Step by Step #essentialsofrec #recovery #Surrender

“I took everything that AA had to give me. Easy does it, first things first, one day at a time. It was at that point that I reached surrender. I heard one very ill woman say that she didn’t believe in the surrender part of the AA program. …Surrender to me has meant the ability to run my home, to face my responsibilities as they should be faced, to take life as it comes to me day by day, and work my problems out. That’s what surrender has meant to me. I surrendered once to the bottle, and I couldn’t do these things.” 

– Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, 1976, Part II (“They Stopped in Time”), Ch. 4 (“The Housewife Who Drank at Home”), p 340.

Today, I look again at the concept of surrender and realize its various interpretations that can be integrated into my own recovery. While surrender arguably may be interpreted most often as entrusting our very lives to a Higher Power, the excerpt from the housewife’s story shows us that surrender is regaining the ability to take back and carry out our responsibilities and meet problems head-on and work them out. This requires sobriety and being clean, of course, and the promises of the Program by surrendering what we would be without it are just that – promises. Today, I long for those promises and, today, I become responsible enough to work for them. And our common journey continues. 

Step by step. – Chris M. 

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