God Is Not A Puppeteer
Ladies and gentlemen - if you’re new to recovery and have been told to pray your troubles away, take heed, please. God is not a puppeteer. God doesn’t pull our strings and automatically extract us from the situations we place ourselves in. God does not do for us what we can do for ourselves!
When we were drinking (or using or whatever) and we prayed, how often were our prayers answered to our satisfaction? Now that we’re early into recovery, without having practiced the Twelve Steps, how much do you think our praying has changed?
So, if you’re feeling disconnected after a few months, or feeling restless, irritable, and discontented, and think that prayer is the answer, think again.
Oh no! I said prayer isn’t the answer… Well, not right now because of the way we pray when we haven’t learned how to pray rightly.
Rather than praying “Grant me my wishes” we ought to be praying “Thy will be done.” How many know how to do that? Plus, how many of us realize what placing demands upon God really are? Why? Simply because “we discover that we do receive guidance for our lives to just about the extent that we stop making demands upon God to give it to us on order and on our terms.”
Heck, we don’t even realize we’re requiring God to cough up our desires as we wish them to be. We think we’re actually praying and will thus receive what we want.
How discouraging has it been for you to realize that sometimes God’s answers to our prayers is “no!” Or “not now.”
Folks, the easier, softer way out of our troubles is to change through the Twelve Steps, not to simply ask God to remove our troubles expecting Him to fulfill that request because we asked.
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POSTED IN: Heard At Meetings, Reality, Second Step, The Eleventh Step
4 opinions for God Is Not A Puppeteer
Hank
Oct 14, 2008 at 7:07 am
Thank you for the reminder. I needed the reminder that the best way to deal with our problems is to go through them.
aa blogger
Oct 14, 2008 at 8:36 am
Amen!
I think one of the sweet spots in sobriety, which is a place that I am not able to stay in as much as I would like, is to be in a place where my will and what I perceive to be God’s will do not seem to be far off.
This means that I am struggling less, I am content, and I have little desire to pray for “things.” In that spiritual/mental space I am more attuned to walking through whatever is in front of me the way I have been taught, as opposed to the way I taught myself. So instead of being selfish, self-centered, and trying to get/take I am seeking to be helpful, positive, and open to what may come my way.
All the best in sobriety,
AA blogger
Barry
Oct 15, 2008 at 8:29 pm
action is better than letting things happen. drugs and alcohol will come to us if we don’t have the will to do gods work which he has given us the strength too.
Monday Sanity: Better Late Than Never
Oct 20, 2008 at 1:14 am
[...] made a good point about God and his non-puppeteerism (not a word, I know, forgive me) at A Dozen [...]
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