Take Your Life Back

by Stephen Arterburn

  13

  EXPANDING YOUR RECOVERY PLAN

  AS YOU BEGIN to assemble a responsive plan for taking your life back—renewing your mind by changing the way you think; finding self-compassion and a safe person to share your healing journey; acknowledging the truth about your past; identifying your basic emotional posture; naming what happened to you; grieving what was lost; tearing down walls and establishing healthy boundaries—you will reach a point where you will begin to see that an effective way to expand your recovery is by working the Twelve Steps of Life Recovery with your safe person.

  Why the Twelve Steps? For several reasons. First, the Twelve Steps were developed from the Bible. The founders of the Twelve Step process, along with their wives, were strong believers in God. In the early stages of developing the Twelve Steps, many of the meetings were simply Bible studies.

  In church settings, many of us expend a lot of effort to present ourselves in a positive light. That means we don’t share much of who we are, and we are very reluctant to share any of our struggles. We want to look good, plain and simple. And that squeezes to the margins our desire to know other people honestly and to be known. As a result, our problems continue to grow. But that’s not the way healing and recovery works, and it’s not the way the church is intended to function.

  It was different in the early church. Those first generations of Christians were connected to, and open with, one another.

  All the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. They worshiped together at the Temple each day, met in homes for the Lord’s Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity.[36]

  These people not only were generous with each other and shared their joys, but also shared their problems—putting into practice James’s injunction to “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”[37] When they practiced confession and prayer with each other, their problems grew smaller, and they experienced physical, emotional, and relational healing.

  From these two biblical examples, we again affirm that Life Recovery cannot be accomplished in isolation. When we think we can do it alone, nothing changes. That’s just a fact of life. We need to be open to one another, connected, confessing, and sharing our struggles as well as our joys within our relationships. So the key, as it was with the grieving process, is to expand our recovery by working the Twelve Steps with a safe person or safe people—ones with whom we can honestly be ourselves. Let’s look at how working the Twelve Steps of Life Recovery expands our healing.

  The Twelve Steps of Life Recovery

  1. We admitted we were powerless over our problems and that our lives had become unmanageable.

  2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

  3. We made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God.

  4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

  5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

  6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

  7. We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

  8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

  9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  10. We continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

  11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out.

  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

  (The Twelve Steps of Life Recovery have been adapted with permission from the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.)

  Steps 1–3: Our Relationship with Jesus, Our Higher Power

  The Twelve Steps of Life Recovery is a comprehensive program that covers our relationships with God, with ourselves, and with others. It doesn’t leave anyone out. In order to take your life back, you have to work on all three relationships—and the order is important. Dr. Bob, who was one of the early pioneers of Twelve Step recovery programs, asked newcomers two important questions:

  Do you believe in God?

  Have you given your life to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior?

  If the people couldn’t answer both questions in the affirmative, Dr. Bob believed they were not ready to begin recovery.

  The first three Steps are about our relationship with God, beginning with the recognition that our lives are out of control and that all our attempts to control things haven’t changed anything. We need help from a force or power that is greater than ourselves and outside of ourselves. And then we must be willing to turn our wills and lives over to that power.

  The Steps are phrased in such a way that they take us beyond mere mental assent. We have to actually give our lives over to God. Some of us have tried that for years. We keep trying to give our lives to God and ask him for help, and it hasn’t changed anything. That’s because something was left out.

  Step 3 says, “We made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God.”[38] Relating to God, the “Power greater than ourselves” from Step 2, involves a decision that not only includes our lives, but also our wills. That means we have surrendered. We no longer seek our own will—what we want; instead, we seek to know and do God’s will for our lives.

  Jesus says, “Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.”[39] If we choose to be willing to believe, we will discover in the doing what God’s will is. Our willingness to believe leads to belief and then to deeper and more certain belief. It’s like digging down to set an anchor in bedrock. You must choose to turn that first shovelful.

  The struggle that some people have with surrendering their will and lives to Jesus as their higher power may derive from a common portrayal of Jesus as gentle, meek, and mild. We want someone who is powerful, forceful, and assertive, don’t we?

