Willing Wrongs Away

Where there’s a will there’s a way — no way! Just say no — I say, “NO!!!” Willpower works when it works yet out there lurk gargoyles that jerk earnest efforts leaving us hurt in the dirt. You’re where we were. Willpower won’t work. Learn where to turn — I’ll show you the way.

Not God

That you’re not God means quite simply that you don’t dictate the laws of reality. ~ AA Agnostica

If God can be defined by any person in recovery and outside, how can you know that you’re doing what they say, that you’re not being God? Or behaving as if. The opportunities, actions, attitudes to act as God could look like anything, could differ from person to person. But there is a definition, a way to figure out. If you act as if, if you believe that – whether openly or not… that you’re in charge of running the world, then you’ve got no god. Instead, for you, you fulfill that role.

Quintet for One

Loneliness echoes through crowded rooms, seeking out me, the insecure. Moving to a town of closed cliques is an empty chasm of edges. Who am I? I lack definition, mirroring back what I think you want. Lonely is married year after year to one who knows nothing of me. I don’t know your name. Can it be you hurt me less being so formless?

Powerless

Powerless I’ve tried, really tried, yet to sooth the savage beast eludes me. Why? Tell me why! Others can! So why should this craving mock me, shame me, crush my soul? Others stroll from the beast, a whimpering kitten in their lives though they’ve indulged with the rest of us, partied just as hard. Am I so weak, so deficient?

Losing a Best Friend

Giving up alcohol was like giving up a best friend. ~ E.H.’s father-in-law

Alcohol has never tugged at me… but food does, like alcohol does to the potential members of Alcoholics Anonymous! In fact I’ve been known to say I didn’t have real friends. In the place of friends I substituted my addiction to sugar and flour in almost any combination, the higher the percentage of sugar with the addition of oil as enhancement the more satisfied, the more mollified, the more comforted I became. I know now I have real friends, people who share my history with food or whose struggles with other addictions ring true! I’m through with my affinity for food to fill the interstices of my soul! I choose people, true friends, soulmates as my true friends for life!

Icy Fre

Fear consumes with icy fire, tendril vapors clutching souls with absolute zero. Glacial fear creeps, a smoldering floe encasing mummified embers glowing dimmer by half-lives.

Worthy of Belonging and Joy

Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. They don’t have better or easier lives, they don’t have fewer struggles with addiction or depression, and they haven’t survived fewer traumas or bankruptcies or divorces, but in the midst of all of these struggles, they have developed practices that enable them to hold on to the belief that they are worthy of love, belonging, and even joy. ~ Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly (p. 11). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Do you honestly believe you’re worthy of love, of belonging? Have you developed practices that enable you to hold on to the belief that you are worthy of love, of belonging and even joy? Are you worthy of love? You truly are worthy of love and you are loved and of respect and joy!!

God, Acrostically

Choose a word you might use to meditate on God’s character. Use that word to build an acrostic poem of your own. Reflect first on where you are spiritually, and then move toward naming God’s character and how you could live your life differently. ~ Room, The Upper. The Upper Room Disciplines 2022: A Book of Daily Devotions (p. 91). Upper Room Books. Kindle Edition.

God is good, great, gracious, generous. Only God is God, no-one else is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. God is divine, never daunted or discouraged.

Actively Passive...

I offer myself to Thee…. Interesting verb, offer, not passive, for action affects the object, myself — not the subject, I. For me, what’s the difference? Me, myself, and I maintain the ultimate symbiosis. Yet here the verb looms large for the indirect object rather than a tail wagging below the diagram stands unequaled, omnipotent, omniscient. The subject and object stand equally passive, but out of respect actively passive.

Grow the Promises...

and promises spring in fertile ground. New freedom pops purple panicles, happiness covers the ground as hummingbirds find the past flowing with nectar. Serenity grabs our attention, familiar but overlooked. Peace flavors the breeze as we find long-lost usefulness. Without second thoughts we weed out self-pity, self-seeking and selfish interests to clear fertile ground for interest in others. We looked for the mainstays of the garden but fear of people and financial insecurity cannot be found. Intuition arches the garden with certainty. Our useless weedpile is gone as God’s garden prospers with promises springing from principles.

