Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Back in Chapter 5: How It Works we were posed with the question of if you are willing to go to any length for you sobriety. Here in Step 9 we find a direct link to that call to action. pg. 76 " Remember it was agreed at the beginning we would go to any lengths for victory over alcohol."
Bob S. would realize this after his last drunk immediately following surgery on that fate-filled day of June 10, 1035. He had been working with Bill W. for some time now but hadn't been willing to make restitution as the Oxford Group had defined it, Bill W. would later revise this to be our Step 9. But after his last drunk at the Atlantic City medical convention he was late to come home that night. Bill W. and Lois waited up for him, worried he'd gone at it again. But Bob S. was so convinced that he had to give his program of action everything he had he went up and down the streets of Akron making amends to everyone he could encounter.
[references in Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers]
9th Step Promises, pg. 83-84 " If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the
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word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us--sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them."
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