Walking Through Sobriety – Step Three

“Made a decision to turn our will and live over to God as we understood him”

So often discussion about this step follows the well-worn path of considering what god might be, and what god’s will might be.

How do we understand a god? How can we, coming to AA with instincts warped by the living lie of alcoholism, tell god’s will from our own wishful fantasies and self-centered rationalizations?

While these are good questions, on that perhaps need to be attended to at some point, sometimes I get sidetracked by them. Reading the step above, I see that nowhere does it ask me to define god, or discern god’s will. So, I will not rave about my conception of a higher power and how it has changed over the years, fascinating as this subject may be. For the purpose of this step, it simply doesn’t matter that much.

This step asks me to make a decision to turn my will and life over to the care of something that I came to believe in during step two – whatever that something might be.

What might “will and life” mean? It is the sum total of all my actions, the result of the myriad of endless choices, some big, some small, that I make throughout each day.

Could it be that my “will” is the intention behind each of these choices – choices that are always made in the present moment?

Perhaps then, what I am turning over is the present moment, each little choice that turns the many potential paths of the future into the single unalterable trail of the past.

“to the care of …” I am not turning this over to the command of a higher power, to have this god of my understanding make all these choices for me.

I think of how I care for people in my life in answering the question: What is it that I mean by “care”?

I look out for them. I listen to them. I do what I can to help, and expect them to do the same. So this is the care I would expect from a god of my understanding. I can give up trying to discern a set of rules, and start listening and talking, much as I would to some person that cares for me.

Having made a decision, can I then unmake it?

I have heard much debate about this – surely I can change my mind, and just as surely there is a sense in which a decision is an action, and as such I cannot go back into the past and unmake it. It turns into a semantic tangle, a tangle that comes unknotted when considered in the context of the present moment.

In the present moment, this is the decision I can make … to allow the care of a power greater than myself to guide my choices.