“We made a decision to turn our will and our lives
over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
The surrender we experience in Step One, coupled with the hope
and belief we find in Step Two, make us ready and willing to continue on
the path toward freedom in Narcotics Anonymous. In Step Three, we
put our belief in a Higher Power into action, making a decision to turn
our will and our lives over to the care of the God of our understanding.
Essential to working the Third Step is our willingness to allow the
God of our understanding to work in our lives. We develop this willingness over time. The willingness we experience in our early recovery is valuable even though we may be willing only to a certain degree.
Although this may feel like unconditional willingness, many of us have
discovered that our willingness grew as we learned to trust a Power
greater than ourselves.
The decision we make in Step Three requires that we move away
from our self-will. Self-will is composed of such characteristics as
closed-mindedness, unwillingness, self-centeredness, and outright
defiance. Our self-centered obsession and its accompanying insanity have made our lives unmanageable. Acting on our self-will has
kept us trapped in a continuous cycle of fear and pain. We wore ourselves out in fruitless attempts to control everyone and everything.
We couldn’t just allow events to happen. We were always on the lookout for ways we could force things to go as we wanted.
When we first look at making the decision called for in this step,
we are likely to have questions, uncertainty, and even fear about what
we are being asked to do. We might wonder why we need to make a
decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the God of
our understanding. Or we may wonder what will happen to us if we
place ourselves in God’s care. We may fear that we won’t be happy
with what our lives will be like after working this step.
20 It Works
When we trust that there is growth in taking action despite our
fear or uncertainty, we are able to work Step Three. Even though we
do not know how our lives will change as we work this step, we can
learn to trust that our Higher Power will care for us better than we
could. The Third Step is our commitment to our own emotional,
physical, and spiritual well-being.
What began in the Second Step as belief in a Higher Power can
become a fuller relationship with a God of our understanding in Step
Three. The decision that we make by working this step, and the relationship that results, will revolutionize our existence.
This decision is easier to make than to live by. We can easily lapse
into old behavior; it takes determination, time, and courage to change.
Because we’re not perfect, we simply continue to reaffirm our decision on a regular basis and then do the very best we can to live by
it. Complete and unconditional surrender of our will and our lives is
an ideal we strive to fulfill. Although we don’t become perfect, we
do make a profound change by working this step. We are making a
serious effort to live differently than we have in the past. From now
on, we are going to be practicing this decision, and the way we relate to the world around us can change radically as a result.
Author
gwenie1123