Picking up chips
If you know someone who has been in Alcoholics Anonymous for any length of time, ask them to show you their “chip”. When an AA member hits a milestone, they “pick up a chip”. The first milestone is when the member hasn’t taken a drink for 30 days. Later in sobriety, chips won’t be picked up as frequently, but those first days are often the toughest.
I had a friend in Al-Anon, a group designed to support friends and family members of alcoholics, who came to recognize how tough it can be to remain sober. She had tried to work on her own defects of character by determining to eliminate a particular pesky flaw “a day at a time”. Her objective was to “pick up chips” as time went on in order to mark her own progress. She found that it was extremely difficult – almost impossible – to keep from slipping. In fact, when I last saw her, she hadn’t been able to pick up a 30-day chip.
Which brings me to the point of today’s post. St. Therese of Lisieux wrote the following words in her autobiography, “The Story of a Soul”:
I resolved to lead a life of grater devoutness and mortification than ever before. When I speak of mortification, I don’t mean the kind of penance practiced by saints. There are great souls who practice every sort of mortification from childhood, but I am not like them. All I did was to break my self-will, check a hasty reply, and do little kindnesses without making a fuss about them – and lots of other similar things.
It is her faithfulness in little things that ultimately led to her being recognized as a saint and which earned her the title of “Doctor of the Church”.
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