In living a life of selfless giving, he finds his needs, joy, and serenity supplied.

I’ve had several conversations over the last 24 hours about Step One. It seems to me that everything, right down to the core of my being, resisted admitting my powerlessness. This has been, quite possibly, the biggest hurdle in my recovery journey. Admitting complete defeat felt like dying; it felt like giving up; it felt like the end.

And it was the end—the end of my old life and the only doorway through which I could be born into the new life. Freedom from the bondage of self is a free gift that can only be accessed by the grace of God. As long as I was trying, wishing, willing, and working to make it happen, it eluded me. It was only when I entered into the despair and hopelessness—the “broken and contrite spirit” of Step One—that the door swung open freely and God was there. My self-will had been blocking God the whole time.

God was not lost, and He was not sitting idly by, dangling sobriety and freedom just out of my reach. I think sometimes those of us from religious backgrounds can get this image or idea of God as passively sitting back and watching us suffer and struggle without any concern and without doing anything to help us. Or even worse, He is actively working to make us suffer to drive us to Him. I don’t believe in a God that sends suffering. I believe in a God who created a world where the rock that is hard enough to stand on is also hard enough to stub my toe on. I believe the world is created in such a way and I am constructed in such a way that there are natural laws—both physical and spiritual—that I can either live in harmony with or I can fight and resist. So long as I fought and resisted reality, I lived in suffering and pain. The more I live in harmony with reality and the laws of the universe, the more freedom, joy, and peace I experience.

The primary spiritual law of the universe, as I understand it today, is the law of love. The law of love is that whatever I wish to experience in life, in the world, and in my relationships is what I need to be seeking to give to life, to the world, and to my relationships. The word love brings up many different connotations to different people, but I understand love as only nourishing and life-giving when it is expressed. Love must be actively giving to be real. Love does not hold anyone accountable or seek any payment or return for itself. It simply seeks to give freely for the benefit of the receiver. Love does not keep a tally of wrongs or build cases against others. Love does not seek to benefit itself but to give freely to all.

God is love. God is not “loving” as in one of the attributes of God is love—no. God is love. Where there is love, there is the presence of God. This is extraordinary to me. It means that when I give love freely, I experience God. If I feel empty and unable to connect with God, all I have to do is seek to love, comfort, and understand another, and instantly I am in God’s kingdom of freedom, peace, and joy. I always had it backwards. Instead of trying to get, I needed to try to give. Then, in the giving, my own needs are satisfied. As I give my bread to another, it comes back to me in the form of whatever supply I need for that day. In my experience, this is most often the ability to live comfortably, peacefully, and joyfully with myself, to enjoy reality and the people around me, and the experiences I encounter. Apart from God and an attitude of service and love, I am bereft of this. I have no light and joy regardless of how “good” my life is on the surface. God is the difference between mere existence and joy-filled life.