Step 3 from concept to action

Hi all,

I'm really struggling with step 3 right now (if you hate 12 step programs, I'd appreciate your not sharing). I believe in a higher power but somehow seem unwilling / unable to relinquish control to him/her. Part of my hangup I know goes back to childhood with super bible thumper relatives who really messed me up for organized religion for good. I know that my willpower has done nothing but get me into a whole heap of trouble lately but it also got me a lot of good things before drink intervened so I sometimes thing my drinking is more about the choices I make than my powerless over alcohol. (maybe I need to do more work on steps 1 & 2 too.) I guess what I'm asking with this somewhat rambly post is how do you interpret step three in your life and put it into practice?

Thanks.

---splitimage

Hi Splitmage, I don’t “do” AA. I can’t say that I had much luck with it when I tried it. But, at one time I was an active member, so I know the steps. I do use parts of the steps in my recovery—some of them I modify quite a bit. I think some of the concepts are good tools to keeping me sober and turning me into a better person. Step 3 is one of my favorites.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of god as we understood him.

Today, I believe my higher power to be Knowledge. Turning my will and my life over to the care of knowledge means I follow through with things in a manner that follows my knowledge not my will. Like I know drinking is bad for me. If I don’t listen to that knowledge and put it into action, I will drink. I am making a choice to follow the knowledge not my desire to drink. When I turn the desire to drink over to knowledge, it means I follow through with what the knowledge tells me to do—things that keep me sober—like calling a friend.

I know this is a very different way of looking at things and it might be a little weird, but it works for me.

Split… I sponsor guys and I get asked how do I do it? How do I turn my will and my life over to the care of anything else? I can’t do it! It’s my life, It belongs to me.

I tell them they are in my opinion, going at it the hard way. Instead of thinking about giving my life over to something else, something outside of me, and for that something else to take my life and will, and do what it will with it, I just take my doing step #3 as a promise to myself to do the rest of the steps. Nothing more, nothing less.

Read the Spiritual experience in the back of the Big Book. In it, it states we have tapped an inner resource that we presently identify with this concept of a power greater than ourselves. Not some outside power, but the power that has always been in us. We let it out, we don’t let it in.

So again in my opinion, we turn out will and our lives over to the care of (as President Lincoln put it in a speech once…) “The better angles of our nature.”

I think of all the steps, and the work I must do in order to get and stay sober as the ultimate inside job. All the tools I need to do the job, I was born with.

Stay the course, splitimage. The best is yet to come.
Richard