Ramblings of my mind...

* Had to take a break from the blog in order to file some classroom work for my dissertation. Finding the administrative things I have to do for this study are boring and time consuming. It seems everyone on the planet has to review and approve of my dissertation. But, I'm sticking with it.

* There's a relatively new book out that may interest some folks... Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality It has to do with the biological facts about spirituality and experiences that we might categorize as mysterious that we have actual scientific evidence exists as naturally hard-wired circuitry in our brains. This kind of argument - that we are pre-disposed to be spiritual or even religious - has been around for a while, but this book gives some up-to-date evidence for the claim. It also talks about some people with amazingly powerful spiritual capacities. No necessarily reading for the beach, but it may give some useful perspective to your own spiritual journey.

* We who volunteer for Narcotics Anonymous's Hospital & Institutions work -sort of the local speaker's bureau for NA - are continuously amazed by how few recovering people actually give back to the recovering community the freely given hope they found to be able to stay clean and sober. H&I work is not for everyone, for sure. Some folks are just plain uncomfortable speaking before even a few fellow addicts who are suffering with the effects of the disease of addiction. But, many of us are astounded by how few seem to be really involved with carrying a message of hope for recovery to addicts still suffering.

* Another issue that amazes me in my work as an alcohol and drug counselor is how tenaciously some people hang onto character defects that are keeping them sick and thwarting their recovery. We sometimes want to not let go of the familiar ways of coping with stress of living. Moreover, these techniques we use to defend against pain are sometimes the very things that kept us alive. So it's no wonder that people in reocvery need to have a program that allows them the opportunity to have these defects removed. We recommend Steps 6 and 7 for the remedy:

Step 6 - We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Step 7 - Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings.

These two steps are down the line a bit and newly recovering people ought not concern themselves with these for a while. But they are powerful weapons against drifting back to those dysfunctional attutides and behaviors that kept us in trouble for so long. When we have these defects reoved from our daily lives, we find that the things they were designed to protect us from also disappear...faith replaces fear, courage replaces cowardice, hope replaces despair, and honesty replaces lying.

All the best, Roger