“Came to believe a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
I was humiliated and my ego was tattered in shreds. I believed I am powerless over alcohol and my life is unmanageable. I believed I was hopeless, destined to die in the throes of my addiction. I tried to kill myself in a variety of ways and fantasized how I would end the pain. But yet I didn’t die. It seemed I couldn’t die. So I conceded to a slow alcoholic death. Days, weeks, or months, I would die eventually.
But yet, I still didn’t die and I met people who had the same story as me and they had become sober! If they could do it, why couldn’t I? I have never backed down from anything in my life. What was stopping me from embracing a program that showed results?
Oh, I had to believe that a power greater than myself. At best I thought I hated God or God hated me or all of humanity. I certainly fell into the category of human described on page 30 of the 12 and 12 as being “disgusted with religion” and yet I was jealous of others who had such strong faith in Jesus, or Allah, or just God – in all of it. I chased religion but never felt at peace. I didn’t gloat over the “hypocrisy, bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness,” as described in the AA literature, I simply despised organized religion.
What I realized is that I despised the evil in humans, the evil in myself. My ego got in the way for realizing Step 1 and it was yet again getting in the way in me realizing Step 2. I was closed-minded, biased, and judgmental. The very traits I pointed out in “religious people.” It took a fellow warrior to point that out to me for it to sink in. It took an old-timer and fellow surfer to talk about his connection to water for me to be open-minded that I have always believed in a power greater than myself and not only that, I had submitted to it consistently.
With my “scientific and logical” brain, that I so cherished, I had to put my own ego on trial and find it guilty of attempted first degree murder of myself. Once I did that, I saw a power greater than myself existed in the ocean. I accepted that every time I went surfing or open water swimming or just put my feet in the water and felt the current, the tide, the movement of water, that there was power external to me that I did not control. And this power had restored others to sanity! Why not me??? Why the hell not me?
So I begged to the ocean, to the universe, to whatever potentially could be listening to restore me to sanity because I stopped trying to conform to a religion and recognized the difference between religion and spirituality.
