Step 7: Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings
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| Image credit: Photo by Trapac on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
I've been going through the process of working the 12 Steps around my own personal craziness, and last week, I reached the point where I was supposed to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. Whew! That has so many problematic words in it. I mean even if we forget about "shortcomings" (because, let's face it, don't most of us want to keep on keeping on with the ignoring in that department?), we have words like "God" and "ask" and "remove" and (trickiest of all) "humbly."
I don't know about you, but I don't have a healthy sense of humility. I can do self-righteous superiority or rampant insecurity or defensive arrogance or abject self-abasement. But there is no healthy medium of humility for me without either a heaping dollop of "I suck" or a secret "see how much humbler I am than you!" I did some 12 Step readings around humility, but I still couldn't envision that middle ground. What I heard were exhortations to perfection: "Do this, but not too much! But then again, don't go too far the other way! Get it juuust right." Then the Junky's Wife helped me out by sharing that she saw humility as simply asking for help when you needed it. I'm not good at that, but at least I can understand and aspire to it, which I could see was a step in the right direction.
So, I sat down and prepared to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. And I couldn't. I was stuck. So, I thought about what the Junky's Wife told me about humility as being the ability to ask for help when you needed it. And I thought it was pretty clear to me by now that I could use some help. So, I tried to ask. But I still couldn't. Now that's frustrating. So, I tried to figure out why I might not want to ask. Was I holding on to my shortcomings? Was I afraid to lose them? Was I stuck on this whole asking thing not working with my particular concept of God? What was the problem?
And then it hit me. I needed to ask for help asking for help. So, I humbly asked God to remove my inability to humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings. And guess what? My newly humbled self was unstuck. Go figure.
This post was originally published at The Second Road...
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