Last night my wife wanted to spend time together at the end of the evening when I was trying to do my review so this is a review of yesterday, Sunday (it is 5:00 am Monday).

Yesterday morning I found the initiative to get all 4 kids dressed and take them to the 9:00 am mass by myself. I knew that my wife was going to a job at 12:00 noon so we had planned to all go at 9:00 am. When she didn't wake up (because she was up doing homework until 2:00 am)I resolved to at least take the boys myself. But, then I went ahead and got the oldest girl dressed and then the youngest so I incrementally got up the willingness to try and take them all.

It went very well with only a few short, uncomfortable burst of bawling from my youngest when we first arrived and some normal level messing around by the middle children during mass. But all in all I got to have a great worship and communion all things considered. Our readings were about the rich young man (who kept the commandments all his life) who asked what it would take to enter the kingdom of heaven and Jesus told him his one obstacle would be to leave all he owned and follow Him. I noted that the responsorial psalm was "blessed are the poor of spirit". I thought about how this might mean that the downgtrodden don't have worldly attachments to deter them.

I was grateful that I never felt resentful while managing the kids for mass.

In the afternoon I found the initiative to do a lot of housework, cleaning, and kid maintenance. Even through a football game. in the afternoon I turned off the TV and we had a nice stew dinner in a clean house on a cool day.

When my wife came home I sort of insisted that I go to a meeting even though I had been last night. Our topic was the reading "selfishness, self-centeredness, that we think is the root of our troubles". I thought about how I always thought this was only the religious view of the cause of my using problem and that the real psychological cause would be revealed in the inventory process to be much more complex than that. I thought about how i never liked the repeated self-bashing that seemed to be prevalent in the text.

I thought about how recently I had an epiphany of how the program had given me a new paradigm, of how when I tried to codify this I concluded that every time I have a problem that self is the first place I need to look for the solution. That all my disturbances arise from self regardless of what the cause is. They arrive from some form of mis-directed instinct in my inner self. The reading lists some of these forms of self shortly after the initial sentence but I initially attached these to fear and I had not reached that point of the inventory which showed me how fear drove my mis-directed instinct yet when I formed my initial conception.

I was grateful to get to go to the meeting.

Thanks be to God.