Wisdom Of The Rooms - 2024

[bluidkiti]

September 23

Quote of the Week

"We are responsible for the effort, not the outcome."

When I entered sobriety, I didn’t know how I was ever going to fix everything in my life. All the relationships I had ruined, all the bridges to jobs and opportunities I had burned—there didn’t seem any way I could control and manipulate everything back into place. How was I going to get all the people I had stolen from to forgive me? How was I going to get healthy after all the abuse I’d inflicted on myself? How was I going to get my family to trust me again? I didn’t think I could pull it off.

Luckily, my sponsor assured me that I didn’t have to. In fact, he told me I could never be responsible for other people’s attitudes and reactions to me. That wasn’t my job. Instead, he told me my job was to stay sober, clean house, and take the next indicated action. In doing my Ninth Step, he told me I was responsible for admitting my faults and making sincere amends. Whether someone forgave me or not wasn’t up to me. I was responsible for the effort, not the outcome.

Learning to let go of outcomes wasn’t easy for me. After a lifetime of trying to arrange life—including other’s reactions and opinions—to suit myself, simply taking the right actions and leaving the results up to God seemed impossible. But the miracle is that every time I follow God’s will and not my own, wondrous and unexpected outcomes flow into my and other people’s lives. Plus, now that I know I’m not responsible for all the outcomes in the world, I’m able to live a life that can be happy, joyous, and even free.