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There is a great passage at the end of the first 164 pages of the Big Book where the authors offer some encouraging words about moving forward as a sober person, including the iconic line “trudging the road of happy destiny.”

But there was another line from that last page that jumped out at me recently: “The answers will come, if your own house is in order.”

A lot of the sentences before and after that line are about trusting a higher power and having faith that this too shall pass when life gets lifey. So that line about when the answers will appear during what can be a tricky world really stood out to me, because of the emphasis on my house being in order.

At the time, I had a few situations in my life that were perplexing, and I found myself praying and reaching out to the universe to try to figure out what to do. When I read that line, I realized that I wasn’t ready for an answer to arrive, because my house wasn’t in order.

I had missed quite a few meetings and seen my sober calls dwindle a bit. So my spiritual gas tank was running at about a quarter tank, which is enough to live and be happy for me, but not enough to navigate complicated people or decisions. Sure enough, the minute I tidied up my house a bit by getting more spiritually fit, I felt like the answers to these complex decisions started to get a little more focused.

It reminded me a little bit about how some basketball players thrive in pressure situations by first taking some deep breaths and clearing their heads. Why do they need to do that? They’ve shot a million free throws in their lives. They have undoubtedly played lots of close games. They could quite literally do the shooting motion in their sleeps.

Well, I think that line probably has something to do with it. It’s the idea that my house must be in order for the answers to come. In their case, it’s a shot to win a basketball game. In my life, it’s how to figure out what a good parent is, how to pay tens of thousands of dollars for college and how to be optimistic about not getting cancer again. So it’s basically the same thing, huh?

This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:

A woman was driving home from a conference when she saw an old acquaintance, obviously down on her luck, thumbing for a ride. So the woman stopped the car, and the hitchhiker got in, smelling of gin.

After they’d been riding a mile or so, the rummy noticed a brown bag on the front seat. “What’s in the bag?” she asked.

“It’s a bottle of wine. I got it for my husband,” the driver replied.

The drinker fell silent for a minute and then said, “Good trade.”

(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 2002, Frank C. from Omaha, Nebraska)

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