“You know the difference between you and God? God doesn’t think he’s you.”— old AA wisdom
“Selfish? Who, me? I’m the most caring guy I know.”
That’s the tricky part about self-centeredness — it’s blinding. We rarely see it in ourselves. Everyone else can see it just fine, but to us it looks like concern, responsibility, or just trying to make things work out the right way. This is one reason sponsors are so necessary. They can help us slow things down and put a pause between a thought and an action. That little pause alone can save us from a lot of trouble.
We put ourselves at the center of the universe and tried to manage everything around us. At first it might have looked small — wiggling out of responsibilities or sidestepping things so we could relax and kick back with a cold one. But that “kick back time” started taking up more and more space.
Before long, many of us were either drinking or thinking about drinking most of the time.
And behind the scenes we were managing everything we could to protect it. Manipulating people. Manipulating situations. Lying. Sometimes stealing — being hungover at work, not working up to our full potential, wasting parts of our paychecks the family trusted us to bring home, stealing time away from our kids who wondered where we were — whatever it took to feed the secret nature of our drinking.
For us, it’s just like that.
Through grace we finally stumbled our way into AA and heard about a new way of living. We start hearing about faith, spiritual growth, and a power greater than ourselves. And somewhere along the way we bump into a hard truth: our old ways just aren’t going to work anymore.
If we want anything close to a spiritual life, the first thing that has to go is the job we were never qualified for in the first place — playing God. Why? Because it didn’t work. Obviously.
If we truly want rid of this selfishness, we’re going to need God’s help. Left to ourselves, we end up doing what we’ve always done — taking a deep dive into self and trying to fix self with more self. It just magnifies the problem.
What situation in your life right now would probably improve if you stopped trying to run it?
