John Fischer The Catch

Time for You by John Fischer from the album, “Casual Crimes”
[Click on title to stream song.]

I have been the subject of an endless theme
And the star in everybody else’s dream
I have fought the demons of my own dark night
Finding only shadows in the dawning light

My ship is in; my debt is due
The time is now — the time for you
I have crossed the chasms of my casual crimes
I have passed the sign at least a thousand times

Waiting for a hand to rescue me
While at any time I could have walked out free

My ship is in; my debt is due
The time is now — the time for you

 There are no more places where my heart can flee
There are no more friends to give me sympathy
I am out of reasons; I am out of time
I am out to make it in the uphill climb

 My ship is in; my debt is due
The time is now — the time for you

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

This is the song of a narcissist (me) waking up to the fact that there are people outside of self who count more than he does.  It seems like a given. It seems like something mostly everyone knows instinctively (and most do), but it’s a class I missed. It’s a sign I didn’t see. It’s something everyone gets by the time they are five or six years old that I skated right by. I have people I can blame for this, but that doesn’t help me now. So what? (They’re dead now anyway, so I can’t make amends even if I wanted to.)

It is my place in the world that puts me in context with those around me. People are everywhere; people are like me; but they are most distinctively not me. They are someone else, and I desperately need to connect. The world is full of someone elses, some of whom I have harmed because of my addiction to myself. Time to make amends.

So it’s “Time for you,” where “you” is anybody but me.

I apologize if this is going right by you because this is probably not your problem. But maybe you can see yourself and your own addictions in here somewhere and receive the same encouragement I have received from these steps to make things right. I am a tiny little dot among billions of tiny little dots on a tiny little planet revolving around a relatively small sun. Who’s at the center of all this? Well it obviously isn’t me.

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

Okay, now these steps have taken to meddling. Let’s not bring anybody else into this. This is my own personal struggle. I can handle this myself, thank you. Bring someone else into this process and it becomes painfully real that I can’t operate in a vacuum. None of us can.

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7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

About now it’s time to either get serious about this 12-step thing or drop it. Do you feel like you’ve been dancing around this for at least a week, maybe more. I don’t think anybody’s rubber is meeting their road, at least mine isn’t. So far this spiritual walk-through of the twelve steps hasn’t cost me anything. Nothing’s changed; and isn’t this supposed to be all about change? Isn’t it about changing the things we are powerless against?

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

I love the way these steps get you ready for something before you actually do anything about it. In Step 2 we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity before we trusted that power with our lives (Step 3). Here we are asking if we are ready to have God get rid of all the bad stuff in our lives before He actually does it.

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

So I’m going to admit to you all about my own personal struggles with these 12-steps. For me, the moral inventory part has been both revealing and freeing. Let me try and get at some of what I’m still digging up after writing about this three times over the last eight years.

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

In the 1983 movie, “Mr. Mom,” Jack (Michael Keaton) losses his job requiring him to take over staying at home with the kids while his wife (Terry Garr) goes back to work. In a touching scene, Jack has to talk their son, Kenny, into giving up his whoopee blanket. When I think of this scene, it always reminds me of Step 3, when we all must turn over to the care of the Lord whatever we used as our own security blanket, whether it’s alcohol, drugs, sex, power, money or something else. Jack even warned Kenny that pretty soon he would be out on the street trying to score a quilt or an electric blanket and before you know it, he’ll be strung out on bedspreads!

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

There is an oral tradition in AA that is a play on the first three words of this step: “Came to believe.…” It turns it into a three-part unfolding.

First, we came. We showed up. Let us not downplay the significance of this first fact: we got ourselves in the door. Now this is more largely felt in Alcoholics Anonymous than it is in church, but the parallel is still there.

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Return of the Prodigal by Rembrandt

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

It has been estimated that over two million people worldwide are currently partaking in the assistance provided by an Alcoholics Anonymous group, and AA has been in existence for 83 years. That alone should tell us that the twelve step principles are connecting with something common to us all. As Christina, one of our readers wrote last week, “I have come to believe that everyone should embrace a 12-step program and just adapt it to the areas of life that are particular to you.”

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I am firmly convinced, now, more than ever, that the 12-step program as originally adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, is closer to capturing the true essence of a Christian’s attitude and relationship to God and to others than anything taught or modeled in our Christian churches at least in my lifetime. If all Christians were 12-step Christians, all of the ugly traits that have wrapped themselves around Christianity in this culture in the last 40 years would never have come about.

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