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MAPPING OUR JOURNEY

You may be wondering how I, a nonalcoholic, came across the Twelve Step program. Allow me to share a little bit of my story with you.

Over the years I have struggled with the need for change in many areas of my life. When I was younger, I battled with an addiction to gambling in the area of horse racing. Twenty-five years of marriage have brought home the subtle depths of my own self-centeredness. Moments of extreme tiredness have exposed compulsive tendencies to overwork and overcommit. My children, especially, have helped me to recognize how hard I find it to lighten up and really enjoy myself. These issues and others as well have caused much heartache and pain and struggle—not only for myself but also for those around me.

However, while wrestling with this need for change I discovered the helpfulness of the Twelve Step program. Here is how it happened.

Some of my friends happen to be recovering alcoholics. We often get together to talk about the struggles and joys of our lives. Whenever I spoke about my own compulsions and character defects, like those mentioned above, they would point me toward the program. One day a friend told me bluntly, “Trevor, just work the Twelve Steps.” I began to do so and have continued it on a day-by-day basis, even now. This is how I came to discover the power and value of the Twelve Step program.

When I look back over this time, I can see clearly that the Twelve Steps have become God’s surprising way of keeping my life on track. I have little doubt that without the wisdom and practical guidance they offer my life would have been very much poorer today at every level. They have given me a way of dealing with my tendency toward compulsive behavior, helped me take a closer look at my weaknesses and provided me with practical tools for spiritual growth and healing. In a nutshell, the Twelve Steps have become profoundly helpful in my own ongoing personal journey of change.

However, I should not really have been surprised. Literally millions of people around the world can testify to the blessings and benefits of working the Twelve Step program, not just in Alcoholics Anonymous but in many other recovery and healing programs. These wonderful gifts include things like peace of mind, newfound freedom, and the joy found in serving others. Furthermore, they have provided for many people a solid and realistic plan for growing spiritually. Small wonder that Dallas Willard, one of the most respected spiritual writers of our time, comments in one of his books: “Any successful plan for spiri­tual formation, whether for the individual or group, will in fact be significantly similar to the Alcoholics Anonymous program.”¹

The Twelve Steps

You may not be familiar with the Twelve Steps. The person largely responsible for formulating them was Bill W., one of the founding members of Alcoholics Anonymous. During the spring of 1938, when he was writing the story of the AA movement, he listed twelve principles that he believed helped alcoholics to recover. They had grown out of his own experience and that of other alcoholics from what he had learned from an evangelical movement called the Oxford Group and from his reading of the Bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount. They eventually became known as the Twelve Step program. While I will be adapting those steps that speak specifically of alcoholism, here are the Twelve Steps as they are used in AA:

1.We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2.Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3.Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

4.Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5.Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6.Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7.Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

8.Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9.Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10.Continued to take personal inventory and, when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11.Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

12.Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

If you study each of these steps carefully, you will see that the program is deeply, though not specifically, Christian. Steps One, Two, and Three invite us to give up our natural tendency to want to be in total control—to be managing directors—and instead to let God be God in our lives. Steps Four, Five, and Ten call on us constantly to examine our lives and to confess our wrongs. Steps Six and Seven prompt us to let God change us from the inside out. The Eighth and Ninth Steps encourage us to mend broken relationships wherever we can. The Eleventh Step shows us how to grow in our relationship with God on a daily basis. Last, but not least, the Twelfth Step challenges us to share the hope of recovery with other strugglers and sufferers. Can you see how close these steps are to the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth and the writings of the New Testament?

What is most important is that the Twelve Step program be seen as a way of life, not just a set of rules. It does not offer us a theory for change, but a way of living, rooted deeply in the biblical wisdom that leads to change. These steps are not meant to be done once, and then checked off as completed, never to be done again. They are steps to be taken regularly, sometimes several times in one day. We must not just think about them; we must do them. As AA’s Big Book reminds us: “The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it.”²

In reflecting on these Twelve Steps from the perspective of someone who is not an alcoholic, I hope that I have been faithful to the spirit and content of the Alcoholics Anonymous program. If you are already involved in AA or some other recovery group, please don’t change what you are doing. However, if you sense that God may be nudging you toward living for a change and you are not too sure how to go about it, I hope these steps will guide and help you. May they also draw you into a more personal and living relationship with God and enable you to live with greater joy and freedom and serenity.

In closing, this book should be seen as a companion to The Serenity Prayer,³ which is a series of meditations that I wrote on that prayer. Together, these two books express my gratitude to Alcoholics Anonymous for the way it has helped throw light on biblical treasures sometimes neglected by the Christian church. I also hope that these two books together will make available to a wider audience the spiritual wisdom contained in these wonderful treasures.