In between the stories of the man, Jim, who convinces himself that he can drink as long as his alcohol is in milk, and the Jaywalker who gets a thrill from jumping in front of cars even though he doesn't think so, is this passage I want to share: We have sometimes reflected more than Jim did upon the consequences. But there was always the curious mental phenomenon that parallel with our sound reasoning there inevitably ran some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink. Our sound reasoning failed to hold us in check. The insane idea won out. Next day we would ask ourselves, in all earnestness and sincerity, how it could have happened. In some circumstances we have gone out deliberately to get drunk, feeling ourselves justified by nervousness, anger, worry, depression, jealousy or the like. But even in this type of beginning we are obliged to admit that our justification for a spree was insanely insufficient in the light of what always happened. We now see that ...
First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children. Most Good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom. Going from thinking life, the world and everyone was just having their way with me and everything thing was just series of random events that always seemed to harm me or make my life harder, to - OMG I had contrived the entire thing and the fall out was because my way was so grossly misaligned to the divine script that I NEEDED to be fired from the director of the movie stat! What I create when not attuned to God is an artificial construct generated, or, d riven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity.. .everything was a manipulation to attempt to produce the outcome I wanted so that I could get w...