Daily Reprieve

I have never successfully trusted my Higher Power in the financial arena, and I am afraid to do so now.  But I haven’t done such a good job at it myself.  Alcohol isn’t the only thing that makes me powerless.  The pursuit of money also strips me of the power to control my environ and it becomes a taskmaster over me, issuing its own code of morality.  I must be loyal to a company that doesn’t give a damn about me as a person.  Or I must spend my mental resources researching and perfecting financial skills even if that has nothing to do with the passions of my life.  And it doesn’t.  I am not a businessman.  I am creative and idealistic.  Yet I must put on a Richard Simmons smile and I must demonstrate that I am a good cog for the machine. 

If I succeed at marketing myself, I fail at being myself.  I am trapped, unless…

Step One:  We admitted we were powerless over money – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step Two:  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to capitalistic sanity.

Step Three:  Made a decision to turn our financial will and our economic lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Step Four:  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of financial lives.

Step Five:  Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

And thus the Higher Power has another cycle of empowering the powerless one.  Of transforming a victim into a victor.

I try to remember that my Higher Power has helped me to stay sober for over a year now.  Surely this God of my understanding will not turn from me now.  But I am afraid that my expectations will turn to resentments and unravel me.

This appears to be the next step for me.  If I cannot trust my Higher Power here, how can I turn my life over to Him-She – It?  So, I surrender.  I have come face to face with powerlessness once more.  In that surrender, I can relax.

3rd Step Promises on Page 63:

“When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed.  We had a new Employer.  Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well.  Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our little plans and designs.  More and more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life.  As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of His presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow or the hereafter.  We were reborn.”

This entry was posted on September 28, 2008 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.