Thanks yall, I have thoroughly enjoyed this thread also. THats why I was happy when this forum got started, it gives me a place to find like minded people and learn more about myself.
THe whole conflict with people of faith and secular people I think stems from the effectivness of NA as a whole. It works no matter what your religious/spiritual beliefs are, but some people that have gotten clean fall under the false pretense that there way is the only right way (which may be true for them) and they get a little overzealous in sharing it since it is what has worked for them. (I'm guilty of this myself) It's jsut that it's amazing to some people that they are able to stay clean and they want other people to know it's possible and how to do it (their way to do it). I take what I can use and leave the rest as they say and try to keep as open a mind as possible.
Autum, the whole "turn it over" thing used to bother me too. I saw it as a cop-out. Like, "well if god really wants me to stop 13th stepping new commers, he will make me, so I'll turn it over to him, but untill he stops me I'll continue" That is not recovery and that is not taking personal responsibility.
I heard it put like this by a fellow secular buddy in NA. "go lock your self in a closet and pray to god to open the door for you and turn it over to him.....see if that works.....or you can stand up and open the ******* door. We aren't powerless over everything."
My view of "turning it over" is to simply take responsibility for everything that I have control over and try my best to do what i consider "right" in situations that I have power over. In situations that I don't have any control over, I try to just forget about it or "turn it over" and trust that it'll work out how its supposed to even if I don't like it.....it's hard sometimes b/c I like to keep this illusion of control in my head even if I logically know that there is nothing I can do to "fix" the situation, but eventually I get tired of trying and I just "turn it over". Life is easier when I stop trying to control things that are out of my control.
This has worked pretty well for me so far. In the first step of NA it alludes to the fact that when I try to exert control over something that I am powerless over, it brings up unmanagability in my life. Unmanagability is the outward expresion of my powerlessness. An example would be trying to pick up a huge boulder with my bare hands, I can try and try and try, but it just isn't possible for me to do, the more I try the more unmanagable my life gets....pulled muscles, hernias, ruptured disks. THe only way to get around it is not to try to pick up the rock in the first place which relates to the concept of surrender and "turning it over"
I don't know if that made any sense, but it's what I've learned to be true for me so far.