Daylight Savings

Our cats’ favorite time of day is at bedtime, when I give them their treats.  Each cat gets treats in their own way:  Seamus gets a handful on the kitchen floor.  Carrick loves to chase them, so I toss his treats, one by one, across the room.  And then there’s Mackin.  He is, as always, reticent, unsure, and watchful.  I have to approach him slowly and hand him a couple of treats, then back away. He circles his treats as if they were poison pellets, then very slowly eats them.  In the past few months, though, Mackin has  started creeping up to me when he sees me give his brothers their treats.  I give him two, and he eats them and runs away and hides.  A couple of weeks ago, Mackin ate his two treats, then slinked up to me and meowed, so I gave him a couple more.  For the last several nights, he’s let me give him two treats, then asks me for more.  I said to him last night, “Oh, Mackin. How many times did we have to go through this?  You’re such a sweet boy, but you’re a very slow learner.”

The minute the words were out of my mouth, I looked up.  And I said to God, Who I’m sure was smiling, “Ooooooh.  Is this what You feel like?”  All week, I’d been worried over a problem that looms in my future.  I’d prayed about it and asked God what to do.  And all week, God had been giving me the same answer: “You’re not there yet.  Let’s take care of today.”  I have to admit that I said to God, “Uh, no thanks.  That’s not the answer I want.  I need to know today exactly how to solve this problem.”  Instead, I kept hearing and seeing God’s message, “one day at a time,” in many, many ways.  I opened a kitchen cabinet and saw my coffee mug that says, “One day at a time.”  At the end of one of my recovery meetings, when we said the Lord’s Prayer, the man next to me put extra emphasis on “this day”—“Give us this day our daily bread.” When I needed something to write a grocery list on, I grabbed the closest thing to write on, turned it over, and it was my copy of “The Daily Bread.”  I read my morning meditation books, and their titles jumped out at me: “Daily Reflections” and “24 Hours.”  And yesterday, I was looking up a verse in my Bible, and instead opened it to this verse: “Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34)

God had been giving me an answer all week, loud and clear. He’d been giving me incontrovertible truth again and again. Like Mackin, I had all the data.  I had history.  I had proof.  And I still wasn’t learning the lesson.  Talk about a slow learner!  At the beginning of my recovery journey, I had clung to the “one day at a time” concept.  I had to—because if I looked into the future, I became almost frozen with fear.  How could I possibly live the rest of my life this way?  When I voiced that fear to my sponsor, he told me to forget about the rest of my life and answer the question “Can you do it today?  Just for today, can you stay sober?”  I could, and I did.  I still am.  But only if I take it one day at a time.

So I’m very familiar with the concept of living one day at a time.  And I knew it had, quite often, been my saving grace.  So why wasn’t I applying such a time-tested principle to my current problem?  I realized, finally, that “one day at a time” doesn’t just apply to sobriety.  It applies to exactly where I am right now.  So I’m working on concerning myself with today only.  The future will happen, and I can trust that God will be right there with me when it does.  Mackin and I may be slow learners, but we do learn.  Day by day—we learn.