Let Go, Let God...is it that easy?

"God is not moved by my tears, or by my fear. He is only moved by my faith."

That is what my younger brother, Justin, told me two nights ago. It was one of those weird statements that I heard and acknowledged, but it did not sit right. It hung in the back of my throat like a swallow of bad milk.

You mean that if I cry that God does not really care? When I am scared God moves on to listen to someone else?

It was not that I did not understand what Justin was saying. The problem was that, for the first time, I actually understood that statement.

In A.A. we use the term, "Let Go and Let God" quite a bit. What does that mean? It means have faith. I have to believe that God is on my side. I have to believe that if He is on my side then nobody and no "thing" can stand against me. I cannot claim to have faith and then be worried about what is going to happen to my home in this economy. I cannot say that I have faith then stress about what will happen to my job if GM goes bankrupt. I have to let it all go and let God do what he has promised. He is concerned for me and wants what is best for me, but what is best for me is to have complete faith that He will provide for me.

Justin made another comment that made perfect sense to me...for the first time ever. He said that, "fear is faith, just in the wrong thing." Faith is the belief in something not seen. Fear is a belief in something that most likely has not happened yet. So, when I fear for the future of my home, I am believing in something that I cannot see. I have faith in it.

I have come a long way in not worrying about my life, I have not perfected it, but I am making progress in the right direction. I have to let God do His part and I have to do mine. Mine is not to worry about anything, but in all things to give Him praise.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

Johnny

Stumble It!

He is mine, you can't have Him...

Has the Church missed the mark? I think that the Church is an amazing thing and helps so many people find redemption, but I'm not sure it is exactly what God had in mind. I know too many Christians that are in an incredible amount of pain.

I am not even remotely implying that being a Christian makes you somehow immune to this life, but why isn't there more of a difference between Christians and Non-Christians? I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend. He said that a group has been studying things like divorce, bankruptcy, suicide, etc., for past couple of decades and that statistically there was no difference in the percentages if you were a Christian than if you weren't.

I was wondering how that could be. I haven't done any big study on this, but I was reading someone's story in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. She was one of the first women ever in A.A. She loved the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, but couldn't get past the 'Higher Power' thing. One day she became very angry with some people and decided to show them by getting drunk again. This was when she had her spiritual awakening. In that moment she says that it made perfect sense to her. It wasn't about Religion. It was about freedom. Freedom to live.

Isn't that why Jesus came? Not so that I could be Evangelical Free and you could be Catholic, Methodist, Assembly of God, or Pentecostal. He came so that we could be free. I believe that the goal is to get back to that perfect relationship with God that existed in the Garden. I don't recall a lot of rules for Adam and Eve. Actually, there was just one. As soon as they broke that one rule God had a plan to get us back there; back to perfect communion with Him.

I'm always amazed at how an Alcoholic that has had no relationship with God, ever, gets it so much quicker than a "Christian" does. Maybe it is the desperation involved. However, I think that it revolves around maybe the greatest phrase in Alcoholics Anonymous, "The God of your understanding." I have a friend that said to me, "This is my God, you can't have Him. Find your own." He actually said it like a child with his favorite toy in hand. It really offended me, but later I understood what he was saying. Why would I want to worship the God of my friend's understanding? I have had a different life. I have been through different things. And, don't forget that God wants a unique, personal relationship with me. I guess that is why we are all so different, isn't it?

My Dad is a pastor and he gets a little fidgety when we start talking about "Higher Power" and "God of your understanding". The thing to remember is that I grew up knowing my Dad's God, not mine. I grew up understanding someone else's God and I ended up a drunk because that God couldn't possibly love me. He could forgive me, but only because he had too, not because he loved me.

James 4:8 tells us to draw close to God and He will draw close to us. It is personal. It is unique. The Big Book of A.A. says that if you draw near to God that he will reveal Himself to you. Now, who would you rather hear it from; God or me?

