Chapter 5: Step Two – Part 1
By Philip A. Harrison
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Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. (A.A. and Heart t’ Heart versions)
Came to believe that God has all power and all wisdom and that in His strength we can do all things. (Mosiah 4:9; Alma 26:12) (Heart t’ Heart scriptural version)
God has all power, both in heaven and on earth. He has the power to touch my soul; He can change my heart. I cannot of myself change my behavior, my heart, my will, or my desires. I can only turn to God, who has the power to change me from the inside out. He can change my desires so that I no longer want to sin, so that in my heart of hearts, I want God more than I want any earthly pleasure. But before I am willing to make this surrender, I must believe He can and will perform this great miracle in me.
Step One left me sobered with the realization of my powerlessness. In Step Two, my hope is rekindled. There is a way out of the morass of addiction – through Jesus Christ, my Savior.
Voluntary Insanity
In the original AA wording of Step Two, we read: “[We] Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” In the Heart t’ Heart version of Step Two, the wording softens the focus, placing emphasis on the miracle that in God’s strength we can do all things – including overcome our addiction. I found, though, that I needed to honestly face the indictment of insanity found in the original version of the step.
I have heard insanity defined as “doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result.” What better description could be found for the endlessly repeating cycle I was caught in for most of my life – acting out, then suffering inevitable demoralization?
Over and over I asked, “Why do I keep hurting myself this way? It just doesn’t make sense to keep doing something that, in the end, always brings such sorrow and despair!” However, my thinking was “insane,” because I just kept saying to myself, “Maybe this time I can get away with it. Maybe this time I will only have the rush and not the guilt. Maybe this time, wickedness will be happiness!”
I might just as well have jumped off a building and hoped I would fall up. Need I say, in this area of my life, I have been a very slow learner. Actually, my downfall wasn’t a matter of needing to learn something. I knew intellectually that “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10), I just didn’t believe it. I wasn’t really a “slow learner” as much as I was a “slow believer.” Thus, my need – as ridiculous as it may seem, since I was a lifelong active member of the Church – was to take Step Two and come to believe.
Becoming a Believer
I began my recovery work by attending Heart t’ Heart meetings and studying the LDS version of the Twelve Step program outlined in He Did Deliver Me from Bondage; both of these activities helped me immensely. Once the basic principles for overcoming addiction began to sink into my understanding, I was eager to find Twelve Step literature specifically addressing sexual addiction.
I obtained a copy of Sexaholics Anonymous (The White Book), and was amazed and delighted with the insights I found on almost every page. On page 89, I found the process of Step Two broken into three separate parts that all of us who have come to this type of fellowship can recognize:
We came
We came to
We came to believe
First of all, we came. We came to a meeting. We came to a book or a website or some other vehicle that allowed us to participate in the fellowship of recovery. Like the early disciples of Jesus, heeding his call to “Come follow me,” we became willing to listen. Maybe we didn’t believe yet, but we were willing to sit still and hear and consider these new ideas.
We came to. It was as if our addiction had knocked us unconscious. We were in a trance and needed to be awakened. As we heard the words, the thoughts and experiences of those who were ahead of us on the path to recovery, a light dawned: there might be an answer here for us as well! We also came to admit that happiness could never come the way we had sought it. We had tried to force happiness from life instead of obeying the principles of Life itself.
We came to believe. The more we listened, the more the Spirit worked on us, teaching us that the Savior’s love applied to us as well. Our newly awakened belief gave us the courage to try concrete actions in our attempts at recovery. We gained the faith to test the promises of the Lord. We began to truly look to Him to restore us to sanity – to sane living.
I knew there was truth in these ideas. I knew there had to be a way back. I knew I had not always been “like this.” I remembered a time in my life when I was innocent, when I didn’t automatically cave in when temptations came along. Perhaps the Lord could help me get back to that place.
Dealing with Doubts
Facing these issues of just how much I believed and just what I believed brought me face to face with three questions that had been lurking in the shadows of my unexamined thoughts for years.
1. Could God really take this addiction away from me? Could He really free me from the control of this terrible disease? I had already prayed for relief, but it hadn’t helped much. Was the deficit in the level of my belief?
