Under extreme pressure, diamonds are made...

The challenges I face these days are being met in a very foreign matter. I face them head on, instead of doing the 50-yard lurch and jerk, cowering in the shadows of a bell tower.

I am doing everything differently, including taking direction and making choices and decisions based on the needs of others instead of being based on self.

I have a hurdle to meet tomorrow and have committed to doing so. I am contacting the powers that be and telling them where I am working so they can start garnishing 50 per-cent of my earnings, for past due child support.

Ordinarily I would have waited and let them find me. Which would not be hard to do-they seem to know where I am working most times before I do.

But that would be entirely self-centered and not the next right thing, as uncomfortable and difficult as that is for me.

I can assure you, this decision is not martyr based, it is based on responsibility and commitment.

When my sponsor visited me in the VA hospital, I asked him how to proceed with my life, having turned away from all I had, in order to try and save my life. His response was, "Do everything differently." And so it goes.

I spent the afternoon yesterday at a sober pool party with my sponsor and about 35 other sober adults, and a maybe a dozen children, whom I assume were sober as well. (However there was this six-month old little boy though, demanding and crying and alternately laughing and sleeping, much like me when I was loaded, but who am I to judge.)

I just returned from my Sunday morning meeting, which was on self-centeredness, don't ya know, so as usual, I was right where I was supposed to be.

My sponsor mentioned on the way back to the Ox, that I was selling my Higher Power short. As I have just recently become acquainted with my H.P. and don't know him very well, I think it's understandable.

But we talk every day, so in time, I may learn to trust.