Daily Reprieve

From Courage to Change of Nov 02:

Step Two states that we “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Recently at a meeting I heard someone paraphrase this Step in a way that perfectly described my own experience: “First I came, then I ‘came to,’ then I came to believe.”

The journey toward a Higher Power has been so gradual for me that I have been unaware of much of it. There has been no burst of light, no burning bush — just a gradual clearing of the fog that I lived in before finding recovery in Al-Anon. Like my fellow member, first I came, bringing my body, if not my faith, to Al-Anon. Then, once I was here, slowly I “came to,” and eventually I came to believe that I wasn’t alone in the universe. There was and is a force, a drive, an energy that can give me the means to make my life joyous and productive. I need only ask for assistance and keep an open mind.

Today’s Reminder

The arrival of faith in my life has been a gradual process. This process continues and grows stronger each day I keep myself open to it. Perhaps acknowledging this process will help me when I am impatient with the twists and turns of life.

“I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.”
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

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NOTE: There were two famous Oliver Wendell Holmes, Father and son, senior and junior. The sited quote is from the Father. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)

Profession: Physician, poet, essayist, and professor at Harvard Medical School.
Known for:

• Being part of the Boston literary circle (“Fireside Poets”) alongside Emerson and Longfellow.
• Coining the phrase “the Boston Brahmins,” referring to the city’s old, elite families.
• His poem “Old Ironsides” (which helped save the USS Constitution from being scrapped).
• Medical contributions, especially his early work in preventing puerperal fever (he argued physicians were spreading it with unwashed hands—years before germ theory was mainstream).

Holmes Sr. believed literature and science should both explore the human condition.
He embodied the 19th-century American intellectual who moved easily between poetry and anatomy.

END OF NOTE—————————————

There is something deeply merciful in Step Two when read slowly:

Came. Came to. Came to believe.

No sudden conversion.
No thunder.
No forced certainty.

Just presence → awakening → trust.

It honors the reality that faith is not something we manufacture. It is something that arrives in us when we make room.

I know what it feels like to live in the fog — the body attending the meeting while the soul waits outside. At first, there is no faith; there is only pain, confusion, exhaustion, and the faint hope that maybe there is another way to live. But I showed up anyway.

That “showing up” is the first miracle.

Because sanity doesn’t return as a lightning strike — it returns as clarity in increments. A soft, almost imperceptible lifting of the veil. The mind stops running. The heart loosens its grip. Something in us begins to breathe again.

Step Two is not a declaration of belief.
It is permission to let belief come on its own terms.

• First, I came — I moved my body to a safer room than the one I used to live in.
• Then, I came to — awareness returned, like someone waking after a long emotional coma.
• Then, I came to believe — not through argument, but through experience:
  “I wasn’t alone in the universe after all.”

There is a humility in that awakening.
And also a profound dignity.

Because the Higher Power we slowly recognize is not a distant voice shouting from the clouds, but a quiet companion who has been walking beside us the whole time — waiting for us to turn our head.

Recovery teaches that faith is organic.
It matures in the soil of willingness and ordinary days.

Not burning bushes.
Just breathing through another morning,
holding on through another wave,
and allowing the fog to clear as the morning Sun dawns.