Page 14 - AA NEWS FEBRUARY 2019

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Alcoholics Anonymous. Again, great material, but do I believe every word to be gospel? Nope. This is terrible. Do we not have anything that we can truly believe in? How about our own experience? You are no doubt familiar with the definition of insanity, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”. But what about the opposite? Is it reasonable to do the same thing over and over and expect the same result? Can we do that thing often enough, experiencing the same result, that our expectation becomes a belief?
Early in sobriety we are told that in addition to working the steps, there are things we need to do on a regular basis in order to stay sober. Each day we should pray to a higher power to keep us sober, talk to another alcoholic, perhaps do some service work and/or attend a meeting of alcoholics anonymous, and at day’s end thank that higher power for another day of sobriety. I did these things and, lo and behold, I stayed sober for that day. Since then there have been additional days – taking the same actions with the same results. How many days of doing those things with similar results will it take to make a believer out of me? As of this writing my current count is 11,945 days. At this point I truly believe, without a doubt, that IF (a big if), I do those same things tomorrow, I will stay sober for that day. So, as always, it comes down to action. The Bible says that “Faith without works is dead” (KJV James 2:14-16). One could easily substitute “belief” for faith in that
quotation. One can truly believe what one’s experience proves to be true. And the strength of that belief is proportional to the action that one puts into the experience. Neither faith nor belief will keep us sober, but action will. Work does work.
Blaine H.
God as He May Express Himself
Alcoholics Anonymous came into existence in 1935 at a time when much of our society was centered around the churches in the communities where we lived. Much of the South and the Midwest are still like that to this day. As a child in my home town, on Sunday morning I could look out the window and see a great majority of my neighbors walking to church. That was the way it was in the early 1940's The book, Alcoholics Anonymous was published in 1939, and it seems that it was highly influenced by the many early members of the program at that time. A.A. could have, very easily become a religious program, but fortunately, the elders of that time realized, by the mistakes of the Oxford Group, and the Washingtonians, that they had to make it clear that, a desire to stop drinking was the only requirement for membership, and that the individual members could choose their own concept of a power greater than themselves, i.e. God as we understand him. In Tradition Two it says, “As He may express Himself in our group conscience” When the word God is used in the remainder of the book, it is not always followed by the "as we Continued on page 15