“We had to stop playing God. It didn’t work.” — Big Book, p. 62
Many of us came in with old ideas about God — punishing, keeping score, watching us in the dark, judging, waiting for us to mess up. When we inspected each idea and asked where it came from, those ideas usually didn’t come from any real spiritual experience. They came from parents, authority figures, movies, or our own sick minds trying to make sense of a world that felt unsafe.
Looking back, when we got upset, didn’t we often act in those same ways? We punished. We kept score. We judged. We gossiped. We decided who was in and who was out. We played the God of our understanding. No wonder our relationships were a mess — we were trying to manage the universe and couldn’t even manage our own lives without punishment.
If some of the ideas we carried were as sick as we were, it’s no surprise they didn’t work. We needed new ideas — not to look like saints, but to live in a way that didn’t make everything harder.
What’s one old idea you let go of that helped you stop burning bridges in moments of stress?
