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how difficult life may seem, there is hope, as long as i keep moving forward on my spiritual journey. okay, get my little whine about the overused phrases that comprise the beginning of this reading out of the way. it is almost as if they dug out the really big book of trite banalities and peppered the first paragraph with them out of sheer laziness. the sentiment of those phrases may ring true, even though i have heard each and every single one, at least thousands of times, since i got clean. so to move onward and upward, i will accept that this is what it is and move along.
what is on tap for me today, is a reaction to what several of my peers shared at the meeting yesterday and how that fits in, with m,y spiritual path. once upon a time, i would have had nothing to say, except to chime in and agree wholeheartedly, after all the THIRD STEP does say “surrender into the care of.” the more i feel the FIRST taking hold in my life, the more intense i seem to feel emotional reactions to the world around me. when my peers use the term GOD, i get stuck in a loop trying to translate what i see the POWER that fuels my recovery as, and how their sharing relates to that path. since i have left the school of the personification of a HIGHER POWER, i often find myself struggling to take their experience and relate it to my own. i am grateful that i am still mired in STEP ONE and need to get it completed, as i certainly do not feel ready for what i perceive may be coming in STEP THREE. that will be a topic for another day, and one i need to explore today.
of all the bon mots in that first paragraph, the one that has always bothered me the most, is that the trials and tribulations of living life on life's terms, is somehow a “gift” from GOD, to somehow teach me a lesson. it echoed a line from the latest episode in The Handmaiden's Tale, when June is forced to admit to Aunt Lydia, that the death of the man was not only her fault, but a gift from God to teach her a lesson. although i may not have ever caused anyone to be hanged by the neck until they are dead, it still was a disturbing scene when put into the contact of difficulties in life being a gift. that particular peculiarity in the literature of recovery, has always struck me as capricious and cold, echoing the wager GOD made with Lucifer about how Job would react when everything he had was systematically stripped away.
even with that notion acting upon my spirituality like a pea under a mattress, i never questioned or looked for the source of my discomfort. as i grow in both my FAITH and my recovery, what i once accepted as fact, is no longer adequate, and when i chose not to share yesterday, it was because of my reaction and my unwillingness to come down on a different side that my peers. in fact, IF i had shared it would have been the counter-argument to all of their offerings and in reality, not really how i feel about this issue. spewing my beliefs all over the place, may have a time and place, but in retrospect, it was not yesterday morning.
getting off my high horse, i really do not see my recovery journey becoming narrower or steeper, in fact i see it opening up as i start to think for myself and look at what i once took for tenets of recovery and see them as jumping off points, instead of written in stone. this morning i am quite comfortable being a bit “different” by seeking a way to stop trying to explain the mystery of my will to recover and accept that just for today, the gift i get from GOD. is the desire to stay clean and grow as a person, into something more than i ever imagined.

∞ DT ∞