Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
This is when this starts to get pretty gnarly.
“Admitted … to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs?” Is that what it says? Does it have to be a human being? Why not a dog, or a cat, or record me admitting this to my phone? God and myself, I can handle, but I’m going to have some difficulty bringing the results of my moral inventory to anyone outside of that.
God and myself have been living with this stuff for some time now. God is probably pretty sick of it by now. Of course He doesn’t buy any of the justifications, excuses or rationalizations I’ve been using on myself. I buy them. They fool me all the time (at least that’s what I tell myself). It must be why I can live with this for so long.
So what does that say about the nature of my relationship with God? It says I’m counting on Him to put up with me. I’m leaning heavily on His grace, which is what we all have to do, but if I love Him and I keep on living with something I know He doesn’t like, what does that say about my love for Him? Don’t I love Him enough to want to change?
This is when the real struggle comes. It’s that other human being. If we just didn’t have that. That other human being really complicates everything. If I just keep it to myself and God, I think I can manage, but to drag someone else into it — that changes the whole picture. That person is most likely not going to buy my excuses and justifications nor are they going to let me blame someone else for my problems.
We all have things in our lives — sins, habits, hurts, flaws — that will be very hard to overcome. These are things we have made unhealthy alliances with — things we don’t intend to change, at least in the near future — things, indeed, that we are powerless to change. Sound familiar? Isn’t that where we started? We are powerless and our lives have become unmanageable. So here we are facing those things and we will either face them and learn how to overcome them, moving forward in God’s power, or we will leave and not come back to the meeting.
That other human being is critical. I have a friend I’ve been avoiding because he knows me too well. He won’t let me get away with anything. I called him this weekend because I saw this coming. Do you have a friend like that? At least I got the door open now. I can tell I’m going to need this relationship.
How about you? Who are you going to call?
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