Good Morning CR Family,

Please see the Recovery Thought of the Day Below.  Also, if you missed CR Friday Night Live, you can check it out here: CR Friday Night Live Recording - May 29th
.
Balancing the Scales

Step 4 - We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord. Lamentations 3:40 NIV

One of the things that I love about Celebrate Recovery is that when it comes to step 4, there is an emphasis on "Balancing the Scales."  What does that mean?  It means that when we get to step 4, we need to also look at the good stuff, rather than just focusing on all of the bad.  This really helped me when I completed my first inventory. As I completed my first inventory, I remember how hard it was.  I remember being overwhelmed with emotion as I wrote out all of my past hurts, habits and hang-ups.  I could only work on it about an hour at a time before needing to take a break. 

When I was about half way though my inventory, I remember sitting down with my sponsor and he asked me, "where are all of the positive things that you have done?"  As I went back and continued to work on my inventory, capturing the positive stuff,  I realized the my mindset starting to change.  Forcing myself to focus on the positive things in my life, helped prevent me from beating myself up too bad.

Another thing that helped me as I completed my first inventory was "balancing the scales,"  as I wrote about the people that had hurt me in the past.  I challenged myself to write one positive thing for every person that was listed in my inventory.  This went a  long ways for me to start to show grace to others and helping be to become ready to complete steps 8 and 9.

What is something good that you have done for yourself or others this past week?  Spend some time thinking about the good stuff and give yourself a pat on the back.

Announcements:

1. If you are in need of prayer, please send your prayer requests to CelebrateRecoveryatCrossroads@gmail.com and we will forward those on to our celebrate recovery prayer team. The Crossroads Church Prayer team would also love to pray for you, so when you send your E-mail, please note if you are okay with us forwarding your prayer request to the church.
2. Fridays at 6:30pm, We are hosting "CR Friday Night Live."   To subscribe to our youtube channel  please click on the following link and select the subscribe button.  CR Youtube Channel Link .  There will be a song or two of worship and then a short recovery based dialog between a couple of CR members.  This will be streamed on youtube. 
3. Fridays we will be hosting on-line open share group meetings at 7:30pm.  There will be one mixed issues group for men and one mixed issues group for women. Men's Open Share Group Sign-Up Link / Women's Open Share Group Sign-Up Link.  These meetings will take place using the Zoom App.  In order to participate you will need a tablet, smart-phone or computer with camera.  In order to ensure confidentiality of these meetings everyone who participates will need to find a private room to set up, have their camera on, so others can see that there is no one else in the room and they will also need to wear a pair of headphones so that they are the only ones that can hear.  This is a free app and you can download it on google play, apple app store or through your web-browser on your computer. For help on how to join a Zoom meeting please click on the the following link, which will take you to their support web-site Zoom Set-Up Help

Blessings,
James U.