Endigar 686 ~ Goal: Sanity
From the Daily Reflections of February 1;
“. . . Step Two gently and very gradually began to infiltrate my life. I can’t say upon what occasion or upon what day I came to believe in a Power greater than myself, but I certainly have that belief now.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 27).
“Came to believe!” I gave lip service to my belief when I felt like it or when I thought it would look good. I didn’t really trust God. I didn’t believe He cared for me. I kept trying to change things I couldn’t change. Gradually, in disgust, I began to turn it all over, saying: “You’re so omnipotent, you take care of it.” He did. I began to receive answers to my deepest problems, sometimes at the most unusual times: driving to work, eating lunch, or when I was sound asleep. I realized that I hadn’t thought of those solutions — a Power greater than myself had given them to me. I came to believe.
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2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Step two has a couple of bitter pills that I had to swallow when I started working the Steps. The first was the implication that on some level, I was insane, or if I desire to be more gentle with myself, I lacked sanity. The next bit of bad news to ingest was that my solution was wrapped up in recovering a trusting acknowledgement of a Power greater than myself.
My alcoholic insanity is different from the schizophrenic and his hallucinations. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect from reality that I have constructed in order to keep using alcohol. It is a necessary skill for me to learn to lie to myself in order to drink pathologically. Further, I must believe my own self-deception to maintain my fatal attraction to the chemical alteration of my brain. Then I must manipulate everyone around me to support this life of illusions. As the consequences pile up the insanity becomes obvious to everyone, except me. I am usually the last to know how crazy my life has become.
For some people, finding and speaking the truth is a pretty good idea. For me, it is the path to sanity and it is easily lost. I have to fight to keep it every day, one day at a time.
The problem is compounded when I am dependent on my warped ego that is bent toward self-deception and so I need help that resides outside of my skull. The Power greater than me creates in me the ability to connect and thus delivers me from my isolating selfishness. In that connection I can start the work of acquiring and keeping the truth. It is only necessary that I am willing to consider that there is something out there that is immensely and lovingly enveloping. For me, experiences begin to pile up to confirm the presence of something and these experiences have been outside of myself. That something takes a personal interest in my well-being. The willingness to believe allowed me time to witness the persistent presence appear.
“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?” ~ John Green (Fault in Our Stars)
Daily Reprieve 
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