This morning I was resentful that my wife suggested that I would be irritable if I didn't get out of the house. I am grateful that I got out of the house. I am grateful that I got our van diagnosed. I am grateful that I got to fellowship with a friend in the program and I got to meet some good people while helping them get a tough job done. These activities helped me find a sense of initiative, motivation, eagerness, and hope. I realize now just how much my spirits were flagging.

I got to go to a meeting tonight. The topic was finding willingness to believe in God's power and why our old conceptions failed us.

I thought about how I was a pragmatist and believed that material success came from hard work and good fortune alone, I was a pessimist and was put off by the bad things that religious people did, I was a naturalist and believed that the universe could be explained by science and therefore disproved God. I thought about how I needed to believe and was willing to believe but didn't have enough belief to have faith. I thought about how I was informed that I could believe in the fellowship as my higher power, or I could believe in Good Orderly Direction. I thought that the terms higher power and "of my understanding" were just euphemisms for the universal standard conception of God. I remember thinking that I read the steps ahead so I knew this was a trick just to get me to be open minded but eventually they were referring to God.

I remembered reading that something more than human power was needed and that a mere code of morals was not enough which seemed to contradict the conceptions offered.

As this spun around in my head I sensed an idea trying to form. I kept studying the words and I found my answer right there in the step, "... a power greater than myself that would restore me to sanity." I had never had a conception of God that would restore me to sanity. In my pragmatism I had only thought of material miracles but not of psychic ones. Now I was seeing miracles of recovery all around me. I also realized that the wording was not the seemingly euphemistic "higher power" but a "power greater than myself". I was being guided to a conception that emphasized the "power" of God in my present life not just in the afterlife or in relation to all of humanity. This also was something of which I had never conceived.

I realized that I had been relying on a conception from my childhood, the Santa Claus God. The God that I lost faith in when I quit believing in Santa Claus. Before then I believed unconditionally because my parents said so. But when I started forming my own conceptions I never followed through with a working conception of God.

With this insight I was able to move forward in faith. I didn't have to answer all my questions but I just knew there were answers.

It occurs to me now that I was looking only at the bad things religious people did but not the good things. That science was one of those good things that religious people did. It occured to me that there was no doctrine of faith that discredited scientific observation and discovery, that in fact the creation myth said God commanded is to "name" the animals which might just be a primitive way to think of science.

Thanks be to God.