Start Where You Are At
Step Two: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Not figured out what that power is before it restores us to sanity. Coming to believe is a process, an ever evolving thing. I hear many who get the words concept and conception mixed up. A concept is narrow, defined, and rigid. A conception is open-ended and has room to grow. It starts small. A friend of mine says "As you grow, God grows." I was told that God would be revealed to me as I was revealed to me.
Bill says that while in the hospital he turned his will and life over to the care of God as he "Then understood him." A very crucial phrase. If I wait until I have it figured out out, I'll never start. That is why Step Two is more about willingness than belief, because willingness is action and the Third Step is the beginning of action.
The words in what I call the "Third Step decision" do not define God to me, but it does define my relationship. God is the director, God is the principal, God is the father and I am the child.
I'm so grateful that my first sponsor did not have me go home and make a list of everything I wanted God to be. Looking back, that would have been making God over into my own image. Instead, he said "Take the action, the understanding will come."
Sam Shoemaker had a saying, "Turn as much of yourself as you understand over to as much of God as you understand." So in taking Step Three, I start where I am at and grow from there. "Upon a foundation of complete willingness I might build what I saw in my friend. I saw that growth could start from that point," Bill says in his story.
Today I know that it is impossible to intellectualize God. God is more of an experience than an idea. And it has grown for me to something that I can't wrap my mind around, the whole conception of God is beyond me, it is too big. It can only be expressed through the actions of my daily walk.
Jim
Big Book references from Alcoholics Anonymous, First Edition