2. Why would God take my addiction from me? While I believed God had helped others to overcome addictions to things such as tobacco and alcohol and even sex, could I believe He would help me – specifically, me – overcome my own loathsome weakness?
3. Why should God help me, if I haven’t yet done all I can do on my own? My own punitive belief about what God should do for someone like me hampered my faith. I interpreted the words “all that I can do” (see 2 Nephi 25:23) to mean that only by working until the day I died would I have done all I could do on my own, and that was what was required before His grace was available to me.
Each of these unacknowledged doubts about whether God could, would or even should help me acted as invisible barriers that kept me from turning to Him. Perhaps I was like Laman and Lemuel, who told Nephi that they did not ask for revelation because “the Lord maketh no such thing known unto us” (1 Nephi 15:9). It seems that, like them, I was judging God, attributing limits to His willingness to help me long before I gave Him the chance. In order to get past the barriers these doubts represented, I had to examine them one by one.
1. Could God really take this addiction away from me?
From the vantage point of recovery, considering all the miracles God has done in my life and in the lives of others, it seems almost blasphemous that I ever entertained this idea, yet it was truly one that haunted me. I had struggled with my addiction to pornography for years and had asked the Lord repeatedly for relief, but none had come – at least, not permanently. In my weakened faith, perhaps the easiest, natural-man explanation for my continuing plight was to doubt God. As ridiculous as it sounds, I was in effect saying, “I know God can move mountains, and even make mountains, but this addiction thing is really hard! I’m not sure He can fix this.”
If you want to indulge in this kind of foolish thinking, you’d better stay away from the scriptures, because they won’t let you get away with it. For example, consider the people of King Benjamin. They responded to the invitation of their prophet king to repent, and they experienced a marvelous change as a result:
And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually. (Mosiah 5:2)
For years I read this verse with a combination of amazement and envy. I thought how wonderful it would be to be free of the ravages of temptation simply because I didn’t have the desire to act out any more. On the other hand, I thought this blessing was somehow beyond my reach. I was so easily attracted to sin that I felt if it was possible at all for me to get to the point where I had no more disposition to do evil, it would take me the equivalent of several lifetimes.
Now, in recovery, I have experienced the truth that “the things which are impossible with men are possible with God” (Luke 18:27). My testimony today is that God can, and does, work miracles in our lives when we come to Him. I know this because He has now taken this obsession from me. I no longer have the desire to look at pornography. I have learned that this blessing given to the Nephites in King Benjamin’s day is just as available to us today. I know. I am living it!
As Colleen wrote:
Part of the process of coming unto Christ and truly applying His atonement to our own lives and the lives of others is to lose our fear that there is some power or effect of evil the Savior can’t overcome. (He Did Deliver Me from Bondage, 48)
In a similar way, Nephi had to remind his brothers of the power of the Lord in their lives:
Yea, and how is it that ye have forgotten that the Lord is able to do all things according to his will, for the children of men, if it so be that they exercise faith in him? Wherefore, let us be faithful to him. (1 Nephi 7:12)
2. Why would God take my addiction from me?
Addiction is so devastating. It gives us such feelings of unworthiness and even worthlessness. As I was caught in this swamp of self-loathing and self-disgust, someone said to me, “Do you realize that if you were the only person who needed the Savior’s Atonement, He would have willingly gone through it all, just for you?” That thought just blew me away. Why would the Lord love me that much? Why would He value me when I had turned my back on Him so many times and refused His invitation to turn away from my despicable practices?
I think the answer can be found in these thoughts expressed by Elder Hartman Rector Jr.
:
God doesn’t love us because we are good. God loves us because he is good. God is good and so he loves us, and those who are the best love the best. (Conference Report, Oct., 1969, 76)
God’s love is based on His character – not mine! What an amazing thought this was to me. It meant I did not have to earn the Savior’s love through my behavior. He has always loved me, even knowing He would have to suffer for me. Unfortunately, the many years I spent in addiction clouded my mind to this truth. Only after I began to open myself to Step Two was I able to feel the Savior’s love confirmed to my soul once again.
