“Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.”
It doesn’t take long for anyone sober to hear that and say, yeah… I get that now. As we look back over this fourth step, a lot of us are asking, why the hell did we even know half of these people? Without the fourth step, we’d still be asking that question and blaming everybody else.
Before AA, we were headed nowhere, down the road of misery, dragging everyone we loved along for the ride. It wasn’t just us falling apart, it was a tornado ripping through everything around us. Hanging around people we had no business being around, except to get drunk. Now we’re here, in AA, doing the deal, cleaning house, trusting God, trying to help somebody else. We’re hanging around a fellowship built on honesty, unselfishness, purity, and love, and if we stick around long enough and do what they did, that stuff can start to show up in our lives too.
It’s not about being better or worse than anyone out there. The million dollar question is, who do I want to become?
Am I surrounding myself with people who help me grow, or people who help me stay the same?
