AA Meetings Were a Default

I remember one preacher telling his parishioners:

"Let Jesus be your default."

He is our starting point and the finish line:

"Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12: 2)

and

"Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever." (Hebrews 13: 8)

He is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, the Lamb who was set aside to be slain for all the sins of the world before the foundation of the world.

Yet if a Christian refuses to rest in the Truth, that He Finished the Work that God the Father set out for Jesus to do, then he will default into something else, every time some work, habit, or tradition of man.

For me, who had been for so longed reared in the falsehood that I needed the "Twelve Steps", I would go back to an AA meeting when I had no idea what else to do. The mindset was a stubborn one, an attitude which impressed on me that if I just sat in a meeting and listened to other people share their stories of "what it was like", "what happened", and "what it's like now".

2008 was a tough time for me. I had had two successful interviews for teaching positions, first in South Whittier, then in Brea. The second interview was such a hit, that the principal called me three times after the interview to let me know that he wanted to give me the job.

After the first week on the job, my worst fears came true: this was a white school where the rich kids got away with everything, where the students could walk all over the teachers, and the parents would complain to the administrators if the teacher took a heavy hand to disrespect.

Within one month, after frequent sleepless nights and arrogant, bitter students yelling at me and tattling on me to the principal, I walked off the job.

I was demoralized and lost. My own mother spent more time shaming me for not being able to keep a job. All she had was the same AA poison, which at the time did not seem like anything remotely related to what was giving me the difficulties I was facing.

At one point, we had broken off, and I was back to subbing one day at a time, just trying to get through, just hoping that perhaps the next school that I worked for would give me support and the parents would give me respect.

I was getting more nervous and uptight, I had no sense of peace and safety in my life, since I could not predict how I would feel when I walked onto the next jobsite. I did not understand why I felt the way that I did at the time, but looking back I learned that I was filled with fear, an orphan spirit, instilled in me by a sin conscience, which afflicted me with an empty, fearful foreboding:

"26For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, 27But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries." (Hebrews 10: 26-27)

Paul writes this to his Hebrew brethren, many of whom believed that Jesus was the Messiah, yet they had not yet rested on the Truth that He is the final sacrifice for all our sins for all time, so they were still offering animal sacrifices at the Temple, which Paul called "sinning wilfully".

In effect, any believer who sits in AA meetings and keeps working the Twelve Steps in order to reestablish fellowship is "sinning wilfully"', in that they are acting as if Jesus' once and for all death at the Cross was not enough.

This fearful foreboding had not left me because I was "working a program" which told me that I was not completely forgive, nor that Jesus had given me a new heart with His life leading me by His Holy Spirit.

So, I returned to AA meetings.

I went to one meeting in Lomita, where I heard the same set of advice that I had suffered through for two years while earning my teaching credential. "Keeping coming back, it works if you work it." "Easy does it." "You are right where you should be", and a new one that I learned at that meeting: "You are should-ing all over yourself."

This same guy who told me about "should-ing" had shared some outrage over another guy in a different meeting who acted as if he had "just gotten off the phone with God." He was distressed and resentful that another member had the "boldness" to enter the throne of grace and ask God for anything that he needed.

Yet in AA, the sense that members walk away with is a "god" who is not powerful, or one who is indifferent to the sufferings of men. Such is the consequence of letting men choose "their own conception of God."