I heard a comedian last night say that agnostics and atheists wear T shirts with the slogan “Thank God I don’t believe”.
When I came to this program, I discovered that I could have been wearing one of those T shirts. I was totally unaware of what I believed. And when I read the chapter We Agnostics, I found my identity. I was surely an agnostic.
But, as I read that chapter, I was to learn that I was going to have to find a belief in something I could call my Higher Power or perish in an alcoholic death. I sure didn’t want to go that way. I was desperate to leave off drinking and to get sober. So, I gradually began to attain to faith of some sort. Like Bill and so many other alcoholics, I was driven to find a concept of the God of my own choosing. Those five words, which saved AA, “God as we understood Him”.
Faith for me has been an evolution through all these years. Like so many, I find that I have no understanding of the who and the what of God. I only know that I believe in HIs existence and what knowledge I have has come from my experience, and so my faith. I have learned faith experientially. Mainly this has come through the miracle in my own life and the lives of those I have observed throughout these sober years.
I know one thing, that I have complete faith in this program. I have seen it work over and over again. I have witnessed people on the edge of death come back to life and live long years. Years beyond what they would have had, if they continued to drink. I’m one of those. I came in at the last stages of alcoholism, as one doctor described to me, and I have been able, through the grace of God, to have added more than thirty years to my life. I’ve seen others do the same.
But, it’s not the years that are important as the kind of life I have experienced. I should say the quality of life and not the quantity. As one old timer once said to me, AA does not add years to my life, but it does add life to my years. Amen to that.
I”m no one to be writing about anything spiritual or even faith. What do I know that can add to someone’s knowledge of these things? But I do know what I have learned here and what I have experienced in a “lifetime” of sobriety. And, here is why I have brought this up. I was thinking about faith and the third step, because that is the first mention of the word “God”.
This morning I asked myself what the third step means to me. The answer was simple. It means that I will commit myself to apply these principles I have found in this program to my life today. That’s it. I know if I do this I can stay sober for this day. So, that’s “my” plan for this day.
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking this morning when I got up.