One Day at a Time in Al-Anon:
Once there was a Very Nice Girl whose neighbor told her about Al-Anon. The girl was very proud and only reluctantly admitted that her brother was wrecking the family by his excessive drinking. She went to a few meetings, but always hesitated when her neighbor invited her. It seemed this Very Nice Girl felt a little above the kind of people who came to talk about their drunken relatives. But the neighbor, a dedicated Al-Anon, realized that she had not yet learned the importance of Humility in coping with life’s problems.
She would criticize the way people talked at meetings; commented that some of them were uneducated and used faulty grammar, and so on. Finally, after working with her patiently, the neighbor managed to convince her that the most important thing about Al-Anon was the way we help each other through love and mutual concern for each other’s problems. And that the most important way to get that help was to listen to what is said, and not how it is said.
One day the neighbor, who read the Bible each morning and evening, came across a paragraph that she thought would be helpful – and it was! This is what it said:
“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without significance.” This verse, from the 14th Chapter of 1st Corinthians, verse 10, made it clear to the girl that she would find answers from uncritical listening. And she did!