I greet The Indwelling Greeter.
Today’s “Pay Forward” gift is - Blessed Social Skills. My older brother never met a stranger. He already had that gift when we were teenagers. Even adults loved his presence. We were snowed in the Chicago Airport for three days. By the time the lock-down was over, he knew something about almost everyone there. I was pretending I was reading a book so people would leave me alone. That little trip more or less sums up the difference between my brother and I. Somehow he mastered wonderful social skills; perhaps it was a gift of grace, or he worked on it in another lifetime. He knew nothing about A.A.’s Traditions, but he just intuitively lived some of them. “Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.” He spontaneously found something in “strangers” he identified with. The basis for friendship and shared it. “The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.” The beginning requirement for a relationship is to want it. He demonstrated that desire by reaching out to others, without qualifying them first. I have a long way to go before I can express the social skills my brother had. I need those loving tools to come to me by grace. I’m willing to work on acquiring them in this lifetime; hoping the practice will carry over in the next life, if there is one. Thy Love, Thy Will be done.