September 18, 2015
The Twelve Steps of Living Life Recovery came to me via the Holy Spirit a number of years ago as I focused on my recovery journey, the steps I took to achieve recovery and talked to Him about it.
Over the next Twelve days I want to share with you a step a day and some of my experience of it and how arrived at it. As they say in A.A. ‘TAKE WHAT YOU WANT AND LEAVE THE REST.’ It worked for me…..
STEP 1. I admit that my life is a mess and I am out of control.
“I know that nothing good lives in me…I want to do what is right, but can’t”
Romans 7:18
When I first arrived in an alcohol recovery rehabilitation centre in Rockingham, Western Australia in 1987 I was ashamed of the mess my life had become through allowing my drug of choice (alcohol) to control my life. I was embarrassed by the hurt and pain I had caused others, and, I really wanted to achieve recovery, For them, if not for myself. But I was also afraid of letting go of the one thing that had helped me to cope with the feelings of brokenness and incompleteness that had existed within me for so long.
I need to say, I never really felt that my life was unmanageable. I had always gone where I wanted to, done what I wanted to do, had always maintained some stability in employment. So in the first step of A.A. ‘Admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our life had become unmanageable.’ I had a problem with the unmanageable part as I felt regardless of what went on in my life “I ALWAYS MANAGED.” But I could see clearly, when i stopped long enough to analyse my life from an addiction point of view “I WAS OUT OF CONTROL.”
For me this was eye opening and I can relate to the story of Paul in Acts 1:1-9 when he was challenged by Jesus to look at his own blindness about the perfection of his life under his own control. For me the first step of Living Life Recovery was simple. My life was a mess, I was out of control and if I wanted to seriously get recovery I had to investigate different ways of conducting my life.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. Dale Carnegie