Beautify every struggle. Fear and hate perpetuate the problems of our world. If a person is not in a recovery program, especially the 12-Step Program, the following might not make a lot of sense.
The Ultimate Authority in our meeting is aligning with God as God understands us. The closer we get to God, the farther away our ostensible problems become. There’s only one problem that we have. It contains all problems and that problem is Separation Consciousness (sin, if you prefer).
Conscious separation ensconced within our consciousness is that tiny mad idea that we the created exist separate from God as if we could be plucked from God’s Hand.
The hard push toward the light or the answer to life’s riddle is that ‘how do we experience conscious contact with God?’
This simple question would be kind of boring or seriously challenging to the ego because someone would come along and perhaps talk about their spouse leaving them through either death or divorce…feel that? That’s what I’m talking about.
What if your spouse left you, but then you ‘improved your conscious contact with God’ and therefore life got a lot better and saw your spouse as happy on earth or in heaven and you were grateful for it?
Or what if your ego says ‘I just lost my job’ but your spirit responded and said, ‘I improved my conscious contact with God and life got better’ or ‘my’ political candidate lost…so you have the same damn answer for everything and everyone and that leaves us in a very boring, uncreative position. Boredom comes from a boring mind because we don’t see life as life is, we see life as we are. If we have our God Glasses on, then all we see is God.
Fear knocked on the door. Faith answered. No one was there. God said, “Fear is not of Me.’
‘The world is addicted to judgment’ is what Greg Boyd wrote in his book, Repenting of Religion. Our ego causes us to come up with solutions that require problems. We could call it ‘doing the legwork’ or ‘it’s an Action Program’ and leave God out entirely. God helps us do the legwork. Since we have turned our lives and will over to the care of God, ‘our’ problems are no longer ‘ours.’ Every burden or defect of character is no longer ours. The great character defects that all of us have is what? That sometimes our ego recognizes a character defect as ‘self-sufficiency,’ ‘pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps’, or ‘having a spine.’
To me, self-sufficiency is averse to spirituality, yet it becomes something that we feel is good. Now maybe it’s ‘good’ in this material world that was trying to live in and to evolve within, yet it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. One of the paradoxical problems with spirituality is that it works even when we are ready to freak out about something. Unconditional Grace is often disguised as an enemy but is actually a spiritual advisor.
Have a Spiritual Advisor, (NOT a God Mediator ‘middle man’) to take you along for hikes through spiritual domains. Do this and things get better, and you feel much better about yourself, feel much better about the world, and you really are grateful to God for this new Outlook that you have on life (a return to sanity). And it actually feels like you have been made stronger because of all the difficulties we perceive of the world.
And that you had been returned to a place we really don’t need help as much as when you were brand-new. Y’all relate to that? Do you see how the ego sees subtle things, but your spirit doesn’t? That is, you experience an intuitive feeling that when you’re really grateful to God for putting you EXACTLY in a place where you don’t need problems to solve, life gets better and better.
I want to express my gratitude to God for allowing (not causing) our doing that which is very sneaky…lol…so many ways of Easing God Out (EGO) and hitting our bottom (becoming powerless so God could be allowed back in through our now free agency, which sobriety affords.
Easing God ‘In” through acceptance is key. But as the saying goes, everything we let go of had claw marks all over it. LOL! We know what happens within a short time when we ‘take our will back’ rather than practice acceptance in all of our affairs, then the world called FREEDOM collapses because we are now overthinking and handling everything that’s wrong in life through ‘self-sufficiency’.
But like all else, everything is just a wonderful opportunity for spiritual growth…life becomes just one of the tough things to fight off through ‘letting go’ (a cessation of fighting everything and everybody). This is why it’s fun to have close advisers or sponsors, so they can tell us when we’re caving-in to self-sufficiency.
Maybe when you’re handling things on your own too much. The cause of individual pursuit without union with our Higher Power is a pursuit of unachievable happiness (sought through prayer and meditation only for knowledge of God’s will for our lives, and the Power to carry it out).
Self-sufficiency never goes far enough…far enough that we don’t get conscious that the pain of separation is self-made. That we could have and we can come to the conclusion that the CT-Scan (Step 4) read by the Ultimate Doctor (in Step Five) yields this a lifetime job of letting go of everything we think we know about our defects of character.
Some might even erroneously believe that without recovery meetings we’re going fall by the wayside and relapse. There is One who has ALL Power is pleasing to the spirit, but to the ego, there is no such thing as an ‘absolute’ (ALL) and perfect release from alcohol-ism can’t be complete or perfect…even though Bill writes about it in the Sixth Step.
Therefore rather than being addicted to alcohol, the ego is addicted to thinking for itself. Because nothing is wasted in God’s Economy, even the misuse of ego AKA ‘willpower’ is a step in the right direction, for it brings us to a state of powerlessness and the beginning of true freedom. But it is still shy of being wholly connected with God, so we come to believe we could be restored to our original condition of perfection and then turn our will and our lives over to the care of God (as we understand God).
I love you. Pass it on. Step 12.
