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.

I’ve spent most of my life believing I was better than everybody else. I was special. I was given a task from God to do something really BIG for Him. That was drilled into me at the age of five. What it did was set me apart in my mind. I was privileged. God was going to give me VIP treatment since I was so important to Him and His work. A warped sense of spiritual entitlement set in and blended dangerously with my distaste for accountability and you can see where this is going — someone who is aloof and above criticism.

I love the 12-Step program now because it throws me into the mix of broken humanity. It’s where I belong. But it’s also where I don’t fit. I’m tired of being aloof, but I don’t know how to be in the crowd. I’m self-conscious in groups when I’m nobody. I know what to do when I’m the performer. I know how to take compliments and reach out to people as long as I’m the “somebody” they came to hear, but when I’m not the focus, I fade into the background and want to hide. “Don’t you know who I am?” is going through my mind, or as Marti points out, it should be “Don’t you know who I was?”

The 12-Step program throws me in with a bunch of sinners, which is where I long to be, but it’s also where I don’t know how to be. I know how to be in the green room with the performers. And then I find out there are no performers here, there are just a bunch of flabbergasted saved sinners, and they share the job of leading the meeting, and that’s good. We’re all anonymous. We’re nobodies finding out we are somebody in Christ. And this is good. This is all very good, but scary.

Is anybody else scared? Why?

Would you feel at home in an AA meeting or out of sorts?