Daily Readings
Just for Today & Spiritual Principle a DayJust For Today
Getting started on the Sixth and Seventh Steps isn't always easy. We may feel as though we have so much wrong with us that we are totally defective. We might feel like hiding under a rock. Under no circumstance would we want our fellow addicts to know about our inadequacies.
We will probably go through a time of examining everything we say and do in order to identify our character defects and make sure we suppress them. We may look back at one particular day, cringing at what we're certain is the most embarrassing thing we've ever said. We become determined to be rid of these horrible traits at all costs.
But nowhere in the Sixth or Seventh Steps does it say we can learn to control our defects of character. In fact, the more attention we focus on them, the more firmly entrenched they will become in our lives. It takes humility to recognize that we can't control our defects any more than we can control our addiction. We can't remove our own defects; we can only ask a loving God to remove them.
Letting go of something painful can be as difficult as letting go of something pleasant. But let's face it--holding on is a lot of work. When we really think about what we're holding onto, the effort just isn't worthwhile. It's time to let go of our character defects and ask God to remove them.
Spiritual Principle a Day
The spiritual principle of discernment--exercising good judgment--is central to practicing Tradition Two. In our personal recovery, we work on developing a guiding conscience in our own decision making that helps us decipher what's healthy for us and what isn't. Many of us have described that conscience as a voice in our head that tells us right from wrong. Many others say it's our loving Higher Power working in our lives.
We bring this awareness into our groups and try to practice it there, in fellowship with each other. Discernment is group conscience in action; using it requires some common sense, experience, and, hopefully, clarity about what's our opinion, what's factual, and what's actually important. Some of our groups develop trust and a collective conscience over time, but we need to stay open-minded as our membership evolves. To sustain our practice of Tradition Two, we need unity, faith, goodwill, and even more trust.
Speaking of trust, discernment helps us choose our trusted servants and guides us in our efforts to be trustworthy as we serve. We create guidelines that outline preferred qualities for particular roles in our groups. These may aid the process but aren't the whole of it. Other circumstances that aren't on paper and still meet our need to serve the greater good may play a role in our decisions. We listen to our fellow members offer qualifications for a position, learn about each other's capacity for effective leadership, and then use discernment, expressed through our group conscience, to match talent to task.
As trusted servants, we're trusted to serve the needs of our group and NA as a whole, rather than our own egos, individual opinions, and desired outcomes. To keep our leaders in check, we are each other's eyes and ears, shining light on one another's blind spots and turning up the volume when we aren't listening carefully.
Meetings Every Day of the Week!
The meeting list page of the Passaic County Area Service Committee website lists all of the meetings happening every week in our area as well as information about meetings happening in all the other areas of New Jersey, across the nation and even around the world!!