“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”
If I was to pick one step out of all 12 step recovery programs that I feel is the most important, it is this one, the 3rd Step. After coming to the acceptance that there is a Power that can restore all of us to sanity, this step emerges. I call it a pivot step because the rest of the 12 Steps effectiveness is dependent upon how fully one practices this one.
Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith discovered the key to recovery was in turning over one’s entire life to a Higher Power. Through much trial and error, in other words, living in some part of self will, they found nothing else worked. When left to one’s own devices and self will, time and time again, an alcoholic or addict would relapse back into their addictions. Even though I knew what the Third Step meant and understood what history said based upon the AA founder’s experiences, I still tried to find my own version that would work for me.
It didn’t work.
Self will is also known as free will and it’s a funny thing, especially in the minds of alcoholics and addicts. Most of my life I had heard through my religious upbringing that God gave us free will to do with our lives as we wished. I also remember words from that upbringing that said while each of us had free will, that true happiness would only come through obeying God’s will. I think to some level that is part of why my addiction based mind had me trying to trail blaze my own recovery. I always thought of God as some old man sitting above me on a throne, pointing his finger and making bad things happen so that I could learn lessons the hard way. Many addiction based people today talk about the “punishing God” syndrome which I suffered from as well. Sadly, churches have really done a number over the centuries to give the belief that God is a vengeful and wrathful God. Because I held that belief for a long time, the idea of turning my will over to God and fully practicing this Third Step was out of the question. The result was disastrous in my life. While I lived in fear of God and his supposed punishing ways, I punished myself instead and lived in a world of toxicity and darkness. I did that for 17 years sober and while I wasn’t drinking or drugging during that time, my addictive ways grew worse and I more sick.
There are two keys to this step that are important to understand. The first is turning our will over to God. I never got beyond that part of the step because of my fear of God and the thoughts of what I would have to go through if I turned my entire will over to God. Because God and the word punishing were synonymous in my brain, I misinterpreted the second part of this step. “…as we understood God.” The way I understood God was warped from my own upbringing. I never thought about creating a new image of God that was all loving, caring, and kind and not punishing, wrathful, and vengeful.
As all those long self will based years dragged on doing my own version of this step and recovery, there were percentages of how much of my life I’d give God on any given day. Sometimes it was less than 5%. Sometimes it was as high as 95%. On most days it was somewhere in the middle. The key is that I never gave God 100% because I couldn’t seem to get over my fears of God in the first place.
When enough brokenness happened in my life and when enough pain was rampant within and around me, I gave up and decided it was time to believe in something different. That’s when I decided God knew what was best for me and that God always did. And that’s when I decided to turn my entire will and life over to a God that always loved me just as I was and had a path for me to follow that would bring me ultimate happiness.
Today I start every single day off with turning my entire will and life over to the God I understand. While I once despised and loathed God for what I thought God was, today, I see things so differently. I love God. I don’t want my own free will anymore. I don’t want my own self will anymore. Living in either of those destroyed my life and never brought me peace, happiness, or joy. It only brought me more pain, more addictions, and more destructive paths. Living today in a life where I turn my full will over to God as I understand God has finally brought me that peace, happiness, and joy that eluded me all of my life.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