Since opening my mind and heart to His goodness, I now see it everywhere in the scriptures. There are so many stories of men who have been rescued from a life of sin – the apostle Paul, Alma the Elder and Alma the Younger, the sons of Mosiah and Zeezrom, to mention only a few. Right there in the testimony of the scriptures was example after example that the Lord would save those with chronic tendencies to sin, if and when they finally surrendered their lives to Him. None of these men were living exemplary lives when the Lord reached out His hand and touched them. In fact, most of these men were actively opposing the Lord’s work. It didn’t seem they had done anything (at least, in this life) to “earn” any particular privileges – and yet, the Lord saved them. That gave me hope. If, as Elder Rector said, God loves us because He is good, maybe He would help me change, too.
3. Why should God help me, if I haven’t yet done all I can do on my own?
One of the strongest traditions in my cultural heritage as a Latter-day Saint is the tradition of self-sufficiency. In addition, I was raised by parents who had inherited a powerful work ethic, reinforced by the experience of marrying and starting a family during the Great Depression. I was raised to be proud of working for what I received, paying my own way, and not relying on others to supply my wants or needs. Simultaneously, I was taught that “faith without works is dead,” and that anyone who thinks grace is a free gift is sorely mistaken.
Needless to say, when combined with the frightening concept of God I explained in Chapter Two, these ideas painted a pretty bleak picture. Small wonder that my interpretation of the following verse had made me feel hopeless:
For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do. (2 Nephi 25:23, emphasis added)
Today I realize that I totally misunderstood this verse. I read it with hardly more than a passing thought for the faint and distant hope of “grace.” To me, grace represented God’s help given after this life. I read the word “after” in the sequential sense, as in this sentence, “After I finish mowing the lawn, then I will go to the store.” In this interpretation, I heard the verse was saying to me: “Philip, even though some grace may be extended to you at the end of your life, don’t forget that you have to do absolutely everything you possibly can until the day you die, and then maybe you will qualify for enough grace to be saved.” What a discouraging message that was!
It dawned on me one day that “after” could be seen as part of the phrase “after all,” which gives it a very different meaning. “After all” can be used in discussing which of two contributing factors carries the most weight, or it can mean “in spite of.” For example, “After all I tried to do to cheer her up, your letter really made the difference.” In other words, I may have done all I could, but your letter was what really did the job. In a similar sense, I may do all I can toward my own salvation, but that is almost negligible compared to the Savior’s marvelous contribution of grace.
To me, that principle is echoed in the words later spoken by King Benjamin: “I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants” (Mosiah 2:21). We are not enough, but the Savior is, and that is a great comfort!
Today, when I read this passage in 2 Nephi, the emphasis in my heart and mind is not on me, but rather on Jesus Christ and His power to redeem me. This is because I have taken Step Two and have come to believe that a Power greater than myself (my beloved Savior) can, and will, and has restored me to sanity.
As I write this book “to persuade…[my] brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God,” (2 Nephi 25:23) I am rejoicing that I did not have to wait until the end of my life to receive this dispensation of grace. Now it is easy for me to see and confess the truth that it was my pride and desire to “do it all myself” that blinded me to Nephi’s real message.
Nephi wasn’t teaching the importance of self-sufficiency. He was teaching the importance of believing in Christ, and being reconciled to God! Why? Because it is only through our faith in Christ and becoming reconciled with God that we place ourselves in a position to receive the grace that is so necessary to our salvation.
For even though we work as hard as we can, we will never be saved by our works alone. In spite of all we can do, we are dependent upon the grace (power) of the Savior for our salvation. Just a couple of verses earlier, Nephi testified:
As the Lord God liveth, there is none other name given under heaven save it be this Jesus Christ, of which I have spoken, whereby man can be saved.
(2 Nephi 25:20)
The second half of this chapter will be posted next week.
Clean Hands, Pure Heart by Philip A. Harrison, and its companion LDS 12 Step book, He Did Deliver Me from Bondage by Colleen C. Harrison, are available at most LDS bookstores and can be ordered online at www.ldscloseouts.com or www.rosehavenpublishing.com