Welcome to this week’s meeting especially those who are new here in GROW, new in AA and those ladies counting days.
In my first year of sobriety I went to a Sunday Gratitude meeting and each week they asked for anyone under a year counting days to share their sobriety days. The miracle of days connecting together and making first a week, then a month, then six weeks, then two months is something that I couldn’t actually believe was happening.
I used to look in the mirror in the mornings and say my name is Sophie and I’m an alcoholic and one day at a time I can’t safely take the first drink. I used to get out my Just For Today card and choose one of the ideas on it to practice that day. At night I’d say thank you to a god I hadn’t yet come to find, but I knew something was giving me that day sober and it definitely wasn’t me, or any other human, or that new pair of shoes or the pay rise.
Slowly I came to find a Higher Power I could turn to for guidance along with an AA sponsor (just another woman alcoholic in AA who had more time than me and experience of working all 12 steps in order and knew the Big Book) who connected me to the power of the 12 steps. I came to see that I couldn’t think myself sober or sane but I could listen and learn and copy the actions of those whose sobriety I admired and respected.
I reflected on the passages below from Chapter 3 in our AA Big Book in relation to being new to sobriety. I wonder if they speak to you? I’ve copied them in below (and the [brackets] show where I’ve taken out the original words to personalise or feminise them for impact, something I do when I read it the Big Book to myself)… for the un-edited original please refer to
https://www.aa.org/the-big-book
https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt3.pdf