John Fischer The Catch

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

Did you ever think that Jesus might have utilized some of the the Twelve Steps of AA? Not because He was following the steps of course but because they are true. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night Jesus was betrayed and arrested, He was well into what we know today as Step Eleven. It’s just that the rest of His group was asleep, so He had to go it alone. But everything He was experiencing that night in the garden is expressed in the eleventh step which reads: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God … praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

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Step 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible (see Step 8), except when to do so would injure them or others.

Step 8 and Step 9 are connected. Step 8 is about making a list of people we have harmed and deciding if we are willing to go to them and make amends, and Step 9 is actually doing that.

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

This is when it starts getting personal. This is when we start to involve others in this process. I can spend lots of time working on myself, (I can even fool myself into believing I’m doing what is asked of me) but the minute you bring someone else into the picture it becomes more complicated. This is where accountability comes in.

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Step 6. Are ready to have God remove all these defects of attitude and character.

If this doesn’t hurt, it’s probably not happening.

What does it take for God to remove these defects in attitude or character? It takes a lot, because we have undoubtedly gotten very comfortable with them. We’ve been self-medicating for years. These are the judgments, rationalizations, accusations, manipulations and put-downs we have relied on most of our lives. They are the equalizers by which we try to make up for our own deficiencies in character by putting others down. We are constantly evening the moral score with other people. As long as God grades on the curve we’ll probably be okay, because everyone else is so messed up (and aren’t we glad when we find that out!).

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