Our Relationship with God

Step 2 of the Twelve Steps of AA says, “We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Plenty of us believe; but do we believe within the criteria of the Second Step?

Our struggles boil down to three primary issues:

* do we believe God is powerful,

* do we accept that only his power can restore us and

* do we believe we are worth his efforts on our behalf?

Christian writer J. Keith Miller wrote many books over the course of his long life. His first, The Taste of New Wine, described his struggle with faith. In his book A Hunger for Healing, Miller continues to open up and share his experience of recovery and faith.

“When I came to Step Two I realized that although I was a committed Christian and I really believed in God, my problem was that in some very important respects I was living a frantic, highly stressed existence as a Christian professional speaker and writer. I knew that something was not right: I was teaching about grace and freedom, on the one hand, and my life was anxious, stressful and over committed, on the other. But I was in denial and couldn’t see how bizarre the contradiction was. People in this program have helped me to realize that anything I do or think that is destructive to me or to my relationships with other people or with God is a kin of insanity, especially when I keep doing it month after month.”

~ J. Keith Miller - A Hunger for Healing

Do you ever worry – which would be a good thing actually – far better than being in denial!?! Do you ever worry that perhaps what you say you believe does not match up with how you behave? For instance, a person who talks about loving Jesus but is cheating on their spouse. Or an employee who believes that scriptures speak about respecting our earthly authority but is constantly undermining their boss? Or a person who says that they believe that God says love one another but there are certain ethnicities you just would not invite home to meet your mother?

Yeah? Me too. None of us get it right all the time. What do we do with all our messy ways?

How do we make sense of our saying one thing but doing another?