Step 2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
You know how it is we become conscious one day and everything is already here. We don’t wake up to nothing we wake up to the world we find ourselves. We didn’t ask, “Where did these people come from?” “ Where did this house come from, this bed, these clothes?” We just assumed that they were always here until a time came and we asked, “Where did people come from, the house, the bed, the clothes and me where did I come from?”
We find our answers or maybe not but whatever it does not remove the fact that we are here and everything around us, well almost everything around us, was here already.
I had similar thoughts when I joined a school or a workplace. I seem to adopt a person who was here when I arrived and has remained during my time. They are a marker, that before me there was! Where I live I have a 94 year old neighbour who moved in when the estate was built. He is a marker, before me, he was here.
And so it is like that with God. I woke up one day and he was there. I didn’t question his existence he was part of peoples everyday. I didn’t see him but like the people on TV, he was somewhere. In time like all the other questions, I asked, “Where did he come from?” He is a marker, before me he was.
Step 2 speaks of ‘came to believe’. It does not say ‘believed’ but ‘came to believe’. It is as they say ‘a journey’ or as I like to say ‘a story’. Why did I need God, if there was one? Why did Adam, Abraham, Noah and all the cast members of the Hebrew Bible need a God? Did it make for a better story? I can’t answer for them though somehow along the way a whisper, a story was told that we were not alone and that we were the creation of a creator. Somehow that whisper carried itself along the corridor of time to me! Was it just a story or was it true? Stories are not ‘just’. Stories are powerful!
Somehow as a young child, the story that was told outwardly became an inward story. I could hear the words inside me, “God loves you.” I believed them and I felt loved. Later I questioned them and the experience but I could not deny that the words had come alive in me and sustained me.
When I was a teenager I became aware that hate and rage had also come alive in me. Again I had heard stories though these stories poisoned. There came a time when I wanted to be freed from the poison though knew not how. I had a number of encounters with people who simply by their presence began to dissolve the poison. They were a power greater than me that was beginning to restore me to sanity.
There were not only people. I allowed a power greater than me to begin to work inside of me and over time the poison was dissolved. I was and continue to be restored to a place of peace by the workings of that power.
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