Alcoholics Anonymous Beginners & Refresher Class Sessions Prepared by Mike & Kathy L, West Orange, NJ Revision 1.0 May 5, For additional copies visit http://back.to/aabasics on the Internet ____________________________________________________________________________________ 67 (Page 86, ¶ So the book tells us to meditate first thing in the morning. Let’s look at the sentence beginning with, Before we begin, we ask God to direct our thinking Please concentrate on these words fora minute. They are very important. Before we begin- before we begin what Before we begin listening to God. How do we know we’re supposed to listen to God Because, right afterward, it says we ask God to direct our thinking If we ask God to direct our thinking, doesn’t it stand to reason that our next thoughts are going to be from God? We call these thoughts from God Guidance. We’d like to read from a book called What is the Oxford Group It was the Oxford Group’s basic text and one of the source materials Bill used to write the Big Book. On page 60, in the Chapter on “Guidance”, the author writes: “A Quiet Time with the Holy Spirit every morning before the daily toil and common round of the world commences will put us in the right key for the day. These early morning Quiet Times in which God impresses on our minds His counsel become living spots in the routine of ordinary life. The Oxford Group advocates our use of a pencil and notebook so that we may record every God-given thought and idea that comes to us during our time alone with Him, that no detail, however small, maybe lost to us and that we may not shirk the truth about ourselves or any problem, when it comes to us. It is not suggested that everything we write down during our Quiet Times necessarily comes from God. The human mind, being what it is, wanders from concentration at an outside interruption, take up a train of thought it finds hard to discard, invents or remembers a thought of its own. But to those closely in touch with God it becomes easy after a short while to differentiate between spiritual and human messages. In cases of difficulty our guidance can be ‘checked up with the teachings of the Bible [or with the Four
