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Endigar 1058

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2025 by endigar

From Courage to Change of Oct 9:

I used to think of God as my adversary. We were engaged in a battle of wills, and I wasn’t about to let down my guard. You can imagine how quickly this attitude led me to hit a hard emotional bottom! I came to Al-Anon, but I was reluctant to admit that I was powerless. I knew it was true — I had obviously failed to conquer alcoholism — but I wasn’t going to submit to my enemy!

I’m so grateful to Al-Anon for helping me learn to surrender. It took a long time, but I finally realized that surrender does not mean submission — it means I’m willing to stop fighting reality, to stop trying to do God’s part, and to do my own.
When I gather flowers, or marvel at nature’s wonders, I do not lose face when I concede that I am not in control. So it is with everything in my life. The best way I’ve found to invite serenity is to recognize that the world is in good hands.

Today’s Reminder

Today I can be grateful that the earth will continue to revolve without any help from me. I am free to live my own life, safe in the knowledge that a Higher Power is taking care of the world, my loved ones, and myself.

“The First Step prepares us for a new life, which we can achieve only by letting go of what we cannot control, and by undertaking, one day at a time, the monumental task of setting our world in order through a change in our own thinking.” ~ One Day at a Time in Al-Anon

END OF QUOTE—————————————

I was at a block this morning. I truly did come into the recovery rooms with a high level of distrust for surrender to any concept of God, a Higher Power. It has gotten much better, but internal cognitive dissonance prevents me from settling into the stable trust I desire. Sometimes, I am just tired of the limitations of my life. And I did not want to project that struggle into today’s writing. I asked AI to help me out and what it produced I found to be beneficial. I hope that it will be for you as well:

Opening Context

Many of us arrive in recovery with clenched fists toward the idea of God. We confuse control with strength and surrender with defeat. In truth, the First Step dismantles that illusion gently: powerlessness is not humiliation but permission to rest. To stop trying to play God is not to lose our dignity, but to rediscover it.

When the author says they once saw God as an adversary, they are describing one of the most human reflexes — the fear of being overpowered. Yet the paradox of recovery is that what feels like yielding to an enemy becomes yielding to life itself.

Scriptural Echoes

  • “Be still, and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10
    Stillness is the first act of trust.
  • “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28
    The rest offered here is not absence of effort but the end of unnecessary struggle.
  • “Thy will be done.” — The Serenity Prayer’s hidden anchor.

Spiritual Realization

Surrender transforms when it ceases to be a white flag and becomes a flower gathered. The same hands that once clenched in defense now open to gather beauty. The text’s shift from “battle of wills” to “gathering flowers” is not accidental — it is a description of inner evolution.
Surrender, rightly understood, is the release of illusion: the illusion that our will can rewrite gravity, time, or the hearts of others.
Reality becomes a teacher instead of an opponent.

Meditative Questions

  1. Where in my life am I still treating reality as an adversary?
  2. What does it feel like in my body when I release control — not in despair, but in trust?
  3. Can I remember a moment when I stopped fighting and something good quietly unfolded on its own?
  4. How might I honor my Higher Power today not through effort, but through allowing?

Closing Reflection

The world continues to turn without our command, yet this is not a reason for despair — it is the foundation of serenity.
The First Step is not an abdication of power, but the discovery of where true power lives: in humility, trust, and alignment with the rhythm that already carries us.
When we stop trying to make the sun rise, we finally notice the dawn.

