Blog entry for:

to stay clean, just for today. the irony of writing about prayer by someone who does not pray, never fails to amuse me. i do pray, exactly twice a day, and the rest of the time i listen. over the course of my recovery, i have finally arrived at a place where i am comfortable in my spiritual identity and comfortable expressing what that looks like to my friends and peers, today however, i will not be dwelling in that house, i will speak to the little bit of prayer i do still have left in my life. i do not mess around, or mince words. i flat out ask the POWER that fuels my recovery, to keep me clean and thank that POWER for another day clean. this is the ONE place in my life where i surrender absolute and total control to that POWER every minute of every single day. i may or may not be “rewarded” for doing so, BUT i certainly GET to stay clean another day.
moving forward, what about all those places, pieces and tasty bits of my life, i do not so unconditionally give over to the POWER that fuels my recovery and how do i justify holding on to them, when i am supposed to be listening for the will of a POWER that has no mouth or ears. there is the rub and that is part of the problem i once had, say like a year ago, as i integrated how i saw the spiritual side of the program, with how my peers throughout the world see theirs. in the log run, it became clear to me, that instead of fighting it, and i am very stubborn person. i finally decided to “listen” to that POWER, with my heart and not my head and allow how i share about that path, morph into something that fits me as well as my peers. for a “godless heathen” that is not a bad place to be. 😏
moving forward from there, over the course of the past year,m as i have been smack dab in the middle of STEP 12, i finally “get” why it is important for me to not only find a path, but to be able to share about it, in the terms that are best understood by my peers in recovery. a consequence of that journey is that i can speak of GOD and prayer, without feeling like a charlatan or a snake-oil salesman. the comfort i finally achieved is not because i hide what i am under a huge pile of spiritual camouflage, but celebrate it the terms i have been given. i no longer need apologize for being out of the mainstream and today i am grateful for a program of recovery that allowed me to arrive in this particular spot.
i do however have to cut this a bit short this morning, as one of the gifts of recovery, a job, needs me to get my a$$ into the office. whether or not i have a purpose in life, whether or not i was destined to be in recovery, whether or not i see the good things in my life as rewards, or just the consequences of living clean, i am quite certain that if i ask for it and pay attention, i WILL be given the opportunity to get everything i NEED today, and perhaps a few things that i simply desire. that, at least for me, is enough of a push to get me moving through the door!

∞ DT ∞