There’s something about flat-out that screams for attention, doesn’t it? One might think I took that position on the floor of the club to get God’s attention. Not so.
I already had His attention! In reality, the problem was: He didn’t have mine. Being flat-out was a physical manifestation of a decision to trade my will for my Higher Power’s will.
In retrospect, I don’t remember ever saying to myself, I just want to run my own life, God, so butt out. But in reality, that’s how I was living. One decision at a time, I was taking charge of my own life and controlling things to suit me. I was putting my own ideas and my own thinking into action.
Being candid here, I thought it was being responsible, I was stepping up to the plate. I was taking charge, being invested and being smart, even. I was accomplishing things that were on my goal list, wasn’t I? What’s so wrong with that?
Just count the number of times I’ve used I in the previous paragraph. Yup. I, I, I…
That’s the problem. It’s called playing God. (I had no clue.)
The way out was to get a clue! I thought I was supposed to be in charge of my own life, so I was. Look where that got me: often drunk and equally suicidal. My way of thinking is what got me on the wrong path. My self-will took me further and further down a destructive trail towards an inevitable dead end.
It was going to take a flat-out decision on my part to remedy my predicament, my self-willed life before I prematurely ended it.
I finally hurt enough to make this flat-out decision. The motivator was the pain. The pain is why I was lying flat out on the carpet in an empty room at the Fellowship Club. Without the crippling pain, I never would have made the decision. I know there are people who don’t have to reach such a crisis point to make this decision, but I’m the kind that does.
Maybe it’s the Irish red-headed stubbornness in me. Maybe it’s the German bull-headedness. Maybe it’s the 4th of July birthday. Who cares? I’m just so thankful I finally flat-out decided to take Step 3.
If my life was the result of bull-headed wrong thinking and stubborn wrong action, then I could have a remarkably different life by taking Step 3 seriously. Step 3 bears careful reading.
“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.”
As Joe and Charlie say, “We don’t turn anything over to God in Step 3. We make a decision to do something in Step 3, and the decision itself implies we’re going to take some further action to carry it out.”
Good Life 
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