THE GOD THING-ME?

THE GOD THING-ME?

Had some great feedback over taking a first step, powerless and unmanageable! Thanks. I learn from hearing from others.

I sometimes wonder if I’m not addicted to golf. Played twice over the weekend. Each day, even on the occasions of playing very poor shots, I am amazed by how I don’t get angry. This is behavior that only started after I awoke spiritually. To boot, I am nearly 100% of the time I’m on the course aware of the beauty of nature that surrounds me, and the peace that is there when I quiet.

I play with some very interesting people. A man I call a friend, and who was terribly addicted, was a golf partner. He hit his bottom nearly a year ago, and has been free of his mood altering substance of choice for just about a year. The change in him and his relationship with those he loves the most is a miracle, and I truly enjoy his company.

His life is still terribly busy and filled with problems.

During our time together, we talked about finding a higher power who could restore us to sanity and who we were willing to lives and will over to. I always remember, my higher power gives me free will and allows me mistakes!

The “god” thing is often a tough concept for people new to recovery and self-discovery to deal with. For me, I had been badly let down by formal religion, and at 20, had closed my mind to the god that group of people followed. Many I run into have trouble with a god who will allow bad things to happen to people they love, or to them. What kind of god allows the natural disasters we frequently hear about? The whole higher power thing is more than they can handle.

For me, I came to understand that I did not run the world and everyone around me. In my own way, and in my own small world, I had tried, and ultimately failed. I always believed things happened for a reason, and my awakening started when I realized that there might be something outside of me and bigger than me that called the shots. And note, I said might.

There were a few people I knew who were more powerful than me, and initially they were my higher power. During a breakthrough conversation with a spiritual coach while I was in treatment, something happened to me that I to this day can’t explain, and I quit denying god and started to look. My eyes were open to a different world, and the small voice inside of me became stronger; I was listening better to it.

I saw others who had big addiction (sanity) issues, and were one day at a time free from them. A measure of sanity had returned to their lives. Yet others told me they could turn problems over to their higher power, and things got better. While I had real trouble for a while believing this could work, I at least became WILLING to give it a try.

From having no belief in anything bigger than my self for a very long time, and being angry at a god of my former church who had really dropped the ball and been consciously shut out and denied in my life, to a person who realized that there might be something bigger than me which could help my mental state and possibly I could turn to this source for help with living issues, was a quantum shift.

It was a shift I made much easier than I could have imagined because I became willing. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I didn’t get “religion” then, nor do I have it now in a text book way. While today I have nothing against any religion, I do not feel compelled to attend a church.

Over the last dozen plus years, I have found conscious contact with this higher power. For ease, I call this higher power god, we need a label for everything, but god to me is Good Orderly Direction.

Do not ask me to draw a picture of my higher power, but I can feel its presence whenever I make contact. I see and feel my higher power in all about me and within me. I hear my higher power through other people and in things I read. My higher power is alive in each and every living thing if I allow myself to see it! The relationship is in continuously more powerful state of evolution; it is the journey I’m on.

My first step was a tough one. Surrendering was not easy. The next steps, those which put a source of life itself back into my life were not easy, because I fought a truth. But I did come to believe and did become willing!

So, no religion per say today, but knowledge that there is a higher power at work in life today, yesterday, and in the today’s to come. I know this to be true, and am relieved I don’t have to run the show,

In my own way I have a god in my life today which is real to me, and who is always there a loves me, even if I hit bad golf shots!!