I Guarantee

Guarantee: To promise that some condition holds or will be fulfilled.

I try to avoid statements that suggest any guarantees in life but here's one anyway: you are not always going to get what you want and you are not going to be able to avoid the occasional unpleasantness of life.  I guarantee the veracity of that statement.  I also guarantee that if you stay sober and clean and you try to develop a spiritual life to the best of your ability that everything is going to be just fine.  Whatever you're worried about right now?  It's probably not going to amount to a hill of beans in short order and it does end up amounting to a mountain of beans then you're going to have the tools to navigate through to a safe harbour.  Sorry about the pain part and sorry that you're going to be denied a lot of the shallow, self-satisfied things that you want . . . but it's all going to be just fine.

"It may be possible to find explanations of spiritual experiences such as ours, but I have often tried to explain my own and have succeeded only in giving the story of it.  I know the feeling it gave me and the results it brought, but I realize I may never fully understand it's deeper why and how."

Bill W

"In learning to practice these steps in my daily living I began to acquire faith and a philosophy to live by.  Whole new vistas were opened up for me, new avenues of experience to be explored, and life began to take on color and interest.  In time, I found myself looking forward to each new day with pleasurable anticipation.  Alcoholics Anonymous is not a plan for recovery that can be finished and done with.  It is a way of life, and the challenge contained in its principles is great enough to keep any human being striving for as long as he lives.   . . . limitless expansion.  There is no more 'aloneness,' with that awful ache, so deep in the heart of every alcoholic that nothing, before, could ever reach it.  That ache is gone and never need return again."

Keys to the Kingdom - The Big Book