We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
Surrender
Is this surrender, or humility? Surrender is what you do in the middle of the fight, and you quit. But, when you have lost the fight, don’t call that surrender. That is accepting reality. This is a big step, it is the foundational step.
Before you can use directions to get somewhere, you need to know where your starting point is. For example, the directions to getting to New York City, where I was born, start with where you are NOW.
If you don’t know that alcohol, or whatever your “drug-of-choice” is, has beaten you beyond control, how can you get back into the driver’s seat? If you say that you haven’t been beaten, then you don’t need this program, do you? It is not for those that think they can manage on their own or are still trying to be a “Lone Ranger” in their spiritual walk.
Sounds Familiar!
This is a lot like admitting we are sinners and can’t make ourselves clean, doesn’t it?
This is why many people say that you are “talking-to-the-bottle” if the drunk hasn’t hit bottom yet. If doing it your way is so good, why are you reading this?
This is why I pray that all drunks, addicts, etc. have it so bad that they do hit bottom. That’s when they have a chance to turn their life around. Only when their life can’t “get-any-worse-than-this”, can they start upward.
Hitting Bottom
Yet, if they think that they still can handle it and that everyone else is hounding them, maybe they should read “The Big Book” and see why this was made the first step by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. Not by preachers or doctors or therapists or “experts”, but by people who have walked the path. They know what it’s like to be wanting their dreams and their hopes and their futures back from where they had been lost.
Someone said: “Addiction is giving up everything for one thing. Recovery is giving up one thing for everything.”
Anyone who does what they want when they want is trapped by their desires. They cannot be free because they are trapped in a very “comfortable” and self-serving trap. It is a trap when you realize where those desires are taking them in the long run. We all have to learn to break free of what we want so that we can be a bigger part of the wonders and goodness of life.
Oh, you are not insane? I see. If using your drug of choice has given you such a rotten life so far, isn’t it insane to think that it will do you any differently in the future? Instead of looking only 6 or 7 hours ahead (if that far), look a week ahead, or even a month. A friend of ours defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. Another has said, “we can not solve problems with the same thinking that created them.”
Please comment and/or respond to what you heard inside of you as you read this! Let’s share!
To see and use Personalized Scriptures, visit YouIntheBible.org and enjoy!
The Steps
- Introduction
- Step 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Step 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.