What We Could Not Do for Ourselves

I can remember the first time I read the following sentence from chapter five of the Big Book: "We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection." I was sitting at a Big Book meeting, only a few months into the program, still pretty shaky and confused. But those words gave me a feeling of release and freedom such as I had never experienced in all my thirty-one years as a "religious woman." Here I was, an alcoholic, a young girl child (in the guise of a woman!), and "religious" by profession, hearing, for the first time, that God did not expect me to be "perfect." What a relief!