One Day at a Time in Al-Anon:
An Al-Anon member of long standing writes of a tragic estrangement between her beloved grown daughter and herself. She had tried to prevent the girl from making what seemed to her a wrong decision, just as, years before, she had tried to compel her husband to stop drinking.
“Although I feared we would never be reconciled, I hoped I could find an answer in our program. I concentrated on the First Step: my powerlessness over others. What patience it took! What a constant temptation to take action, rather than leave the problem to God. But I made it–and it worked. The seemingly unyielding barrier of silence and, yes, hatred, melted away. We have learned again to love, by accepting each other as we are “
Today’s Reminder:
How often, in a crisis, we find it better to wait patiently for a problem to work itself out through a natural, inevitable process, than constantly to inject our own, perhaps misguided, control into it.
“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” — Thomas Merton, No Man ls an Island