Hidden Agendas
I’ll never forget Tom. He had been a sober member of the Patchogue group of A.A. (which meets at St. Josephs) for about 17 years when I was walked in by the Grace of God.
Tom had a story as we all do - part of his story was about hollow apologies. They were actually the tool which God used through Tom’s wife to motivate him to go to AA. He told us like this;
It was his habit to go out drinking on Christmas Eve and come stumbling home drunk on Christmas morning. It was also his habit to have written a note, apologizing, promising he’d never do it again. The last Christmas he did this before he got sober he’d done what he’d always done and had walked into the entryway of the house with a new note of apology. His wife greeted him and he handed her this note. She told him not to move, she’d be right back.
Tom’s wife walked away, went into their bedroom closet, pulled out a shoebox and returned to the front of the house. As she approached Tom she removed the cover from the shoebox and tossed the many years of apology notes she’d been saving, at him, saying, “Here’s all your hollow apologies, they ain’t worth a sh**.” He went to A.A. and got sober.
Even though I have been “corrected, chastised and character assassinated” for this, I’d like to refer to the Big Book on page 86 regarding hidden agendas or self-serving motives. It says;
“On awakening let us think about the twenty-four hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all God gave us brains to use. Our thought-life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives.”
The paragraph prior to that one provides a long laundry list of self-serving motives which we will review. One of those is “Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time?”
The Hidden Agenda. “Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time?” Absolutely not middle-of-the-road fellowship babble!
For a very real life example of this outside in the real world you might not have to look any farther than this…
Tags: 10th-step, 11th-step, Recovery, sobrietyRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Heard At Meetings, The Tenth Step
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