Choices

I read today that selfishness and self-centeredness is the root of my troubles. My life and choices were driven by many different manifestations of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking and self-pity, and those choices led to almost every instance of damage and pain that I have experienced and or caused others to experience. Realizing this came as a result of taking a thorough moral inventory of myself. But today I associate this passage and the ideas I feel are behind it with a different step of my program of recovery. Today it helps me keep a proper attitude and reaction to the very foundation of recovery.

In the same book that I read the above information about the root of my problem I am told that lack of power was my dilemma. I know that I am powerless over alcohol and other addictions and that my life, as a result of running on my own strength, power, and making choices based on my reactions to and bondage of fear, self-reliance, self-will, etc. had become unmanageable. Experience has proved to me that when I make choices based on my own understanding of things and survival instincts that far more often than not, I choose something that leads to disappointment, if not outright disaster. Eventually when I begin to attempt to run my own life and make my choices based on what I feel is best or right I distance myself from God and lose contact, guidance and power that He freely makes available to me. When I begin to live this way, insanity returns, and although I can not explain it, everything within me makes a drink or a drug seem like a really good idea.

I have a daily reprieve from the obsession to drink and drug contingent on the maintenance of my spiritual condition. The maintenance of my spiritual condition is not my spiritual knowledge or understanding, it is the level that I put into action what I have learned of and from God and how I stay connected to Him. When everything feels like it is falling apart in areas of my life I need to beware my choices. I am not writing here of choices to drink and use but the choices in how I react or respond to what is happening in my life. When I don't know what to do, I feel afraid, but I can not allow my choices to be directed by fear. If I begin to act on my own wisdom, knowledge, will and power in the everyday direction of my life I am beginning to return to the path that led to my near destruction. But when I remember that I have surrendered my will and my life, and therefore my choices, over to the care of my Creator, I am directed through the storm to a port of safety and security...and while I am traveling to that safe place I can know peace. My choices based on my needs, desires and instincts have almost never lead to life, but every choice I have made to let God make the choice of direction and reaction has lead to freedom and serenity. The only choice I can safely make in my life when I feel the pressure of life pushing me under is to choose to let God direct every action and reaction I make.