Spiritual Survival Guide
6: Keeping It Going: Moving Beyond Survival Mode
How do we do a moral inventory? One way would be to use a kind of moral checklist. The key is to learn to ask the deep, probing questions. Try working with what the folks at A.A. call “the grudge list.” Lots of us have found that it’s our resentments that most often keep us from God. Try asking yourself, “Who and what do I resent? And why?” Be hon- est. Figure out where you feel you’ve been sinned against and where you need to forgive. Then move on to where you’ve sinned (whose grudge list you’re probably on), and where you need to seek and ask for forgiveness. Where and when have you gone wrong? How and why have you messed up and fallen short? Centuries of experience teach that we need to get this kind of thing down on paper so that we can look at it objectively. And experience also teaches that this step takes time to process. It might take a month to work it out and write it down. That’s okay. You’ve got time, right? For most of us, this whole idea is both appealing and terrifying. Some of us are thinking, “Oh great! I already feel horrible about myself. Now I get to pile on even more.” Those of us who tend toward being self-justifying are probably going to resent the claim that we all have serious house-cleaning to do. They will look at their grudge list and think, “Hey, look! If anything, it’s these other people who really need to do a serious moral inventory, not me!” But in the end, each of us has to walk our own Christian walk. The moral inventory is ours , not someone else’s. That means the pain and the guilt are ours. But it also means that the insight and potential for change that the inventory stirs up are ours as well. It takes courage to step into the basement of our heart and take stock of what’s really there. It takes courage to face up to ourselves. And the Bible tells us that courage is a gift from the Holy Spirit. So ask the Holy Spirit to give you the courage you need for this step and for the steps to come.
Step Five: Confession We go face-to-face with God and someone else. We practice humility. We join the community of forgiven sinners. We surrender our secrets. We hear the words of forgiveness. We feel free and cleansed. The fifth step says that we “admit to God, to ourselves, and to another hu- man being the exact nature of our wrong.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where the sticking point is here, does it? Admit . . . to another human being . . . the exact nature of our wrong. The question is inevitable; we’re all asking it: “Why does someone else have to get involved in this process? Isn’t this inventory between me and God? So why can’t I do it totally on my own?” The answer is, because it simply doesn’t work on our own. It never has. And it never will. Listen carefully to why this is: Taking a shortcut here and try- ing to avoid this humbling process just cements us deeper in our problems. It leaves us alone with our secrets, stuck in isolation and loneliness. God’s Word says (and experience teaches) that without someone else involved, we’ll be stuck with either too much guilt or too much self-justification. Either we’ll be exaggerating our sins and not hearing the healing word of forgiveness, or else we’ll be excusing our sins and not hearing the healing word of forgiveness. In the Bible, the letter of James coaches us to do this: Confess your sins to each other, and pray for each other so that you may be healed. (James 5:16) If we’re going to practice true humility, we need each other. We need some practical advice from outside ourselves, because we need to bridge that gap of shame that isolates us. We need someone else to confirm that we really are cleaning house and not just pretending. Most of all, we need to hear someone tell us the words of forgiveness we can’t fully tell ourselves.
166
167
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online