Amazement...

I find that I can go out my front door on any given morning and either be mired in self or be braced with awe and amazement of God's creation.

Same door, same vista, roughly the same weather - just my head in 2 different spaces.

I am struck by how seldom I truly appreciate this sense of awe (and gratitude?) for the grandeur of all that is in God's creation. I diminish the expression of my life by presuming how I experience life today will be how I will always be - how I will always experience it - that my health will always be about the same, my mental and physical experience of my life will always be available to me, that life will just sort of motor on at the same temperature...

One of the 2 chronic slippers that I sponsor (this one figured out yesterday that he's only been drunk about 6 months of the past 8 years - but, his consequences seem to be getting much much more costly to him) helped me move some heavy stuff yesterday. He needed the money, I needed the help, and it gave us some time in the truck together to work through some of his writing and step work.

As he read some of what he wrote, he was crying, I was crying - it was not a great example of a safe or sober highway moment - but we understood the despair of the disease and how we destroy that what we love as a consequence of what we do in the course of yielding to the disease of alcoholism.

By the end of our day in the mountains together, I was again amazed at the intimacy we share in AA - it's still hard for me to believe that the only qualification I have for this sort of relationship is that I drank myself to the edge of oblivion and then was saved by the grace of God as experienced in the program of AA.

Amazing...