Recently the idea came to me that the members of our SA group might pray for each other. Our group has been growing, and praying for each other can be a way of supporting and strengthening each other. At each meeting, we pray for SA members yet to come when we have a moment of silence. How else can I pray for others?
Some people have asked me about the fear list and gratitude list. I don’t have a formula, but here’s how I do them:
At 5:45 this morning I woke to the sound of music from the house opposite floating through our open windows. I was in one of those headspaces, which have plagued me on waking up, since I got into recovery. I tried to go back to sleep; I didn’t really want to get up and take the actions.
That’s what the man on the SA tape told me to do for my boss. My boss told me I was a “permanent temporary” and that I wouldn’t be hired as a permanent employee. When he told me that, I had been on the job about a year and a half. As I went through the Steps again, I prayed for the people on my resentment list. The man on the tape told me to pray for them until I meant it, and I did.
Frequently my head and my heart think and feel that I am alone. This is especially difficult while being the secretary for an SA meeting of one, here in Fort Bragg, Calif. One Thursday night my Higher Power gave me a gift. It is a tool for revealing loneliness as the deception it is. I use it frequently. I call it the Gratitude Attendance Check.
I have been working a program with a few other members of SA from different parts of the country on abstinence from TV and movies. I have been abstinent from these media since June 1, 1996. This has not been an easy surrender. Even though God has removed what was an overwhelming compulsion to utilize these media, I still experience an intense pull from them. When the lust for TV or movies comes up, I am able to pray each time — just as I do with sexual lust — and God has, one impulse at a time, given me the willingness to turn away.
When I first got sober I made a firm commitment not to date for at least a year. Every day I had lived expecting the woman of my dreams to show up and magically change my reality. Once I found her I would no longer suffer from inadequacy, pain or loneliness. The world I hated so much would turn into a paradise. Everything would be different from then on.
In Madrid we are trying to live in the solution and not in the problem. Before the regular one-hour Sunday meeting where we read and comment on a piece of official SA literature “to relate our sharing to some aspect of what we have read,” we are having on a trial basis a half-hour Tradition meeting. We’ve already been through several items of Discovering the Principles and are going to start to read Guidelines for Group Recovery, which has just been translated into Spanish.
In clearing away the wreckage of the past in my 15-year marriage, I am successfully using the following format when making amends:
These 12 suggestions were beneficial and very useful to me and our fellowship. I believe they have helped us to stay focused and committed to working the solution, like the first 100 members of AA did. I thought the fellowship might find it of interest.
