Back in the saddle......

Back from vacation and for once it was a vacation. We didn't worry about meals ( only cooked one planned meal a day:dinner), but we were blessed with great weather, warmth, abundant sunshine, swimming, kayaking, walking, camp fires, laughing and sleeping deep at night. We are all tanned and much rested. I even managed to read 400 pages and finish my book (The Girl Who Played with Fire) but am frustrated at the ending and will be picking up the sequal :The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest so I won't go crazy wondering what happens....my disease likes closure so to end a book without a conclusion drives me nuts! But what a joy to have this time away. Back to work and mounds of emails and tasks. Something has once again shifted. (if you haven't noticed I have a lot of these "shifts"). I can feel my husband rolling his eyes as I'm typing this (lol) I couldn't put my finger on what has been bothering me for the last few weeks until I stepped away from it. I had a conversation with my sponsor shortly before I left and we were talking about integrity. How difficult it can be to find. We live in a town of around 47,000.00 people with neighboring areas that bring the population up to around 65,000.00. We have an Alano club where I attend all my meetings. But I've been struggling because of what goes on there. There is a lot of 13th. stepping, lots of gossip, lots of garbage that I know better than to get mixed up in. Don't get me wrong, there are also so many awesome people there but I was struggling with some meeting leaders that I know have drank, and not owned up to it, and just some of the behavior in general has been less than desirable. So when I was on vacation I called the AA hotline to get meeting times for the town I was in when it hit me. It's time to look outside the box. There are many meetings at local churches and various places that may not have all the drama the Alano club does. It's time for me to head in a new direction. I will keep two of the meetings I attend at the Alano club because they are small and intimate but I've already switched my schedule up for this week. It's also time to get back to church. I took a hiatus this past winter. I needed to work things out. I have struggled for years with "orgnized" religon and was so worn out that I just wasn't going for the past few months. I had a conversation with someone I admire and they pointed out to me "Church is your community, it's your public walk with other people, your religon is your personal relationship with Christ." For the first time in my life it made sense. I was always trying to have the relationship through the church, the members, the pastors etc... and ignoring the relationship that I needed to be focusing my energies on. That bit of truth released so many misgivings I have been having. My relationship with God is just that "my relationship". This has brought me a sense of peace I did not have before. It's also time to get back out there. To volunteer again, to give of myself. I have carefully isolated certain parts of my life and of course having the disease of alcoholism gave me the perfect excuse. I'm ready to set the excuses aside and get right back into the saddle. It's time to walk from the darkness into the light and start the path back to living.....