I always find it rather ironic when I go to a 12 Step meeting and find out that the material being read for the day is dealing with something I’m seriously struggling with. This very thing happened just a few days ago when I met up with two friends to attend a noon meeting I don’t regularly go to. It was a 12 Steps and 12 Traditions literature based meeting where I learned upon sitting down that the reading for the day was going to be in the middle of the chapter for Step 7. And within a few short paragraphs being read, I got to see a completely different perspective of this step and realized how much it applied to my current state of health.
If you have been reading any of my other articles, you’ll know by now that my current state of health is clearly not where I would like it to be. Each and every day, I have been enduring a tremendous amount of physical pain for several years now that doctors have been unable to diagnosis or provide any relief for. Some days are better than others, but on most, I am challenged to get through even the slightest of normal activities in life, like sitting through that 12&12 based meeting. But the irony in being at that meeting was in seeing how my state of health could be the direct result of the work I did surrounding Step 7 several years ago.
I guess it might help for those who aren’t in recovery from an addiction to point out now that Step 7 is defined in all 12 Step programs as “Humbly asking God to remove all our shortcomings.” And just over three years ago in March of 2010, I found myself on my knees asking my Higher Power for exactly this in my life. At that time, sex had become my master and my higher power, just like alcohol and drugs once had. My closest relationship was to a married man and although I knew what I was doing was unhealthy and wrong on so many levels with him, I couldn’t stop. But a day came during that month, when the mental and emotional anguish wasn’t being extinguished anymore by that substitute addiction or any of the others I got myself involved in either. It was then that I prayed to God in tears and humbly asked to have everything within me be removed that had driven me for so long to all of the addictions I had suffered from. Within a matter of weeks, the first of many different physically painful ailments began in my life. Since then, I have grown in humility as my ego has been completely shattered because of them. Unfortunately, while I haven’t acted out in any addiction for some time now, I’m still dealing with an extremely high level of physical pain. But it was one sentence that was read in Step 7 during the recovery meeting that day that helped me to look at this with a more positive attitude.
“In every case, pain had been the price of admission into a new life.”
And in my case, that seems to be holding true. The pain I have been going through since saying that prayer has brought me out of the depths of all of my toxic addictions, it has led me away from living in one shortcoming after another, and it has brought me so much closer than any other point in my life, to the God of my understanding.
Today, I’m convinced that all of this physical pain I endure daily is the release of all of the things within me that has continuously led to all of my shortcomings. I’ve even had at various times several doctors, practitioners, spiritual teachers, and friends back this theory up. While science and medicine hasn’t been able to explain most of body’s current challenged state of health, I rest my faith solely in God now that my 7th Step prayer is still being answered. I gladly welcome every bit of this pain if its the release of all of my shortcomings, and I know my humility is still being fine tuned through all of it. But best of all, I trust that these pains truly are the price of admission into the spiritual life I’ve always desired to live in. And that alone, makes experiencing them completely worth it.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
Read 7th Step at Friday Night’s meeting too. My HP is trying to tell me something I think. Keep up the great insight! Peace!