Well as early sponsors use to say expectations are pre meditated resentments. However, after nearly forty years of sobriety I can say that there is much you can expect IF, you stay with the program and allow the steps to become a way of life.
Lets start at the beginning.
The first big thing was the desire to drink went away. Just as the book said, it was as if it were removed, taken away. After nearly twenty years of alcohol addiction that was a flipping miracle.
I wondered…If God can do that, what else could He do?
Then with sober time and working the steps I started to find out…
Others told me I was looking better and I started feeling better. I found I could belly laugh again, usually at myself. I started to have money in my pocket, where as before there was none. I stopped having car accidents. I started sleeping, even dreaming at night. General living problems started to go away as I became more responsible. I was told I was beginning to love myself in a new balanced way and as a result I was able to really love others and be loved by them. I excelled in education. So many people came back into my life. I was no longer alone and isolated. I started to develop a new sense of purpose. I was getting recognized for my abilities instead of my liabilities. Depression left and the new happiness came. Faith replaced fear.
I found a true real relationship with God.
So as not as to go on and on which I could, let me say this in closing. I realized speaking with a good friend over coffee just yesterday morning that it was really always about that plaque on Dr. Bob desk. The plaque defining humility. That was the real prize and had always been in plain sight, I just dismissed because it seemed so unattainable.
Here’s what it says…
"Perpetual quietness of heart. It is to have no trouble. It is never to be fretted or vexed, irritable or sore; to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me.
"It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised, it is to have a blessed home in myself where I can go in and shut the door and pray to my Father in secret and be at peace, as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and about is seeming trouble."
If you have been around a while and you read that, you just may realize that you too, by God’s grace through the fellowship, have attained that wonderful level of new understanding. As they say though, humility is not thinking less of yourself, it thinking of yourself less. So don’t think too much about it all, cause you just may lose what you work so hard to attain.