Grace

I went to my favorite meeting last night - it's my home group. It's a candlelight meeting. We have a reading, a silent meditation, a lead and then comments. There is just something about this particular meeting - there is a peacefulness to it - maybe it's the candlelight. There is a calm when you walk in the room, an intensity, an intimacy. Last night we were talking about grace. The grace of God - what it looks like and how easy it is to miss it, or to convince yourself that you deserve the bad things that happen and don't deserve the good things. How to open yourself up to it, or receive it, or tune into it.

My understanding of it has changed in the time I've been in AA. I have heard it defined all sorts of ways - that grace is an unexpected and undeserved reprieve for which you owe nothing in return. It is a gift. It is as huge as the fact that I am sitting here writing this, and as small as not having to sit in an airport bar with the head of my group while traveling back from a client meeting last Friday. It is as monumental as the ability to surrender, and as insignificant as having patience while waiting in the slow line at the grocery store. It is everything. It is all around you, if you know what to look for.

I have these days sometimes, like lately - these past few days, where my level of peace and serenity is so much higher than what I consider to be my best days, my average days. It's like being on some other plane of spirituality or something. It's hard to describe. There are just days like this - when I have faith, for no other reason except that I just have faith, and it's powerful, it's stronger than normal and it's pretty strong to begin with. There are days when I just believe that it will be okay - that it is okay and that it's right and that belief is based on nothing other than a feeling of connectedness. It's just a feeling.

On days like today, when I feel such serenity, such peace, I know it is because I have achieved real acceptance - real surrender, however fleeting that may be. And it is fleeing. On the days that I accept everything as it is, just exactly as it is, and I believe that it will be okay, no matter what that means, I am able to see the grace all around me.