A Bad Sponsor with a Bad Conception of God

So, Sam dropped some wicked ideas on me.

He had told me that he would be happy to meet with me, then at the last minute tried to back out.

Then he told me that if I wanted to go through the steps with him the same way that his sponsor had done, then I had better prepare for twenty-four weeks of inventories, working steps, writing out my thoughts and amends on paper.

I did not want to do any of that, for the most part because I had been doing that for so long, anyway, to no effect. At the time, I had not put any of this together.

Then Sam went on about his little life, how he liked to build things, how he liked to rest and depend on his wife, hoping that she would play Mommy for him.

Then he shared a more sinister turn to his program. This man began to have some shaky ideas about the God of His understanding.

He had started losing faith in a God who could "sit by" in his words while terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

He could not reconcile his understanding of a Higher Power with this image of a distant deity who did not care.

This account blasts through once and for all what men and women cannot choose a God of their own understanding. The God revealed in the Bible is a lavish, loving God, one whose goodness leads to repentance, a goodness which mankind in his fallen mind cannot grasp except by giving up on his own efforts, submitting to His love because in his own efforts man cannot be holy and blameless.

I remembered his dour appraisal of his higher power, enough that when I went back to that same meeting a few months later, I saw Sam again, but at that time he was half the man he used to be, so quiet, so beaten down, so unsure of himself and everything around him. He said nothing during the entire meeting. He looked disappointment and aggrieved, as if the peace and joy that he was looking for had been alluding him all this time.

The AA program will "help" break people from alcohol, perhaps, but the program does not give man what he really needs: life, and that more abundantly. In permitting men and women to choose their "own conception of God", they are created gods of flesh and law and effort which demand from them more than they can do, for men and women in their limited means will only conjure up ideas and powers who are like them: fallen, unforgiving, brooding, and never satisfied.