Thoughts for the Day – Gratitude

By | June 11, 2023
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A.A. Thoughts for the Day

Gratitude

“Another exercise that I practice is to try for a full inventory of my blessings and then for a right acceptance of the many gifts that are mine – both temporal and spiritual. Here I try to achieve a state of joyful gratitude. When such a brand of gratitude is repeatedly affirmed and pondered, it can finally displace the natural tendency to congratulate myself on whatever progress I may have been enabled to make in some areas of living. I try hard to hold fast to the truth that a full and thankful heart cannot entertain great conceits. When brimming with gratitude, one’s heartbeat must surely result in outgoing love, the finest emotion that we can ever know.”
Bill W., March 1962
1988 AA Grapevine, The Language of the Heart, p. 271

Thought to Consider…

I have learned what a heart full of gratitude feels like.

AACRONYMS

I S M
Incredibly Short Memory

Just for Today

Illness
From “Building a New Life”

That year I went to an alcohol treatment program twice. The first time I was in treatment, I was shaving at the mirror in the bathroom and it seemed to me that my beard was growing back in as fast as I could shave it off. Even though I was in a hospital gown, I escaped, running down the streets and jumping up and over fences. I was on the porch of a woman’s house banging on the door for her to let me in when the police arrived. I tried to convince them she was my wife and my children were inside, but they saw the hospital bracelet on my wrist, and they took me back to the program. The doctor told me that if I went into D.T.’s like that again I might not come out.”
2001 AAWS Inc. Fourth Edition
Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 482

Daily Reflections

FAMILY OBLIGATIONS

. . . a spiritual life which does not include . . . family obligations may not be so perfect after all.
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS,  p. 129

I can be doing great in the program – applying it at meetings, at work, and in service activities – and find that things have gone to pieces at home. I expect my loved ones to understand, but they cannot. I expect them to see and value my progress, but they don’t – unless I show them. Do I neglect their needs and desires for my attention and concern? When I’m around them, am I irritable or boring? Are my amends a mumbled “Sorry,” or do they take the form of patience and tolerance? Do I preach to them, trying to reform or “fix” them? Have I ever really cleaned house with them? “The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it.”
Copyright 1990
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS WORLD SERVICES, INC.
Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 83

As Bill Sees It

“Let’s Keep It simple”

“We need to distinguish sharply between spiritual simplicity and functional simplicity. When we say that A.A. advocates no theological proposition except God as we understand Him, we greatly simplify A.A. life by avoiding conflict and exclusiveness. But when we get into questions of action by groups, by areas, and by A.A. as a whole, we find that we must to some extent organize to carry the message – or else face chaos. And chaos is not simplicity.”

“I learned that the temporary or seeming good can often be the deadly enemy of the permanent best. When it comes to survival for A.A., nothing short of our very best will be good enough.”
1. LETTER, 1966
2. A.A. COMES OF AGE, p. 293-294

Big Book Quote

“In this book you read again and again that faith did for us what we could not do for ourselves. We hope you are convinced now that God can remove whatever self-will has blocked you off from Him. If you have already made a decision, and an inventory of your grosser handicaps, you have made a good beginning. That being so you have swallowed and digested some big chunks of truth about yourself.”
Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition
How It Works, p. 70

Twenty Four Hours a Day

A.A. Thought for the Day

We alcoholics have to believe in some Power greater than ourselves. Yes, we have to believe in God. Not to believe in a Higher Power drives us to atheism. Atheism, it has been said before, is blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere. That’s practically impossible to believe. So we turn to that Divine Principle in the universe that we call God. Have I stopped trying to run my own life?

Meditation for the Day

Lord, we thank Thee for the great gift of peace, that peace which passeth all understanding, that peace which the world can neither give nor take away.” That is the peace that only God can give in the midst of a restless world and surrounded by trouble and difficulty. To know that peace is to have received the stamp of the Kingdom of God. When you have earned that peace, you are fit to judge between true and false values, between the values of the Kingdom of God and the values of all that the world has to offer.

Prayer for the Day

I pray that today I may have inner peace. I pray that today I may be at peace with myself.
Hazelden Foundation PO Box 176 Center City, MN 55012

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