August 9
“Having accepted both the reality of our disease and the possibility that a Higher Power can help us where our own efforts have failed, we make a leap of faith, turning to that Power for assistance.”
Sex Addicts Anonymous, page 28
It was time to take the leap of faith!
As a new person in recovery, with residual guilt and shame from growing up gay in a strict church in a small conservative town, my understanding of God had been tainted with condemnation, judgment, shame, hypocrisy, and long suffering. I had lost the pure light of compassion and unconditional love that, as a child, I knew my God to be. I had traded it in for the condemning, jealous, authoritarian God that others had convinced me of, as if I even deserved to have a God at all after choosing to be my authentic self.
When it came to the Third Step, I had heard someone share the idea of keeping a “God Box” as a way to turn my will over. I felt a strong tugging from my inner child saying, “I wanna trunk so that I can fit in it, hide, and be safe.” As an amends to my kid self, I decorated my God Trunk with of images of color and light and beauty and connection and boundless love—all the things that my kid had known, but I had forgotten. Thank you, SAA, for letting me remember.
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Choosing to be who and what I was created to be has led me back to God as I understood God.