November 29, 2017 (this day)

Oh what a year what a year what a mighty fine year!

I’m full of gratitude, and also a certain kind of sadness.  My mother left this morning, the last of my Thanksgiving visitors to leave.  My daughter and her boyfriend left early because my 1970s furnace came to the end if its long long life, flooding the basement floor where they were staying.   Insurance will pay for the floor, our emergency house fund will pay for the new furnace.  We didn’t freeze for the few days we were without heat, although I was terribly afraid of being uncomfortable.  Grateful, and sad.

As I write, Colleen is on a Skype call with the campaign we’re working on.  A fool’s errand this is, our district is impossibly gerrymandered against us so that we can’t count. We can’t count, but we can make big noise when we go down.

November, AA’s month of gratitude.  My list is infinite and it all begins and ends with my miraculous sobriety.

Expect A Miracle

Two aspects of this saying – expectation, and miracles.

I believe I remember hearing it when I first came to the program.  I liked the mystical implications as much as I did not believe in things unseen.  I don’t know what I expected, miracle-wise, but I can articulate my understanding of it today.

A room of sober alcoholics is a miracle.  I understand alcoholism to be fatal for many, and terrible for the rest who go through life drinking and drugging and trying to stop, or not trying to stop.  As I sit and write this I know that around there world there are gathered groups of sober alcoholics following the twelve steps and staying sober.  That is a miracle.

My personal miracle, aside from the one about being nearly dead and coming back to life through sobriety, is that at some point during my journey I started wanting it.  There was a day, and I didn’t know it at the time, when I changed my attitude to one where I wouldn’t take the pill, shot, gene therapy, or anything else that would take away my alcoholism because my sobriety, through Alcoholics Anonymous, is the best in my life.  It makes every other good thing possible.

Expecting this miracle?  I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.  I hope that this kind of expectation makes us ready, somehow, to receive it.