An AA club in the area where I used to live had a main meeting room with only one decoration, other than the usual display of the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. It was a little sign on the table at the front of the room, and it said quite simply, Expect a Miracle

If we are members of 12-Step programs, we are used to seeing the miracle -- the miracle of recovery from our basic addiction. Since the AA Big Book was written, the focus has been increasingly on that miracle of basic recovery, and less and less on the other and far more comprehensive miracle promised after Step Nine. Sometimes it seems as though AAs would scarcely notice if the second half of page 84 and pages 85-88 of the Big Book went missing altogether.

Something has almost been lost over the decades since the founding of AA: the second and greater miracle of Program. For the promise of the Twelve Steps is not merely recovery from our basic addiction: it's the promise that that same miracle can be repeated for every aspect of our lives, that we can reach a point where our other supposed "problems" quite literally disappear and we become transformed into people we barely recognize.

The odd thing about the Twelve Promises on pages 83-84 of the AA Big Book is that we tend to think these are things that we are going to get. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Promises at heart are not about Me getting anything but about Me losing Me. When I begin to lose Me, the second and greater miracle begins to manifest itself in my life.