My Step 03 – Last days

Step 3 (LDS ARP Manual)

Decide to turn your will and your life over to the care of God the Eternal Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I have always had a problem with last days.  I will act out in addiction and assure myself guiltily that it was the last time would do that.  Then later (often not much later) I would do it again, because I had already done it that day or because I still felt guilty so once more wouldn’t make a difference.  If I was going to feel the shame and guilt, why not feel it over something worth feeling it for, right?

Step 03 – Turning your will over to the care of God

Step 3

Decide to turn your will and your life over to the care of God the Eternal Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

What does it mean to turn our will over to God? Turning our life over to God has tangible results: we begin to keep the commandments, which are physical, tangible acts. Our will is elusive, even to us. I mean, what do you want, really?

Step 03 – the big decision

Step 3

Decide to turn your will and your life over to the care of God the Eternal Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

The first thing that you need to do, in order to complete step 3, is to make a decision. This will be tough for you because, as an addict, you are great at making decisions, but lousy at actually keeping them.

Step 03 – The First Action Step

Step 3 from the Big Book of AA 

Made a decision to turn our life and our will over to the care of God as we understood him 

Step 3 from the LDS ARP Manual

Decide to turn your will and your life over to the care of God the Eternal Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

Step 3 from He Did Deliver Me from Bondage

Made the decision to reconcile ourselves to the will of God, offer our whole souls as an offering unto Him, and trust Him in all things forever. (2 Nephi 10:24; Omni 1:26; Mosiah 3:19; 2 Nephi 4:34)

Step 3 is perhaps the most important of the steps. It is the first step that really gives you a good idea of the commitment involved in recovery. This is of course problematic as, being an addict, commitments are not things that you are used to taking seriously.

The Second Step: Why bother? (My Step 02)

After you’ve spent some time in addiction, “why bother” becomes the most important question in your life. If I am just going to sin again, why bother to repent? If I am just going to get drunk after the meeting, why bother to sober up before it? If I am just going to drive my family away, why bother trying to be civil to them now? God can’t forgive, because I never change, so why bother trying for anything anymore?Obviously, your hardcore, longterm addict is a barrel of laughs to be around.

The Second Step: Unstoppable Forces and Immovable Objects

From the LDS Addiction Recovery Manual:

Step 2: Come to believe that the power of God can restore you to complete spiritual health

If we accept that God has all power in the universe and if we accept that he can change our desires, then how exactly does addiction happen? Why doesn’t God take away our desire for it the first time we ask? Addiction is bad, after all. Why would God want us to have it? Why would He make us prone to it? Why am I the way I am?

The Second Step: What God does

The Second Step: What God doesFrom the LDS Addiction Recovery Manual:

Step 2: Come to believe that the power of God can restore you to complete spiritual health

There are a couple of important verses in Alma 5. They are immanently familiar to you, I am sure, because Janice Kapp Perry has written a couple songs based around them. I am just started to get a handle on their meaning, so please allow me to share what I have discovered.

The Second Step: Who is God?

From the LDS Addiction Recovery Manual:

Step 2: Come to believe that the power of God can restore you to complete spiritual health

I like the way that the second step is worded in the manual because it reminds the reader of something important: God has power. Most LDS addicts accept that God, in theory, is loving. We’ve felt the Spirit. We sat through Primary, Young Womens, and Young Mens. We understand the concept of God’s love.

The problem is that we may have a hard time believing that He loves us.

The Second Step: Recognizing God

From the AA Big book:
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity

From He Did Deliver Me From Bondage (the Heart t’ Heart study manual):
Step Two: Came to believe that God has all power and wisdom and that in His strength we can do all things (Mosiah 4:9; Alma 26:12)

From the LDS Addiction Recovery Manual:
Step 2: Come to believe that the power of God can restore you to complete spiritual health

The funny thing about step two is that it is painfully obvious to most addicts. “Well of course God can restore my spiritual health,” they might say, “I believe in repentance.” The only problem being that they don’t.

My Step 01

As I said before, I had experimented with pn and mb from my youth upward, but I really came into my own in grad school.  As I became more ensconched in my addiction, I began to think of it as helpful.  If I needed to work all night on a paper, I would look at pn once my wife had gone to bed and the worrying surrounding that would keep me awake all night.  When my wife and I weren’t really talking, we seemed to work together better.  Looking at pn helps me make up for my inadequacies in bed.  Thoghts like this actually would occur to me.

When I thought my wife would leave, I actually contemplated what I would do.  I thought that I would have a week long binge, downloading everything I could think of that appealed.  I would then confess it to my bishop, explaining it away as grief at her leaving.  I used to think about how my life would be free-er if she crashed in a car wreck.  I used to think a lot of things.

I want to be clear here.  I love my wife.  I always have.  But addiction really monkeys with your thinking.  Even when I would have those thoughts, I would recoil, disbelieving that I had actually thought that.  But I had.