"God either is, or He isn't. What was our choice to be?"
— Alcoholics Anonymous, We Agnostics
Man, that's a big choice.
But the beauty of AA is that we get to make that choice for ourselves.
It's a pretty simple concept. If we believe in a God of our understanding, then we can start to see God's work everywhere when we sincerely look for it. The people who show up at the right time. The doors that open. The lessons hidden inside the struggles. The coincidences that don't always feel like coincidences.
Of course, alcoholics have a way of blocking that channel. Resentment, fear, self-pity, anger, and all the character defects that help us justify those things can make it hard to see anything beyond ourselves. The good news is we have tools for that now. We can clear away the debris if that's what we choose.
If we choose no God, then we'll see no God. Life can look like a random series of events with no deeper meaning. Coincidence is just coincidence. We're just here taking up space, dealing with whatever gets thrown at us today and cleaning up whatever mess showed up.
Maybe that's true. Maybe it isn't.
But if we're going to spend the rest of our lives looking at the world through one of those lenses, it seems worth asking the question the Big Book asks:
What was our choice to be?
When life gets difficult, do you tend to look for meaning or look for someone to blame?