I since have found the God of my understanding. He is the God of the Bible that sent his son to die for me, but He is mine. You can't have Him. Go find Him for yourself.

Stay strong,

Johnny



Stumble It!

I am not really working the program

So, I am writing a friend back today about some recovery related issues and something hits me: I am not really working the program.

What! I am on the leadership team of a Mega Church's recovery ministry! How can I not be working a program.

So, I sit down and read through the steps:

• Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable
• Step 2 - Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
• Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
• Step 4 - Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves
• Step 5 - Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
• Step 6 - Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character
• Step 7 - Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
• Step 8 - Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all
• Step 9 - Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others
• Step 10 - Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
• Step 11 - Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out
• Step 12 - Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs

After reading through the steps, guess what I found? I am working my own program. Guess what? It is not working very well.

I adhere to the 'Buffet' style of A.A., "Oh, I will take some of Step 1, a little bit of Step 4, but I am going to pass on Step 5 (I will get some of that on my next trip up). Oh look! They just brought out Step 8! Shoot, it is not prepared the way that I like it. I will just scoop out a smidgen of Step 11 and pass on Step 12 altogether."

I know that it sounds like I am being comical about this, but my heart is very heavy right now. I feel sad.

I emailed my sponsor tonight and told him that it was time to get back to the basics. Start working a program for real and not on my terms, but the way that it was intended to be worked; One day at a time, one step at a time.

Johnny

Stumble It!

I can't do it on my own

My is wife is going to kill me when she reads this, but I laid my motorcycle down today. It was not a big a deal. I was in a parking lot turning right and a truck with a very large trailer was turning towards me and didn't swing out wide enough...he was cutting off my path. If I had kept going his trailer would have hit me.

So, I hit the brakes, but broke the cardinal rule: Before you brake make sure that your motorcycle is not leaning. Well, the bike was leaning and, sure enough, it went right down.

Now, I have a Honda Shadow 1100. It is not a small bike. The owner's manual lists the bike at 678 pounds production weight. There are probably about 50 pounds of extras on it.

I tried. Lord knows that I tried hard to get that bike back up on two wheels. I am not a small guy, but I had no room to work. I was standing in wet grass just on the other side of a curb. I could not even budge it. The guy got out of the truck to help me. Even with both of us it was not that easy to get it back up on its wheels.

As I finished my ride into the office this morning I thought, "what if nobody had helped me?" Well, I would still be there. I am sure that I would have tried any number of a dozen different ways to try to remedy my situation, but I would have failed. Then it dawned on me that I handle most of my life that way; I do not ask for help. I either try different ways to fix my situation, I give up completely, or I try my best to forget about it.

Would it not be completely ridiculous for me to just leave my motorcycle siting in that parking lot rather than ask for help? However, if I am struggling with something like my emotions or my marriage I will try everything that I know then "walk away" from the problem.

In our recovery ministry meeting this past week we talked about "Hiding". I am a hider. I am the proverbial ostrich with its head stuck in the ground. It is weird. Some things I am as open as possible about and other things I just stay closed up on. I can not even really tell you why.

I believe that most of my problem is relationship based. I keep people pretty far away from me. I do not know why, but I am working on it. I do not have great friendships and part of me really hurts because of it. Plus, I know that I can't do this life on my own. I need your help.

Johnny

Stumble It!

Step 2: God, I don't know if you are up there....

We have all seen where the big hero of the movie is desperate. He, or someone that he loves, faces certain doom. On his knees, all sweaty, beaten, and bloodied he looks up and says, "Look, God or whoever you are, if you get me out of this I will never___________."

Here is something that you do not hear everyday about Hollywood: They got it right on this one!

Step 2 for you and I is no different from our humbled hero. He does not really acknowledge God; he does not even know who God is. He simply looks up and says if you are there please help me. That is Step 2.

