Ammends - Between Now & Then

September 06. Hello everyone, glad to be alive & sober another day. Also glad to be able to write to you all here, this project has been both relieving & fulfilling at the same time. Today I enjoyed a beautiful Holdiay weekend with family & a few friends of the family. We had a cookout, so I got a great meal w/ an awesome dessert & got to see the kids play around for hours having fun. I can ask for nothing more than enjoyment for everybody on days like this & my wishes were answered gracefully by my Higher Power today. I got to show off some of the new merchandise for the jewelry business to the people who came over & there was a lot of 'ooh's & ahh's' over some of the pieces. That helped build my confidence that I picked up some good things for the market month ahead, which would be good because things have slowed down to a trickle for reasons I can only speculate at this point. Some people had left by the time I was ready to head out myself, MARS Group was set to meet tonight at 7 & I didn't want to be late. I got down there & nobody was gathered for the meeting, I figured I must have missed some sort of announcement for it's cancellation so I headed out of there & onto my way to get to the Moscow Group early so I could help set up & be of use to the group. Things happen for a reason, I am a firm believer in that, and for some reason a person decided to pass me at just the right time that I could not avoid a pot hole in the road, it was deep enough to knock off my hub cap & flatten my tire. With a trunk full of jewelry, I did not have my spare & had to call mom & dad for a rescue mission. Thankfully they got there in good time & I made the meeting for its regular starting time, after changing the tire of course. I needed to make it to that meeting because the topic for the night was waiting for me, something I needed to hear & share about here.

In our active addictions/alcoholism or for normal people before our beginning to live through the application of Spiritual Principles in our lives, we caused much havok & damage to others around us. Some of this we do not become aware of until we are on a sober & spiritual path for some time, other things we are immediately aware of, and further still some things we feel we were equally wronged & don't realize that the only thing that matters is OUR PART & what we can do to right OUR SIDE of things. All of these things I mention relate to the spiritual housecleaning that we do through making our Ammendments in the 9th Step. If your like me, then your not on this step yet. If you've already gotten that far in your spiritual works then what I have to share tonight still applies. We cannot rush ahead to fix what we've done wrong, when we are ready & able it will in fact happen if we believe in our Higher Power & fully work our program of recovery or spiritual growth. I for example cannot just replace some of the priceless things or the time I have stolen away from my family, specifically my mother. Even if I had the mass amounts of money it costs to replace those things I could not find the exact items I had sickly & selfishly taken to feed my craving addiction back then. I can be intimately sorry, out of turn I even verbalized how sorry I was for all of the infractions on her love, why I chose the person closest to me in this world to commit these heists I may never know, but the right time will come to make the ammendments to the right people. I won't be afraid, I won't have to figure out how to make something up to them, and I certainly will never have to hurt someone to make an ammendment because if that was necessary the ammendment is not to be made.

What I finally am getting to through sharing all this is what matters the most in regaurds to the damage we have done before our spiritual steps have begun. That is, "We do not have to behave as we once did, having made ammendments or having yet to make any means nothing right now, what matters most is that We Cause No Further Damage Intentionally to ourselves or another". If we can just keep ahold of that simple concept, we will in time be able to discover & offer repairing ammends to each of our damaging miskates in our lives. How we go about avoiding more damage is done through the steps & through following Spiritual Principles. Being an obediant believer in a Higher Power of moral standing is a great beginning besides staying sober & away from things that rob us of our true personality & desires. The next gesture would be to work our 4th Step, which helps us discover our fears, character defects, and areas we are constantly short in. Through discovery of our areas of defect we can later work on those areas & also pray for their removal in our lives. Over time many have seen alot of these defects dissapear from their lives, so if there is hope for them then there is hope for You Or I. If we keep true to ourselves & to others as our higher power would have us be, then we stand a great chance at not creating any more scenarios that we will later have to make ammends for. This ultimately is what we must learn to do, to love ourselves better & have others love us as well. As a result of it all our lives get better, we become more spiritual, and we stand the greatest chance of never having to drink, drug, or be the person we had to be in our past. Be it out of necessity, survival, hunger or selfishness we all have hurt someone else along the way. The time will come to write those wrongs, and now is the time to make no more. Good Night.. Good Morning... <3 Jimmy