  But the characteristics of gentleness, meekness, and mildness as commonly understood today do not present an accurate picture of the Jesus revealed in the Bible. For starters, gentleness and meekness, far from equating to weakness, are perhaps better understood as “great power under control.” Given the immense authority that Jesus wielded in human form, was there any other way he could have presented himself to the world that would not have completely overwhelmed everyone? Take a look at what happened in the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus announced himself to those who had come to arrest him: “As Jesus said ‘I AM he,’ they all drew back and fell to the ground!”[40] These were soldiers and guardsmen with “blazing torches, lanterns, and weapons,”[41] falling like tenpins.

  Likewise, Jesus’ mildness suggests the emotional quality of someone who knows exactly who he is and yet doesn’t feel the need to impose himself on anyone. Again, he displays power under control, like a thoroughbred responding to the pull of the reins.

  Or consider the time when Jesus and the disciples took a boat across the Sea of Galilee and a great storm came up. Several of the disciples were fishermen, who would have spent many hours on that same lake and would have seen many storms. But this one was different, and they were afraid for their lives. Meanwhile, Jesus was asleep in the back of the boat.

  The panicked disciples awakened Jesus, saying, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!” Jesus first rebuked them for their lack of faith, then “got up and rebuked the wind and waves.”

  “Suddenly there was a great calm.”[42] What’s not to like about that “higher power”?

  One more example is found in Matthew 14:22-34. Again the disciples were in a boat crossi
ng the lake, and again the winds came up and the sea was rough. But this time, Jesus wasn’t even with them—until they got about halfway across the lake, at which point he appeared, walking toward them on the water. The disciples were terrified, thinking he was a ghost. But Jesus said, “Take courage. I am here!”

  Now, imagine that you were Peter and you said to Jesus, “Lord, if it’s really you, tell me to come to you, walking on the water.” Jesus replied, “Yes, come.”[43] Imagine stepping out of the boat and walking on the water! This all was taking place in the midst of the storm. Not only could Jesus walk on water, but he also made it so that Peter could walk on water. Why wouldn’t we want him as our higher power?

  Our higher power can restore us to sanity only if we are willing to obey him and keep our eyes on him. (See Peter’s downfall at the lake in Matthew 14:30.) James tells us to “get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls. But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves.”[44]

  Taking your life back will require you to act on what you know about God. You must “get out of the boat” and actually trust him. Our belief in our higher power must eventually translate into faith, trust, and action.

  Steps 4–7 and 10: Our Relationship with Ourselves

  Once we have an understanding of how we are to relate to God, we look at ourselves next. It’s time to be honest with ourselves and stop looking at others as the cause of our problems. Step 4 calls for a “fearless moral inventory” by which we examine our own shortcomings and look at how we’ve been wounded. We look at “sins done by me” and “sins done to me.” The apostle Paul writes, “Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us.”[45]

  Step 4 has its origin in the four absolutes of the Oxford Group, an early-twentieth-century religious movement: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Our personal inventory can begin with where we have fallen short on each of the four absolutes. Where, and with whom, have we been dishonest? Where have we been lax in our morality and purity? How have we acted selfishly? And with whom is our ability to love diluted with resentments?

  This step is a call to answer Jesus’ question, “Why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own?”[46] In Step 4, we “first get rid of the log in [our] own eye; then [we] will see well enough to deal with the speck in [our] friend’s eye.”[47] We work on ourselves first.

  Some people get stuck at Step 4. A “searching and fearless” inventory of ourselves seems like too big of a task. We’ve already looked thoroughly at our wounds, and now we have to look at our failures, too? Well, yes. They go together, really. So we have to be thorough. That can easily get us bogged down and out of touch with our lives again. But our inventory doesn’t have to be exhaustively complete. It only needs to represent where we are today, with what we can identify today. As we find out more about ourselves—say, at Step 10—we’ll come back and do Steps 4 and 5 again. That’s how the process works.

  As we take our lives back, we’re not only able to be honest with ourselves, but we’re also willing to move to Step 5: being honest with God and with another person. This is putting into action what James instructs us to do: “Confess your sins to each other.”[48] We will never take our lives back if we balk at this confession. Remember, “you can’t heal a wound by saying it’s not there.”[49]

  Step 6 involves a willingness to have God change us and remove our defects and shortcomings. Before God will act, we must be willing. Are we ready to have him take these things away? It seems like a simple question, but it isn’t. God may want to remove some things that we’re not quite ready to let go of. We’re not sure we can—or even want to be—honest about that! That’s why it’s a two-Step process: readiness and then humbly asking.

