the courage to take action, which I can do with God’s help
AS BILL SEES IT, p. 61
2.OVERCOMING DIFFICULTY
“It is the law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, must be exactly what you need most at the moment to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson.”
Emmet Fox
3.LET GO AND LET GOD
Most of us have spent a great amount of time and energy trying to order and arrange our own lives. We have searched frantically for something to hang on to which would solve our problems—a new diet, a new job, a new lover. Nothing has worked permanently. The harder we have tried to straighten ourselves out, the more our problems have defeated us.
When we came into the program, we were advised to “Let go and let God.” At first, this may have seemed to us to be a huge cop-out. The idea of passively waiting for a Higher Power to do for us what we could not do for ourselves was an insult to our pride and our illusions of self-sufficiency. We were afraid to let go.
4.OPEN-MINDEDNESS
Being open-minded means being able to listen to other people’s ideas, having the willingness to consider other possibilities, and even having a sense of humility to accept that you are wrong sometimes. There is no room in recovery for arrogance or close-mindedness because these things are poisonous to sobriety.