Exploring Higher Power in 12-Steps

When I first came upon the 12-step program (nearly by accident, as you’ll see in my testimony), I though they were simple enough to get through. After all, I’ve been through over 20 years of therapy, 3 mental hospitals, graduate school, and risen to the top of the corporate ladder at Google through all of it.

But once I got the the higher power stuff? I figured … meh. I can “kind of” get into this so …. whatever. I kind of thought I could just glide through it … or so I thought.

Then, I got to Step 4. At that point, I realized I was totally stuck, and obsessed with this higher power stuff, confused about the God I thought I believed in, but whom I couldn’t truly find any faith in. I already left New Age, and Evangelical Christianity just wasn’t cutting it for me. I found myself going through “Recovering from Religion” meetings discussing spiritual abuse. Going through all kinds of 12-step meetings … secular, believing, even satanic ones. Trying to even find an agnostic sponsor. I guess my actual sponsor could see through my panic … and suggested I start over from the beginning because it shouldn’t be this hard. And that’s when I realized, that Step 2 and 3 weren’t something I could easily “pass”. I had to understand, deconstruct, and reconstruct my idea of God from the ground up. Again.

This takes me back to the founding of AA and the 12 steps. They say 12 steps is a “spiritual program” and not a religious one. However, in order for me to get to where I am now, I had to discover religion, leave it, find it again, leave it again, find something else, and start over. In other words, I kept finding a house only to burn it down and need to start over. And this had to change.

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

I realized that even though I’ve gone through a lot of New Age paths, I wasn’t able to stay sober through ANY of it until I landed on my face in the mental institutions where I felt the regret of all my sin, and committed myself to changing. I couldn’t go back there: emotionally, mentally, financially … and spiritually either. That’s when I realized, there MUST be more to the 12-steps than simple “spirituality” … because it’s all this spirituality that got me messed up in the 1st place.

“Spiritual thinking” got me to think that I was God instead of letting God be God. I was a panentheist who followed “A Course in Miracles” (ACIM) by Helen Schuckman, and thus I felt that sin was an illusion and all I ever had to do was forgive myself, and thus if someone else was upset with me, that just means they needed to learn forgiveness. That ended in me hurting a great number of people out of disillusion.

A cannot knock all of ACIM though. It got me thinking about Jesus again. In 3rd grade, I’d write to “Dearest J” … as in Jesus, or what I shortened to “J” because it was my Journal. I didn’t like the sound of “Diary” as that was too girly and lame.

And so the best I could do after leaving ACIM was to become an Evangelical Christian, until I realized that didn’t feel that authentic either. I just wanted Jesus, without the dogma.

So that’s when I returned to “J” … a very intimate, close relationship with Jesus. It didn’t need to be about being perfect. It wasn’t about church (side note … I still attend church, but don’t view it as the REASON for my faith, but a by-product of appreciating the redeeming quality of it sharpening me as a human blade and the community aspect on the focus of God). It wasn’t about throwing out my idols … or my partners idols. It was about turning from the plank in MY OWN EYE.

I realized that my version of a Higher Power could never go back to the “New Age” / ACIM / Manifestation / You Do You blah blah garbage I was seeing being spewed out everywhere by MLM profeteers. I had to go deeper to find God, and that meant not being sugar-coated or coaxed to feel ok with my sin.

The idea of a Higher Power is meant to set you straight. Yes, it’s loving. But there’s a good kick there too … God isn’t ok with you being stuck in your addictive behaviors or compulsions, or general life dyfunction. He isn’t ok with you making excuses. That doesn’t mean all the things done to you don’t matter. But holding onto those grudges forever … ? It won’t help you move forward. And you MUST believe that God will handle it!

What’s up to you? To believe in a God that truly wants the best for you, and sometimes that requires a little butt kickin’ … and I mean it in the most loving sense. It’s going to remove all the impurities. It’s going to hurt actually. Removing something or creating boundaries between you and others, or you and God, HURTS. It hurts the devil. It hurts our ego. And that can’t be sugarcoated. We cannot coax our way back to thinking that if we just forgive ourselves, we can continue on or find some transcendental state if we just keep going. We’re just kidding ourselves.

So friends, it’s time to wake up and get back to God. Not the God of New Age, but the God of the Bible. Let’s get back to the foundation of what the 12-steps were built on … and build ourselves back up. Brick by brick, we are meant to lay a new kingdom, one with Jesus at the cornerstone.

Until next time!

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- Fayth