DAILY PRAYER AND MEDITATION
Morning Prayers said kneeling
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�Please keep me sober today so that I may be of service to others�
- �Please give me honesty, openmindedness, willingness and humility.� (The four essentials for sobriety listed in the Big Book)
- �How best can I serve thee? Thy will not mine be done�
This is a daily reminder to ourselves that we have taken Step 3 and are being looked after.
Morning Meditation
Read the Just for Today card, think about how it might apply to your life and ask your HP to help you to live up to its ideal. Also, re-view the previous night�s gratitude list. These are two ancient forms of meditation. Reading the Just for Today card is a meditation upon how we can improve upon how we behave, then we resove to do better and ask for God�s help in aiming for that ideal. Contemplation of the gifts that God gives us in our gratitude list reminds us that all we have that is good and all we achieve ourselves is down to the grace of God. It is also indisputable written evidence that God is looking after us and that the day is good regardless of how I feel about it.
Quiet-time meditation as described in the Big Book.
We set ourselves up with the following prayers
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�Please show me today what I can do for the man who is still sick.�
- �Please show me the way of patience, kindness, tolerance and love.�
- �Please direct my thinking, let it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.�
Now sit quietly for, perhaps, 10-20 minutes. At the end we say:
- �Please show me all through the day what my next step is to be and give me whatever I need to take care of such problems. Please give me freedom from self-will.�
During the day
When agitated, doubtful or fearful: �God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.�
When angry annoyed with someone, pray for the person, eg: �Please God give XXX everything I would wish for myself.�
When we retire at night
Write a gratitude list (see also the morning prayers) and thank your Higher Power for what you have been given and give Him the credit for our achievements � as Bill W says in the Big Book, he realized that �of myself I was nothing; that without Him I was lost�.
On our knees we say:
- �Thank you God for keeping me sober today�
-- the most important item of all on our gratitude list and perhaps the greatest gift from God for that day.