Posted on by Paul Gerald

Defining our Higher Power

First, some pretty cool comments on the previous posts. Somebody must have clicked in from MySobrietySpace.com. I set up a profile there. My first sponsor also sent me an email about Job, and I took the liberty of posting it here as a comment on that post.

Had lunch with a sponsee today, and he’s been on the 3rd Step. My sponsor had told me that it’s important at this point to have some workable image of a Higher Power, no matter how small, so we can have some idea of what we’re turning things over to. Something you can wrap your head around, as he said. Lots of folks use the group, or a more classic notion of God, whatever.

My first take on this, about eight years ago, was that God was the little voice in my head trying to get me to do the right thing. I heard it very clearly in the later years of smoking pot, when even as I lifted the pipe to my face, I’d hear “Don’t do it! You don’t like it! You’ll regret it!” And that voice was always right. Sometimes after I smoked I would immediately hate the feeling and wish I had listened to that voice.

My notion of a Higher Power has changed over the years, but at first my notion of the Third Step was simply following that voice, wherever it came from (“tuning in God’s station” was another way I thought of it).

So today this sponsee came up with another one: He knows there’s electricity, even though you can’t see it or really understand how it works, but stuff works with electricity, which is omnipresent, even in our bodies. So, for him, if God is like electricity, then the program is like the plug you stick in the wall. That action (willingness, faith) allows God to go to work in your life. I thought that was pretty good.

Then we went off into a long, rambling conversation about religion and particle physics and Buddhism — just the kind of massively intellectual conversation we both enjoy and which adds up to absolutely nothing. But it sure was fun.