Step 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
Not my will, but yours, be done. Luke 22:42
Not realizing it, I’ve been wrestling with step three my entire life. I’ve always felt this war between who I want to be and what I want right now. Whether its food or drugs, I want to do right, but right now, I just want whatever feels good.
I’ve come to greatly appreciate then, the reality of Jesus’ struggle on the night before his crucifixion. In the passage, Jesus wrestles with God over the coming misery. With brutal honesty, Jesus reveals that he doesn’t want to go through with the plan. Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Then, in surrender, he utters those most difficult words. Not my will, but yours.
For me, step three – surrender – is so difficult because it’s not just a decision in my head, but rather, something I must do. Any alcoholic can decide to stop drinking while sitting on the couch, but getting up and going to treatment, instead of the liquor store, is profoundly difficult. For me, step three is a daily – often many times a day – fight to wrestle my will to the ground, surrendering to God.
This is not just about getting sober. To truly recover, we must follow something other than ourselves. AA insists that this something else must be God. The laxity of language here – God as we understood him – bothers some Christians as it’s too amorphous.
I would just say here that I know who God is, and I would allow a little grace for the one who doesn’t. With life in crisis, desperate for sobriety, the addict often doesn’t need to grasp the fine details of church doctrine. He just desperately needs God. I’m simply happy to know that this is the one place that our culture pours millions of dollars into encouraging a relationship with our creator.
Step three is for those who have found their way to be disastrous. This isn’t just about alcohol or drugs. Surrender means we must learn to turn our entire lives over to God. This isn’t easy, and it isn’t done all at once. We will find though, that in doing it daily, we experience the life and peace he intends for us.