I found myself fully confronted with this question back when I started working the Steps in earnest with a sponsor. Up until that time, I had been willing to settle for periodic “lengths” of sobriety. Because I’m an addict and quite insane when I’m lusting, I had figured that was good enough. I believed I could fight against lust, meaning I stayed in the addiction a lot longer than I would have if I had just admitted from the start that I couldn’t do this.

I failed yet again after a really good stretch of sobriety; I was smacked in the face one more time that I was truly hopeless if left to my own ideas and effort, and I didn’t know what to do about that. Perhaps enough “enlightened self-interest” kicked in that I finally found a sponsor who could tell me what to do. That was the first good choice I made in the process of becoming “willing to go to any length.”

When my sponsor offered to sponsor me, I remember that I prayed to God saying, “I will do whatever he tells me, even if it kills me.” I was pretty sure he wouldn’t tell me to do something that actually killed me, but that was the second good choice I made in the process of becoming “willing to go to any length.”

As my sponsor started directing me through working the Steps, he told me that when I was ready, I should write in the front of my AA book the date and the words, “I am willing to go to any length to stay sober.” That was the third good choice I made.

When he led me through Step 3, he told me that Step 3 was a commitment to work the rest of the Steps. That was the fourth good choice I made along the path of being “willing to go to any length” to connect rightly with God and others, and to be given freedom from lust and the obsessions and compulsions.

So for me the SA program has worked by going to any length to work the Steps as a path to connect rightly with God. And I’m very confident at this point that if I stay in that path and continue to grow along spiritual lines through a life that is progressively surrendered to God, I will continue to receive God’s gracious gift of sobriety, recovery and freedom.