Spiritual Survival Guide
6: Keeping It Going: Moving Beyond Survival Mode
of Christians called the Oxford Group. They believed that God will change us—step by step—and that we need to surrender to God, be honest, be courageous, and be there for one another. It was these Christians who gave the founders of A.A. their fundamental steps. And then A.A. took this Christian wisdom, tweaked it for alcohol- ics, added a few extra steps (to close the loopholes!) and worked it, and worked it, and worked it. We offer them as one approach you might want to take. Read them through and see if they ring true for you.
says, “Relax, everything you need is already inside yourself.” Step one says, “Those voices are lies,” and that St. Paul was right when he wrote, I’m at the end of my rope. I can’t do it. Can’t cope. Can’t man- age. Can’t do the good I want to. And can’t stop doing the evil I don’t want to. I can’t free myself from my old, sinful self. Wretched man that I am! (Check out Romans 7:14-25.) Step one is humbling, and it demands honesty. Honesty can be painful and shameful because it strips away all those protective layers of myth and denial and phoniness that we wrap ourselves in. Honesty shows us for the weak, selfish, out-of-control drunks, addicts, perverts, critics, liars and phonies that we’ve become. Step one leaves us feeling naked and exposed. No cover. That means no excuses and no false hopes. But thank God for step one, because without it we’d never get to step two.
Step One: Humility We hit bottom. We get clarity. We admit we can’t.
We start by admitting that our lives have become unmanageable, that we are powerless over the sin of _____ . Whatever that sin or those sins are for you, you make it specific, you fill in the blank. It’s not exactly a fun place to start, is it? Admission—confession—is usually painful and humiliating. It’s something we’d rather avoid or deny. A.A. folks say that alcohol has “lashed” them. For many of us, only the bitter experience and the awful consequences of finally hitting bottom put us on the road to change. Why hit bottom? Because half- measures never work. It’s hard and humiliating and shameful for most of us to admit defeat, to confess that we’re weak and powerless. Most of us want to think that we’re competent, strong, and capable—able to keep things more or less under control. When we hit bottom we finally see for ourselves what’s already been clear to the people around us—that no matter what we might say, our self-will just doesn’t work . And that means we usually have to let go of some powerful voices inside ourselves. Like the voice that says, “If you want it badly enough, you’ll get it.” Or the voice that says, “If you just try hard enough, you can manage it.” Or the voice that
Step Two: Hope We begin to trust that God could restore us.
If step one strips away our false confidence, then step two offers true hope in return. Step two says that “we came to believe that God, a power greater than ourselves, could restore us to sanity.” We step from hopelessness to hope, from despair in ourselves to hope in God. Step two says, “Stop despairing and start daring to hope.” Dare to re- member that God’s not only there , but there for us—powerfully . So who do we hope for? We hope for Jesus, the Deliverer, the one who comes in power to set us free. What do we hope for? At A.A., it’s that God “could restore us to sanity.” For Christians, it’s what the Bible calls salvation— wholeness, freedom, joy, abundant life. Hope usually gets born in us when God works through the testimony
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