Principle 1: Realize I’m not God. I admit that I am powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and that my life is unmanageable.
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over our addictions and compulsive behaviors, that our lives had become unmanageable.
Being raised in a Christian family, when I first considered this question, I though there were not any. I do remember my mom saying the she always wondered who that Indian was in her family pictures. She was never told that she was a descendant of a native American, in fact I think in her generation it was considered shameful.
Careful consideration of the question causes me to go a different direction. In my family of origin, SIN wasn’t talked about. It’s more like the family secret is that we are still sinners saved by God’s grace. If I was bad as a kid, I was punished (usually by the belt) and that was the end of it. We were somehow supposed to just be good especially once we made a confession of our faith in Jesus. In doing so we were protecting our own reputation.
Just like covering our ‘sin’, we were also expected to deny our pain and disappointment. I ended up being skilled at pressing all of those feelings down into a trash compactor thinking that their rot and stench would never effect me. This created a sad and depressed me that could never admit sadness or depression. After all, I am saved from my sin and am supposed to be happy all the time. I feel like my parents passed away without me really getting to know them. My mom was just happy all the time no matter what. With the onset of alzheimer’s she just slid into oblivion of any pain. I have often wondered what pain she experienced growing up.
Pain and disappointment is something we all experience everyday. Like the disappointment of being able to drive as fast as you want on the freeway, or to be able to just get ahead of that slow driver who is holding you back. Not to mention your co-worker or boss or spouse who never fail to disappoint on some level. It seems like pain and disappointment is like dying of 1000 cuts daily. Is this what Christ asks us to do? Die to ourselves and take up our cross and follow Him?
Even with me growing up a-religious (not a Christian, not anything), or maybe because of it, I think that pain and “pleasure” (can mean so many things) are all a part of life — for the Christian or non-Christian. Jesus’ life can often be seen as mostly full of pain and disappointment — each day. But at the same time, even if He was not depicted as smiling and gushing about how happy he was — I think that for Him (and the Father), every time someone really listened to him, every time someone stepped out of their legalism, self-centeredness, moment-to-moment sin — and loved others, that was “pleasure” for Jesus. It was a teeny glimpse of his mission. But for every one of those moments there were many more that were painful and disappointing. So how did He handle it? I’m sure his human aspects were hurt, tired, angry, disappointed — but his Holy aspect knew that this was all part of the plan, all part of the process. He knew before He was born that he would be scorned, disbelieved, tortured and then killed by us — yet He also knew that He would get through to some, and He knew that His gift of salvation was real and everlasting. So in our lives maybe we need to do something similar? We’re stuck with a lot of pain, sin, disappointment — that’s the world that we live in and our sinful nature. But at the same time we believe in something that has and will deliver us. Not completely here on the Earth, but eventually. And we reach out and love and help others — often when we really do not feel like it. And that seems to be the miracle of how we honor our salvation. And that *is* a pleasing thing. Sometimes the unpleasant will seem to far outweigh the pleasant — but remember that the unpleasant is temporal, of this Earth and this life — but our salvation, our moments of loving outside of ourselves — those are eternal. And for some it makes them jump for joy, and for some of us, it just helps to calm ourselves a little bit as we deal with the unpleasantness of this life….