[bluidkiti]

STEP 2

Why don’t you choose your own conception of God? … It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning. (Bill’s Story, 12: 2, 12: 4)


If our problem is that we have a body which will die if we drink, and we have a mind which compels us to take that drink, then we are powerless indeed. We are without power. Yet the fact that we and others like us are not drinking or using, one day at a time, is proof of the action in our own lives of a solution – a power greater than any one of us. Step 2 reminds us we are crazy to think that we need to be in control or that we can do it alone. We no longer need to live solo with the pain and insanity that have been our nature. Insanity is when we lack perspective and things are out of proportion, and when we repeat the same mistakes over and over expecting different results. In AA we find hope that we can be restored to sanity, we can become whole. The hope of Step 2 follows the desperation of Step 1 as the dawn follows the dark.
AA is a spiritual, not a religious, program. Spirituality is what happens to us when we work the Steps within the AA fellowship community. Step 2 does not say: We came to believe IN a power that WOULD restore us. Step 2 describes the solution as we came to believe THAT a power greater than ourselves COULD restore us to sanity. (59: 2) The emphasis is not on who or what this power is, but on what this power can do for us. We begin to turn inward to find a higher power that works and feels safe. A group itself qualifies as a power greater than us, so do the spiritual principles contained in the practice of the 12 Steps. So does the understanding any one of us has of a higher power.