Don't Quit 5 Seconds Before The Miracle

June 23. Hello everybody I hope your middle of the week was not long. Mine flew by & was a truly awesome day. I didn't sleep much last night but didn't let that put a fork in the day I had planned. The decision was already made before last night came that I was going to hang out with a new friend in the morning & I gave it the priority I would give a meeting or a day of running my business. So with 3 1/2 hours sleep I met up with my friend & we took my car to Lake Scranton to walk & talk about everything under the sun. We even saw two copper heads, one almost three feet & his little brother or sister in the water after him. Countless animals, laughs, and stories later we had put in our nearly 3 miles & got back in the car, AC blasting to cool down. We went for a scenic ride back to where we met & parted ways. I was not only pleased with the visit, its something I look forward to doing again. Only next time we might take a boat out at a state park. I stopped in to see my best friend's wife at work & he happened to be there too. A few jokes & laughs later we planned to meet up a little later when he was free. We did just that & I also got to see my other closest friend, I call him a best friend too because I would gladly fight his battles with him any day should he have any. We hung out together but seperately, as in all three of us were not together at the same time. But I was glad to see them both. I got a really late dinner & came home to a great suprise.

My parents were waiting up because the space station was going to orbit directly over our skyline & early enough that we could all see it's radiant glow. We stood under the thin cloud cover staring upward at the universe abroad & it seemed like we missed our moment. The time for the passing thru orbit visually that was given had come & gone, just as we thought we would not see it... suddenly it appeared glowing brightly through the thin clouds. This reminded me of something, and it's tonight's topic. Had we counted it out as a "missed opportunity" or said I guess it's just not gonna happen for us, we would have never seen the space station tonight. Had we not been eager & willing to pan the horizon through cloud cover to see it emerge, its glow would have passed without us knowing it. We didn't give up before it happened. Even though it was late, even though we thought it might not appear to us at all like we were told. This is the same blind hope we must apply to our spiritual & sober lives. A saying is coined in the 12 Step rooms, "Don't quit 5 seconds before the miracle".

Just as if we had quit looking for the space station to orbit, if we quit working on our sobriety we are missing a truly heavenly occurance. If we didn't look hard enough through the clouds we would have never seen it & if we don't look at ourselves enough to see through the fog our spiritual disease has created we may never see ourselves or what we truly want in our lives. If we got sick of waiting & went inside thinking we missed it, that glow would have been just a myth told to us by someone else who knew it would be there. And if we think we are never going to see serenity & peace in sobriety & quit too early we will think that those who were sober before us were giving us false hope or spreading myth. But in fact the miracle does happen, just as the space station did orbit. I have experienced both, and continue to experience things in sobriety that change me spiritually. I am much more the man I ever was or could be if I wasn't sober, & even though others ego's may sometimes doubt that, I can live on knowing I have done my best.

See if we want to see something amazing happen, sometimes we just have to hang in there & hope its going to happen. I don't suggest waiting for the sun to stop moving, or a million dollars to appear in your bank account. I am talking about confirmed factual occurances that can or will happen, like the space station's passing, and a spiritual awakening upon taking the 12 Steps into your life. Long before we even take all these steps many of us feel the change beginning, mentally, physically, spiritually. So don't quit 5 seconds before the miracle, or before you see what you really wanted to see in your life. Space station or sobriety, spirituality or solar rays. There is a solution. Good Night.. Good Morning.. <3 Jimmy