Good morning, Jesus. A couple of more thoughts on the promises that seem to be coming true in spite of me.
One reads, "We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace." As I've mentioned to you recently, I've felt like I've been down and distant of late, something that always is a bit disconcerting when things are going well. Maybe this is simply what 'serenity' and 'peace' feel like. Not being frantic trying to clean up recently created wreckage is not completely unfamiliar to me, but if I'm always feeling "one way or the other," any eye-of-the-storm day is definitely "the other." As I'm working on my eighth step, and having to put effort into considering the harms I've done others, I'm forced to relive if only mentally the episodes themselves, and that cannot help but bring me further down and make my life seem even more distant from those I hurt. It's work that has to be done, and at times I'm grateful to be in a twelve-step program - and living with a disease that can only take me to prison or to death - if only because it prescribes this activity to me as mandatory to arrest (pun intended) the illness.
Another says, "Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us." I'm not sure these should have been grouped together, but I guess the program had to have twelve promises to match the twelve steps, traditions, and concepts. There have been times of material want in my life, but when I compare those times to what I see and hear of others lack I realize that I have never wanted much of anything. I was blessed with a family with two very responsible parents, and I was also blessed with a good, creative mind that allows me to find work much more readily than most. Even now I'm headed into a job with a very generous salary attached, which will allow me to be secure economically and also be generous to others.
But 'fear of people'? It's hard to attach the word 'fear' to it, but I have always been uncomfortable in social settings. It has not only hindered me somewhat in day to day life, but the eighth step work I'm doing reveals the difficulties it's caused with my wife and daughters, too.
Even now, I'm being asked to make phone calls to find housing for a couple of people that The Elizabeth Foundation is trying to help - and, quite frankly, I hate phone calls! And I've worked a third of my career in roles based around telecommunications and how to make phones even more ubiquitous in our lives! And one of the things in recovery that you are forced to do is call other people in recovery! Maybe there's been a message here all along, I don't know. I've certainly done my best to miss it.
But, as the program reminds me - and, Jesus, it's a message that your church seems to have missed or mangled - it's 'progress not perfection.' And I feel I'm on the road to progress.
And that's good enough for today. Grant me serenity and peace today.
Especially on the phone.
Amen.