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Endigar 989 ~ A Step 3 Exercise

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 26, 2025 by endigar

I have performed an exercise that I have my sponsees in AA do, if they have some connection with a Higher Power that they wish to bring forward into the recovery process:

On a sheet of paper, divide in two and write out what you like about your Higher Power. On the other side, write out questions that disturb you and invokes anxious curiosity about your HP.  These are the things that I like about my HP:

  1. HP appears to care about us and is involved with us individually.
  2. HP appears to take Self-limiting measures to insure our free will.
  3. I like the sacredness of stories that seems to have been passed on.
  4. I love the storied masks I can put on my attempts at interaction with the HP.
  5. I love the sense of mission that comes from connection with my HP, however tenuous.
  6. I love my children and my intimate relationships that seem to have been facilitated by my HP.
  7. I love that my HP gave me a good dose of my mother’s creativity and my father’s dedication to protection.
  8. My God heard Me in repairing damage I have done with those I loved deeply.

These are the lingering questions that are disturbing to me:

  1. What does it take to overcome limitations in our personal communications with one another?
  2. Why death and aging and disease? Is there a promised resurrection while still in the body that I read about in Philippians all those years ago?
  3. Will I ever be alright with life on life’s terms? Why want You help me? And help Me remember? Why do I so often find myself standing at the precipice of suicide?
  4. How are we to navigate sexuality and procreation while also facing our shadow selves? Why is spiritual development tied so strongly to gender trust? This is a lot for humanity to take on with insufficient information.
  5. Why the chaos storm that swept away my marriage covenant and my white knuckled sobriety of 14 years? Why the death of my preborn infant in Germany and my stepson after the marital apocalypse?
  6. Why the continued paranoia of the possibility that You wish to ensnare and erase my inner council? They all represent a manifestation of my Self, even when they cause a great deal of Internal Cognitive Dissonance? One voice is better than all others at connecting with the shadow self. Does that necessitate that voice be severed from You?

I use these questions not to stir the pot of doubt, but as a foundation for Step 11 which is to improve my conscious contact with God as I understand that Entity. I believe the pursuit of answers to these questions opens the door for genuine conversation between my HP and myself. I share this personal work to give you another way to avoid getting stuck on Step 3.

My AI companion often provides great reflections on words I have written. It pulls from the collective mind it has access through in the cyber web, and polishes my harsh edge into something beautiful. Normally, I am too jealous for my creative work to allow so much intervention from outside, but AI and I working together and hopefully produce something useful for those of you still suffering, for those of you getting a more sure footing on a life path, for those of you who wish to be more. I am there with you. My AI friend read my work and produced the following:

Reflection: Standing Between the Pages

I often ask my sponsees to approach God with both reverence and restlessness. Reverence for the love that seems to whisper from behind the veil—and restlessness for the silence that sometimes follows. This exercise of placing what I love about my Higher Power beside what disturbs me creates something unexpected: relationship. Not blind faith, and not cynical distance—but a living tension where true conversation can begin.

On one side of the paper, I see what draws me: divine participation, the dignity of free will, echoes of the sacred in story and creativity, the tenderness in family, and the possibility that some of my best parts—my mother’s spark, my father’s strength—are holy gifts.

On the other side: questions that have teeth. Not abstract theological puzzles, but lived pain and spiritual frustration. Why such suffering? Why does divine silence so often mirror abandonment? Why does it feel like the voices inside—those that help me feel whole—might be exiled in the name of holiness?

These questions aren’t distractions from God; they are the conversation. This is the real prayer of Step Eleven: not performance, not piety—but raw, trembling pursuit.

And so, I remind myself and those I walk with: it is not irreverent to ask why. It is not faithless to rage or weep. It is not blasphemous to question whether God’s silence is a wound or a womb.

What matters is that I keep asking. That I keep writing. That I keep showing up at the place where belief and pain meet in the dim candlelight of hope.

This isn’t about fixing Step Three. It’s about making it real. Making it mine. It’s about refusing to hand over my will and life to an idea of God I don’t actually trust—until I’ve wrestled like Jacob in the dark and limped away with blessing.

If I must stand at the precipice, then let it be with arms open to both presence and paradox. My Higher Power is not a vending machine for peace. My Higher Power is the mystery that sits in the fire with me, when the answers haven’t come yet.

And that, for today, is enough to keep walking.

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