“I don’t have a problem with God — it’s His fan club that scares me.”
We sat around way too long in meetings doing that internal hostage negotiation:
“Okay… so I’ve gotta turn it over to God to keep from drinking. Fine. But what will that make me then?”
Was AA telling us we had to act like the people we’d met in church? Didn’t we, in fact, deem some of those folks hypocrites — checking in on Sunday, then living however they wanted the rest of the week? If staying sober meant becoming a hypocrite, no thanks. At least when we were drinking, we understood ourselves. It felt honest enough. Disgusting and ugly, sure — but honest to ourselves.
Deep down, did we really doubt what the power of God could do for us — or did we doubt the “people of faith” we had known up to that point? Did we confuse the idea of God with some religious folks who rubbed us the wrong way? Did we reject the solution entirely just because we didn’t like the people we thought it came from? Were we turning down help from a Higher Power or were we turning down the packaging we thought it came in?
When we finally settled down — when we stopped arguing in our heads long enough to just relax and take it easy — we couldn’t ignore the fact that we had met some real salt-of-the-earth people in both church and AA. People that did good for the sake of doing good. People who weren’t selling anything. People who showed up, told the truth, tried to live decent, and helped somebody for no applause.
Looking back, were we making this decision way bigger than it needed to be? We sat in meetings think, think, thinking… when the answer was almost embarrassingly simple: we don’t have to like everyone’s style to make this work for ourselves.
A God of our understanding gives us the freedom to start fresh and drop prejudice against anything that was holding us back from contented, long term sobriety. We no longer have to fight to prove how it wouldn’t work. We get to start with a clean slate and see how this could work for us.
What helped you move past old assumptions and become open to something new?
