We Do Receive Guidance

A favorite place in our literature for me – page 104 in the 12 and 12.

“We discover that we do receive guidance for our lives to just about the extent that we stop making demands upon God to give it to us on order and on our terms.”

I found that I was making demands in some not so obvious ways – to me – upon God for what I wanted life to do – for me. Actually, the Second Step explained it very well;

Page 31

“It’s not strange that lots of us have had our day at defying God Himself. Sometimes it’s because God has not delivered us the good things of life which we specified, as a greedy child makes an impossible list for Santa Claus. More often, though, we had met up with some major calamity, and to our way of thinking lost out because God deserted us.”

Um Hmmm – that’s it! I thought exactly that way… Furthermore, “loved ones, upon whom we heartily depended, were taken away from us by so-called acts of God.”

And my mind would tell me how hopeless and useless everything was at those times. What’s the point? Never once did I consider this before I had this tool in my recovery arsenal (104-105);

“Almost any experienced A.A. will tell how his affairs have taken remarkable and unexpected turns for the better as he tried to improve his conscious contact with God. He will also report that out of every season of grief or suffering, when the hand of God seemed heavy or even unjust, new lessons for living were learned, new resources of courage were uncovered, and that finally, inescapably, the conviction came that God does ‘move in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.”

I’m no longer angry at those old-timers who told me to “suffer well.” I understand.