Step by Step Sunday, July 23, 2023 “I took everything that AA had to give me. Easy does it, first things first, one day at a time. It was at that point that I reached surrender. I heard one very ill woman say that she didn’t believe in the surrender part of the AA program. …Surrender to me has meant the ability to run my home, to face my responsibilities as they should be faced, to take life as it comes to me day by day, and work my problems out. That’s what surrender has meant to me. I surrendered once to the bottle, and I couldn’t do these things.” — Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, 1976, Part II (“They Stopped in Time”), Ch. 4 (“The Housewife Who Drank at Home”), p 340. Today, surrender and its various interpretations that can be integrated into my own recovery. While surrender arguably may be interpreted most often as entrusting our very lives to a Higher Power, surrendering is also regaining the ability to take back and carry out our responsibilities and meet problems head-on and work them out. This requires sobriety and being clean. Today, I long for those promises of recovery and, today, I become responsible enough to work for them. And our common journey continues. Step by step. — Chris M., 2023