“Step Three: Faith”

(This blog is third in a multi-part series, “Thoughts On The Steps”. This series is not a guide on how to work steps; steps can only be worked under the guidance of a sponsor. The twelve-step program is a spiritual program; it teaches us how to live a spiritual life. Working each of the steps gives us the chance to practice a spiritual principle. Whatever your particular fellowship, the Steps are the same, as are the spiritual principles behind them. These are my thoughts on the steps and on those principles.)

Step Three: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

Turn it over.

That's what this step is all about: turning it over to God. We make a decision to stop trying to exert our will on reality and allow reality to be as it is. We've come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can help us. We've admitted that we can't do it ourselves. So we make a decision to let go and let God take care of it. We decide to let the power greater than us run the show, to let the chips falls where they may. Whatever will be will be. We let go.

Letting go is an action--one of Faith. We don't know what will happen, we don't know how things will turn out. We let go anyway. Instead of trying to make things happen the way we want them to, instead to trying to assert our will and our designs on life, we decide to let go and leave it up to God. We might even be so spiritually advanced that we make the connection between all three first steps: we can't do it, our higher power can, and so we let it.

This can be one of the most difficult steps to take. Those who don't have much experience with the spiritual (and let's face it, most of us who walk into the rooms of 12-step recovery don't), don't have a lot of practice in relying on it. That's what this step does--it gives us the opportunity to practice having Faith, using it, relying on it. Instead of relying on ourselves, something we've admitted does not work so well, we decide instead to rely on the power of something greater than ourselves.

They key here (I think) is that the step talks about God as we understand God. The power greater than yourself doesn't have to be Jesus, or the Christian God, or any figure from any particular religion at all for that matter. It's about your own personal understanding of what that higher power is like, what it means to you, your relationship with it. I refer to my higher power as the Infinite All. That's my understanding of it; each of us is going to understand it a little differently. Sometimes a lot differently.

If we are only at the beginning of our journey to understanding the power greater than ourselves, then this step is all the more difficult. How can we turn our will and our lives over to the care of something we're not sure we believe in, something we’re not even really sure what it is?! The less experience we have with the spiritual, the greater an act of Faith it is to take this step.

Some people feel they could take this step much easier if they had concrete proof that it will 'work'. The short answer to that is to look around at all the other people who have chosen to trust in the God of their understanding and see what Faith has done for them. Personally, I think not fully understanding, not knowing for certain IS the point of this step. It is because we really don't know what will happen that makes this a true act of Faith. If we know what's going to happen, we're not really acting out of Faith. It doesn't take much Faith to believe the lights will come on if we flip the lightswitch.

Faith works a bit backwards from our normal rational thought process. In matters of Faith, we do the action first and then we see the results, not the other way around. This is what makes it such a powerful experience. We close our eyes, step out over a precipice, and have Faith that everything will be alright. We trust in the power greater than ourselves to take care of us. We do our part and leave the rest up to God.