  Are you really ready? It’s easy to say that we’re ready to surrender something to God, but if we’re not really ready, we’ll just be trying to take it back a little bit later. The question of readiness is the point at which we begin to face the reality of living differently.

  Then we come to Step 7, where we pray and ask God to remove our shortcomings. This is a serious step, and God takes it seriously. We need to be ready for the changes he is going to bring to us. (As we mentioned in our discussion of Step 4, and as Step 10 reminds us, this is not a “once is enough” effort.) Change is an ongoing process. Because we all continue to sin, we must stay current with taking our inventories.

  This process is really a different way to live—a more authentic and progressive way to live. But as we go back to Steps 4 and 5 again, this time we know what to do with them, and we have a better understanding of how to keep moving forward. I (David) still take a periodic moral inventory to remain aware of my inner character.

  Steps 8 and 9: Our Relationship with Others

  When we worked Step 4, we were already starting to work on Step 8. Part of our moral inventory includes the beginnings of our list of people to whom we need to make restitution. It is a form of hypocrisy to pursue a deeper relationship with God when we have human relationships that must be made right. That’s why Jesus said, “If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.”[50]

  Because Jesus gave this teaching in Galilee, which was a three-day journey from the Temple’s location in Jerusalem, those who heard him would have had a vivid picture of the importance that Jesus placed on restitution and making amends. He was telling his listeners to leave their sacrifice on the Temple altar and make a three-day journey back home, to make amends, and then to travel three days back to Jerusalem to offer their sacrifice. Jesus knows that making amends is difficult, but it is worth every bit of effort! Making amends is a key to taking our lives back. We must try to make things right with people we have harmed or hurt.

  Experience has shown that if we postpone action on these two steps, we short-circuit our growth and healing. At Step 3, we surrendered our will and chose to follow God’s will. But if we truly want to follow God’s will, we will be more than willing to make amends. It’s the loving thing to do, as the apostle John reminds us: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”[51]

  Jesus spoke directly to this issue when he said: “If you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell.”[52]

  We must approach Step 9, as well as all the other Steps, with prayer and an attitude of humility. Apart from God’s leading, how can we know that our going to some people to make amends won’t cause them greater harm? Some situations may seem obvious, but there are circumstances we might not be aware of that only a word from God can make clear.

  Everyone we’ve talked with over the years who has completed Steps 8 and 9 has reported how free they felt after following through with someone—even with just one. Think of how free you will feel after you have covered your entire list.

  Step 11: Strengthening Our Relationship with God

  To highlight that this is a spiritual process, we come back to our relationship with God in Step 11. He acts as the bookends of our healing journey. We encounter him at the beginning when we turn over our wills and our lives to our higher power, Jesus. Now we are faced once again with the reality of our relationship with God—not just in an act of surrender, but in a journey that involves ongoing surrender, along with seeking to know God better.

  We can increase our conscious awareness of God’s activity in our lives by developing a discipline of spending regular time in prayer. Step 11 specifies that we are to pray “only
for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out.”

  The other facet of our spiritual growth is referred to as “meditation.” This means not only spending time reading the Bible, but also spending time being quiet and listening for God’s voice—based on what you’ve read in the Bible.

  Step 12: Taking the Message to Others

  The healing journey is now summed up as a “spiritual awakening.” As we have learned how to take our lives back, and as we have been awakened spiritually, we are to share our journey with others. Be careful, though. Sometimes, people want to start with this step. When they think they understand the process but want to avoid the work of actually taking their life back, they can be tempted to try to help someone else take back his or her life. Codependent helping fits so easily into our problem behaviors.

  There’s a reason why this is the last Step. We’re not ready to share our journey until we’ve had our spiritual awakening. The truth we have to impart is what God has done for us, not what he can do for someone else. Keep it personal—it’s about what God has done for you!

  We believe that recovery is a synonym for what the Bible calls sanctification. We’re all in recovery from the ravages of sin and our sinful nature, and sanctification, discipleship, and Life Recovery are time-tested paths toward developing into who we really are, as God intended us to be. But this is only part of the healing journey. There’s more to come.