Sober living with Jesus

A twelve step program I am fond of touts the mantra  “attraction rather than promotion.”   When I was younger and held prisoner by addiction to alcohol and other drugs, well-intentioned clergy, family, friends, doctors and law enforcement would try to promote the idea of either abstinence or self-control to me as I moved brazenly from one jackpot to another.  Usually I heard that I needed to “slow down” or get some sort of handle on things.  Once I was told by a psychiatrist that I needed to find a good woman to help calm me down and live an orderly life (in all fairness, when I think about the stuff I told him, I have to remember that you get garbage out if you put garbage in).  The magic of a recovery program happened for me when I heard somebody tell their story and I was able to relate to it.   The terminal uniqueness I suffered from had finally succumbed to a dent in its armor -in the reality that others may well understand exactly where I was coming...

Step 11:  Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him , praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Much of what I am going to write involves steps 2 & 3: coming to believe and then making a decision. to act on that new-found belief.  For me, step 11 involves continuing to build on that framework whose construction is begun in those steps. I took a guy I sponsor to a meeting last night that happened to deal with the eleventh step.  Present were the usual suspects -one of whom is a fairly well known card-carrying atheist in the local recovery community.  By his own admission, had he realized it was on the 11th step last night, he would have stayed home.  I have noticed in the past that he has his own particular brand of program, taking pieces from the Big Book and 12&12 and slightly re-writing some of it (carefully editing out the God part) to suit his tastes....