without going to a mountaintop!
When I came into the amazing program of AA, I don’t think that I believed in a God of any kind. At least in a non-judgemental, non-punishing God.
This thought came to me over the years of asking It to bail me out of something and finding that I was no better off, even worse on many occasions.
I had even promised the God that I was praying to that, if He got me out of whatever I was in at the time, I would never do it again and it still did not work.
This furthered my belief that there was no real God. This being said, I did not even know how to pray. Now I was being told about this Higher Power that many were calling God and seeing that the people were actually changing for the better.
Enter Step 11! Step 11 states: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
This step tells me to ask ONLY for the knowledge of His will for me and the power to carry that out. My time spent on a prayer shortened immediately.
From a laundry list of items naming everyone and everything that I could think of to a short “God grant me the knowledge of your will for me and the power to carry it out” and that was it.
I quickly discovered that something was happening that had not happened before. It seemed that all of the a-holes that I had been formerly surrounded by were turning into some pretty decent people.
Today, this is still my prayer whenever I come to a fork in my life’s road. I was not even sure who or what I was praying to just that, when I only uttered or thought these few, short ideas of knowledge of His will and the power to carry it out, things got better.
In most cases, much better! Being addicted to everything that I have tried, I became addicted to the spirituality that you folks had told me that this program was about and not necessarily religion.
I wanted to discover all that I could about it and was introduced to the teachings of Emmet Fox. Mr. Fox was the spiritual advisor for the earliest AAs and his book Sermon on the Mount was even used as the first Big Book, until the AA Big Book was created.
Bill W. created the AA Big Book with the thoughts and ideas from the New Thought School which Mr. Fox was an early leader of. Mr. Fox also stated that every thought is a prayer. WOW! So simple!
Earlier Steps tell us that all that we should believe is that there is a Power greater than ourselves ready, able, and willing to help us. (Steps 2&3). They do not tell us what to call this Power, only acknowledge that there is one.
At first, when trying to figure it out, I called my Home Group my Higher Power. Others call it Allah, Buddha, Mohamed, Jesus, Mary, or any number of names. Since man has existed, he has recognized that there was a Power and they used it.
Even Pagans worshiped their Gods. What is a God? Webster has in its definition of God — the supreme or ultimate reality: such as the Being, perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped (as in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) as creator and ruler of the universe.
This is close to what is taught in the Spirituality lessons that I have studied. God is not a Power in human form with shoulder-length hair sitting on a golden throne “up there somewhere” judging and punishing.
God is a force that we can not see, touch, smell, or taste, just like the unseen energy forces we are aware of like electricity, heat, etc. When Jesus taught about God the Father, he was using the language that his listeners would understand, parables.
We like thinking of our fathers as being protective and all-powerful, whether or not this was the reality with our own. This is a very simple program for very complicated folks.
So just take it and use it for your betterment, just like you use gravity, electricity, water power in a river, or any other unseen but much-used power that we have access to. Once this is done, you will truly be Happy, Joyous, and Free. Thank you, God!
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