You see, we have already tried everything that we can think of. Undoubtedly, our movie hero tried to shoot the bad guys, was probably in a car chase with the bad guys, tried his best karate moves on 6 or 7 of the bad guys at once, and still he came up short. He needed help. "I don't know if you are there, but if you are I need your help." I wonder how God feels when he hears that. I believe that my God is almost overwhelmed with joy when one of his kids says that.

Step 2 reads like this: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

People, there is no conversion here. There is no religion. There is no judgment. There is no punishment. This is just a person that has come to the end of a long rope and believes that if there is not a power greater than themselves out there, then they are screwed anyways, so they might as well give it a shot. The wonderful thing about desperate people is that when they give "something a shot" they typically go all out.

Don't kid yourself, A.A. is firmly rooted in Christianity, but you won't hear it talked about much in those rooms. Why not? The relationship is personal and unique. The relationship begins with a simple, "I don't know if you really exist..." Is that not how most relationships start out? First you get to know someone, then you start to trust them, then the love comes. It is no different with God.

So, it does not really matter where you are at with your Hurt, or your Habit, or your Hangup. According to Step 2, all that really matters is that you concede to the fact that there is something greater than you that can help you with these things. Whether you have a name for that "something greater" or not really does not matter.

We have tried to fix things ourselves, just like our movie hero, and we all end up in the same exact position; on our knees, bruised, and bloodied asking for help.

Johnny

I don’t live there anymore, but I do visit sometimes.

After finally finding the courage to stare yourself down and say, “I am going to change”, you dig deep and you change. It feels great. There is so much victory in no longer being a prisoner to yourself.

You coast along in your new found freedom. “Hey, that guy just cut me off and I am not mad! I cannot believe that I ever let the little stuff bother me.”

Then it happens.

That familiar feeling creeps back in and you react. On some level it feels great to release that emotion, but then comes the shame. “I thought I was done with that.”

In A.A. we say that it is all about “Progress, not Perfection”. That is the only way that we can live. Putting too much pressure on ourselves can have the opposite effect. Putting yourself under the microscope can cause you to fall further back into your old self.

When we fall back into our old ways, the best that we can do is to recognize it and move on. You may have to make some amends, but then you pull up your bootstraps and get back to work.

Often, I have to tell myself, that I am not really that guy anymore. Sure, I am going to make some mistakes and some old behavior will appear, but that doesn’t mean that I have failed. It just means that I am human.

Stay strong,

Johnny

Step 1: How can it help me? I'm not an alcoholic.

Step 1:
We admitted we were powerless over our Hurts, our Habits, and our Hang-ups,
that our lives had become unmanageable.

Is it not interesting that when you replace the word "alcohol" with the 3Hs (Hurts, Habits, and Hang-ups) that meaning of the 1st Step starts to hit home?

We are all broken. The moment Eve took a bite of that apple everything changed. Now, we just try our best to get through it, but life has a way of throwing things at us that make it difficult to cope.

Most of us are raised in a fairly dysfunctional home, or maybe we went through some traumatic event when we were younger. During that time we found what worked for us; what got us through it all. A fair amount of the time, what got us through was not healthy, nor was it affective.

As we grew, we hung on to this coping method. We may have modified it some, but it is still recognizable. You may have the same exact way of dealing with things as you did when you were a kid. However, as I got older, I found something that worked better for me: Alcohol.

What most people don't realize is that had I chose something else, I'd be no better off. I might not have lost 5 years of my life to blackouts and poor decisions, but I still would have been coping instead of dealing.

Drinking was one of my Hurts, Habits, and Hang-ups. What is yours? Anger? Laziness? Maybe you deal with everything by taking nothing seriously. Maybe spending money takes away the bad feelings you have after you get in a fight with your husband. Maybe you don't know how to handle the feeling of being overweight. I could go on a name an endless amount of things that you could be doing to deal with life. Things that are not healthy.

So, what are you powerless over? What has made your life unmanageable?

Fear not my fellow messed up brethren! There are 11 more steps helps you get your life back!

Johnny