The People in this Room

They’re an odd lot, the bunch of folk who’ll meet here tonight. We’d let them have the room free but they insist on paying rent. It’s my job to set up for events, but they persist in doing it, say moving chairs, cleaning up, means service, keeps them on track. And I meant that “odd” part in the odd lot. Who’d ever pick these folk as friends? The cars outside – from rattletraps to posh, and you wouldn’t believe the fellow who rides with the one who drives a Porsche, I swear he’s some bum off the street! You can’t help but like them all, even the obnoxious ones. They’re so open, honest, full of hope. They’ll sit and say the same things they said last week and those before, and get so jazzed up over it. They’re an odd lot. Their coming here, though, somehow makes my week complete.

Spare Me Perfection

Spare me perfection. Give me instead the wholeness that comes from embracing the full reality of who I am, just as I am. ~ David Benner

I’ll never be perfect. I can’t read my own handwriting, and usually words are mispelled in anything I composed. I don’t have an accent… I talk with a drawl! Despite Mother’s telling me for years to sit like a lady, I don’t! I’m neither polished not graceful and I’ve quit trying to be. That’s okay, though! Spare me perfection. Give me instead the wholeness that comes from embracing the full reality of who I am, just as I am.

Measuring Up

You must not envy the worthiness of the person next to you, as if he or she is more accepted by God because he or she is more spiritually mature than you. ~ Tripp, Paul David. New Morning Mercies (p. 639). Crossway. Kindle Edition. I am good enough! I have a purpose and I am trying to understand what it is. I am good enough and have something no one else has to offer. I am good enough because people love me. I am worth more than the way I’ve been treated. I’m good enough to have learned to move on. And I’m good enough to know you’re good enough, too!

My Grandmom

Sorted by recipe name rather than food type the plethora beginning of Grandmom’s cards catch every eye. Followed by “homemade light bread,” “brown sugar cookies,” “prune cake,” “boiled custard,”  then “pickles” stand, flavoring the pages of the family cookbook I compiled. I am the image of Grandmom, and adopted her name for my grandsons to use. After turning eighty, Grandmom responded to Dr. Brook’s suggestion she lose weight by poking his stomach, to “I will when you do!” My grandsons will know Grandmom cookies, but to stop doctors’ observation of the feasting’s results I’ll affirm I am a compulsive eater and enjoy the cookies through my grandsons.

An Exercise in Additions

…make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ~ 2 Peter 1:5-8 (NIV)

What do we need to be? Faith plus goodness plus knowledge, plus self-control, plus perseverance, plus godliness, plus mutual affection, pluslove. I we possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. And we will be the people of God!

Back to Honesty

Life gets in the way and we forget to do the things we committed to do when Recovery Daily Dose was new! We promised a poem a day about 12-Step Recovery from the perspective of OAStepper (as in Overeaters Anonymous) and Barbara B. Rollins. But it gets old to write new work daily to be published early the next day. You may not recognize recycled poems… we don’t even remember doing them. And we have been since Wednesday, May 4, 2011, nearly ten years but this is new and we’ll recommit to a new poem a day which is best for us and probably for you as well!

Our Egocentricity

Many of us have lived too much for ourselves and by ourselves. It is our egocentricity which has been our undoing. We have accepted no authority higher than our own whim and impulse, and we have been angry and depressed when people and events did not follow our preferences. Eating was an area in which we exerted our omnipotence, and appetite was our god. ~ L., Elisabeth. Food for Thought: Daily Meditations for Overeaters (Hazelden Meditations Book 1) . Hazelden Publishing. Kindle Edition. Step Two says we “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” and Step Three that we “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” But she’s right that we tend toward starting out as the center of our universe accepting “no authority higher than our own whim and impulse.” I hear daily multiple phone calls on one side while my calls equal less than a minute for each hour for the other person. My egocentricity contrasts strikingly to the other’s gregariousness. Eating could still be an area in which I exert my omnipotence, with appetite was my god. Where do you stand on the spectrum?

What Is Your Name?

Today, claim the name of God’s child and allow it to enrich your life. ~ Brooks, Gennifer Benjamin. Bible Sisters (p. 3). Abingdon Press. Kindle Edition. We have no problem praying t0 “Our Father” as Jesus suggested… but do we believe it, internalize it? We sing, “With God as our Father, brothers all are we…” Who is a child of God? I am! You are! We all are Know your are, identify as one. Listen as you pause to hear yourself called! Claim the name of God’s child and allow it to enrich your life.