This episode begin to our look at the second step of the 12 step program. To refresh your memory the second step is:
I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.
When I was first dubbing around you with the 12 step program, I pretty much skipped over the second step. I believe I was like many of us who found ourselves in the grips of whatever life problem constantly hampered us. All I wanted to do at that moment was to get this thing over with. I wanted to find some way to get back to my (normal) life. The fact of the matter was that I really had no normal life. My life was a series of starts, then some advancement, then started drinking all over again, until I lost what meager things I had gained. In those new attempts at life, there always arose from problem area that I needed to deal with. Back then, I never looked for solutions other than drinking. That was normal for me. That was the way I had learned since I was very young, to deal with problems. It had never worked before, yet I continued to try to solve my problems through this method. This is a sign of insanity! Please believe me, if you have any aversion to being thought of as insane, look at what you’ve done in the past. We keep trying to run our lives using the same solutions as before, even though they not only did not work, but ended up making us worse off than we were before.
This, my friends, is one of the sure signs of insanity. We try to continue to solve our life problems with methods that didn’t work before, but that we convince ourselves we will work this time. This is why I say, I know, that unless I can truly believe that there is a higher power that I can look to and depend on, it would be no hope for success in my life. In the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, they pulled no punches. They say, I believe somewhere in the beginning of chapter 5, “,… that one is God, may you find him now”.
I truly, honestly, with all my heart and soul, believe that if we cannot get past this second step, either in this 12 step program or not, will continue to be very much unmanageable. Many of us have had some kind of God figure in our lives at some time, usually when we were younger. That may have included being taught by others what God was all about. It may have included being taught that we had to perform certain actions in order to be on the “good side” of God, and make it into a good, comfortable place when we die. How this all manifests in different religions is not, as far as I’m concerned, the important thing. What I see is the important thing is the direct belief in a personal God as a result of this second step.
The truth about the second step is that it is preparation was step number three. I needed to become a right minded person, or at least get a start on it before I was even able to think about making a commitment to a higher power. And while I’m at it, thinking about the whole purpose of this podcast and all of my writing in my books, I would just as soon forget this term higher power. It is just term that’s been put into the program to make it easier for us to adhere to something that was beyond ourselves. I need to get my ego out of the way when thinking about God. One might think they are not going to give any particular thing that they have heard of before control over their lives. Oh, please, let’s get our egos out of the way! I will tell you right now that for me, God is God, with no if’s, ands or butts that might go along with His name. This is the God that we come to believe in, in the second step. It is not the God that you find in church, and synagogue, or in the mosque. It is the God that is that eternal spark, (essence, if you will), that we discover within. It is that spark I become aware of an
