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Writer's pictureSober AA Member

Letting Go of Baggage - The Upper Room

Letting Go of Baggage

Larry Scanlan (Maryland, USA)


Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken. - Psalm 55:22 (NIV)


When I traveled for business, there was one small Midwest airport where a number of times I encountered a frustrating experience. After the doors were securely closed, and while preparing for takeoff on a small propeller airplane, I would see the ground crew pulling checked-in bags from the airplane. Several...


TODAY'S PRAYER Dear God, thank you for your loving plan of salvation. We give thanks for our Savior who helps to carry our burdens. Amen.


1 Peter 5:6-11


6 Therefore, humble yourselves under God’s power so that he may raise you up in the last day. 7 Throw all your anxiety onto him, because he cares about you. 8 Be clearheaded. Keep alert. Your accuser, the devil, is on the prowl like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. 9 Resist him, standing firm in the faith. Do so in the knowledge that your fellow believers are enduring the same suffering throughout the world. 10 After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, the one who called you into his eternal glory in Christ Jesus, will himself restore, empower, strengthen, and establish you. 11 To him be power forever and always. Amen.



THOUGHT FOR THE DAY It is not weakness but strength that allows me to put my struggles in God’s hands.


PRAYER FOCUS Luggage handlers



Gottawanna find love and peace thank you God, thank you Al-Anon, thank you Alcoholics Anonymous


The Upper Room was the original devotional that early AA Members used and read.


they also used The Upper Room, a Methodist publication that provided a daily inspirational message, interdenominational in its approach.


Usually, the person who led the Wednesday meeting took something from The Upper Room [the Methodist periodical mentioned earlier] or some other literature as a subject. S


“Then there was that little nickel book The Upper Room,” she recalled. “They figured we could afford a nickel for spiritual reading. They impressed on us that we had to read that absolutely every morning. There wasn’t any well-equipped bathroom in A.A. that didn’t have a copy. And if you didn’t see it opened to the right day, you immediately began to suspect them.”



Bill Wilson remembered a time when four drunks, still shaking and not knowing what it was about, were staying with Wally and Annabelle. “They would start out in the morning reading from The Upper Room and say the prayers,” he recalled. “



Thank you for your love and prayers - thank you for reading this - thank you God bless you for the healing by being here you are blessing us.


The Books And Materials Early AAs Read

By Dick B.

Early AAs were readers. The Bible was the written word of God. The daily devotionals were written guides. Oxford Group people wrote. Sam Shoemaker wrote. Anne Smith wrote. And there were a great many books available for reading. Dr. Bob was an avid reader, and so was his colleague Henrietta Seiberling. Every pioneer A.A. meeting had tables set out in T. Henry’s house where literature was available. Dr. Bob recommended and circulated many books. He kept a journal which recorded the books loaned, and he quizzed the alcoholics on the Bible and on the written materials they had borrowed from him. Whatever their proclivity for reading, early AAs all attested to the presence of the Bible and The Upper Room. They mentioned The Runner’s Bible. They mentioned E. Stanley Jones books. They mentioned Henry Drummond’s The Greatest Thing in the World. They mentioned My Utmost for His Highest. They mentioned James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh. They mentioned the popular Glenn Clark books, Emmet Fox books, and Harry Emerson Fosdick books. There were religious books, and almost every one elaborated on some aspect of ideas AAs were borrowing from the Bible and the Oxford Group for their basic principles.

There was plenty of material on the Bible, prayer, healing, divine guidance, the Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13, and the Book of James. There were Oxford Group/Shoemaker materials on finding God, changing lives, conversion, the guidance of God, fellowship, witness, and the teachings of Jesus. There has, perhaps, never been a fellowship with such diversity of subject matter at the immediate beck and call of its participants. Nor with such encouragement of its study by the “leadership.”





KDTAHGSDRSG



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