One's understanding of faith and life begins at home, I think, because home is the place where one first experiences everything from authority to autonomy. On the one hand, my parents provided me with food, shelter and educational opportunities. On the other hand, they were prone to emotional outbursts, which led to feeling unsafe and unsure of how to pursue thriving relationships.
Looking to protect myself, I retreated into books. With this education, I distanced myself from faith and life and expected good things to happen by virtue of my accomplishments. When life did not meet my expectations, I drank, and then I drank some more. Now I attend meetings with other men and women who sabotaged their lives with lofty expectations.
AA's third step calls for a decisive action: to turn one's will and one's life over to the care of God as one understands God. This statement assumes: 1) that one knows what one's will for his or her life is; 2) that one is able to experience God's care; and 3) that one's understanding of God allows for a meaningful relationship to exist between this person and God.
As an adult, I have changed cities and jobs often. Every time that I transitioned from one situation to the next, I was abundantly clear about why I was making this change. I have pursued different career paths and seem to prefer whichever one I am not pursuing at the time. Since becoming a member of AA, I am clearer about the nature of the work that I find fulfilling, but I am less certain about what this work looks like in everyday life. By understanding who I am, I am better able to be in a relationship with anybody, including God, and to follow wherever God leads me in recovery.
It is difficult to understand why I was reluctant to turn my will and my life over to anybody or anything, especially God, before coming into the program, because, as an active alcoholic, I was never in control. I was controlling in professional and personal relationships, but I was not disciplined enough to achieve, much less sustain, meaning, magic or success in any area of my life.
Because I was unable to meet the expectations that I set for myself, feelings of failure haunted me. I looked to others to help me in ways that I was unwilling to help other people. When they could not, or would not, help me, then I began to think of the world as a cruel and harsh place. I did not trust anybody, especially myself, because I assumed that everybody was as selfish as me. I felt abandoned by God and neighbor and that nobody was willing to give me a second or third chance. I was not willing to forgive myself or anybody else and assumed that everybody else was as unforgiving as me.
I was raised in a home where Christmas is celebrated and the line between Jesus and Santa is often blurred. As an adult, I have come to think of Christ as compassionate and God as forgiving, although I was taught from an early age that God gives commandments to an imperfect people and then judges them for being imperfect. Christmas seemed like a time to pay off the emotional debts of the past year. All was to be forgiven if the parents spent enough money on gifts. In the end, I believed in asking for presents but not in forgiveness. Now I believe in humility, which asks for nothing but peace.
The God of my understanding is forgiving and empowering, and I am finding that the more that I trust this understanding of God, the better I feel about myself and about other people. I feel safe more often than I feel threatened. I am more forgiving, because I feel forgiven. Even though the third step seems to emphasize understanding God, I am finding that the third step is actually about experiencing God as a peaceful presence in one's life, work and relationships, especially those circumstances in which peace is brought about only through forgiveness.
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