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Learning to Love More

I heard an Indian tribe on the Amazon cursed their enemy by saying, “stay just the way you are.” They know that if humans don’t change and grow, death is right around the corner.

Staying the same was exactly what I was after while I was drinking. I never saw the need to change. I wanted you to change. I wanted life to change. But not me. After all I was a pretty special guy. I had been winning at the game of life. I was just having a run of bad luck is all. Besides, change is uncomfortable. Why would I want that when getting comfortable and staying that way was the only thing that mattered?

When water doesn’t flow it becomes stagnant and starts to smell after a while. I was real stinky when I stumbled through the door to my first meeting. The twelve steps helped me get a good whiff of myself.

The doctor says in our book I need to change or I’ll drink again. One old timer in one of my first meetings put it more bluntly, “change or die, M-Fer!” The doctor goes on to say this change can’t be a “self-help” change. Change has to happen deep down in the center of me. That’s God’s territory.

I can’t change myself in any real,lasting way. I’m pretty sure I could sit and meditate on a mountaintop for twenty years, but unless God (or Life, or Consciousness, or whatever you call HP) has changed me I’ll still be basically the same schmuck I was twenty years earlier. In the same way, AA doesn’t change me. The AA program connects me to God. God changes me.

I invite God into my life first by really, really wanting to be changed. I keep God in the center of my life by remaining willing to take the recovery actions suggested to me in my first week. I seem to grow automatically when I consistently practice the principles. Most days I’m willing to practice. Some days I’m not.

If God gave me a two word job description for my life on earth, it would read, “love more.” Growing along spiritual lines is long hand for learning to love more. As I grow through the years in AA, I come into fuller expression of the loving God seed in the center of my being. Life is pretty darn good most of the time.