Skip to main content

Any Lengths?

October 4, 2026

The Big Books of Alcoholics Anonymous and Eating Disorders Anonymous unequivocally state:

“If you have decided you want what we have, and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.”

Overeaters Anonymous uses similarly uncompromising language:

“We need to go to any length for victory over food and compulsive eating.”

Any length?

Apparently, however, “going to any length” does not necessarily include an honest and fearless search for the truth about God.

That increasingly troubles me.

Much of traditional Twelve-Step recovery deliberately leaves the identity of the Higher Power open to the individual. This has an understandable purpose. People arrive in recovery carrying very different religious experiences—sometimes considerable religious wounds—and the doorway is intentionally made as wide as possible.

But Emotions Anonymous says something that I find particularly interesting:

“…it is our responsibility to formulate our own belief system.”

— EA Big Book, p. 45

It then adds:

“Those who are unclear about what to believe in need only to start exploring the possibilities.”

That second statement catches my attention.

Explore the possibilities.

That sounds different to me from simply constructing a God who is comfortable, convenient, or compatible with what I already believe. It opens the door to a much more challenging question:

What if God actually exists independently of what I would prefer God to be?

If I am truly willing to “go to any length,” shouldn’t my spiritual inventory include that possibility?

For me, this exposes a potential weakness in the idea of God as we understand Him. The phrase can express appropriate humility—we certainly do not comprehend God completely. But it can also subtly become God as I would like Him to be.

Those are very different things.

The biblical story of the golden calf provides a provocative parallel. While Moses was receiving the commandments on Mount Sinai, the Israelites fashioned something tangible that could represent divinity on their own terms.

Meanwhile, the commandment Moses received began:

“You shall have no other gods before me.”

— Exodus 20:3

The problem wasn’t merely choosing the wrong conception of God. It was reversing the relationship between Creator and creature.

Instead of allowing God to define reality, human beings created something religious that suited themselves.

That raises an uncomfortable recovery question for me.

If my own thinking has become distorted enough that I need recovery, why would I automatically trust that same thinking to construct the ultimate reality upon which my recovery depends?

Proverbs offers a radically different approach:

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”

— Proverbs 3:5 NIV

Perhaps spiritual recovery therefore requires something more challenging than finding a conception of God that works for me.

Perhaps it requires discovering whether God is actually there—and, if so, allowing God to tell me who God is.

For me, that search leads to Jesus Christ.

Instead of beginning with God as I understand Him, I am increasingly drawn to begin with another proposition:

God as He has revealed Himself.

That is one reason programs such as Celebrate Recovery and Life Recovery interest me. They don’t leave the identity of the Higher Power undefined. They explicitly locate recovery within the Christian understanding of God and, particularly, in Jesus Christ.

That approach obviously will not appeal to everyone, and I don’t expect everyone in recovery to share my conclusion.

But I do think the question deserves to be asked.

If I say I am willing to go to any length for recovery, am I also willing to question my assumptions about God?

Am I willing to investigate rather than merely select?

Am I willing to discover rather than construct?

Am I willing to consider that reality may not conform to my preferences?

The Twelve Steps taught me to question my thinking about myself, my behavior, my relationships, my resentments, my fears, and my attempts to control life.

Why should my conception of God be the one thing exempt from that searching inventory?

If I am truly willing to go to any length, perhaps seeking the truth about God is part of the journey.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Real Me

This morning, while meditating, I recalled something I said yesterday about a film my wife was watching. I had commented that the lead actor’s performance wasn’t very good. As I thought about that remark, a deeper question came to mind: What makes someone a bad actor? Perhaps we don’t believe they are the person they’re supposed to be. Their emotions seem unconvincing. Their responses don’t feel natural. Perhaps the script has poorly defined the character—or the actor was simply the wrong choice for the role. Then I turned the question toward myself: Am I a bad actor in the portrayal of my own life? Who is writing my script? Am I living my own story, or following someone else’s version of who I should be? In the story of my life, what character am I trying to portray? How do I think I’m supposed to act? Looking through the lens of recovery, I can see many times when I adopted a persona that someone else expected of me—or imposed u...
Post a Comment
Read more

I Am Becoming Free to Be Me

One of the unexpected “benefits”—or perhaps “penalties”—of taking a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself is discovering memories I thought I had long forgotten. Sometimes those memories reach all the way back to childhood. Today, I found myself remembering a time when I was very young, perhaps seven or eight years old. But this wasn't simply a recollection of events. As the memories surfaced, I found myself reliving the emotions I had experienced as that little boy. I remember being terribly lonely. I spent much of my playtime, both at home and at school, by myself. School was especially difficult. I was often bullied by my classmates, and I hated going there! Somewhere along the way, I found a way to cope with that loneliness. I created two invisible friends. They were both girls my own age. They were actually my cousins, although I didn't think of them as cousins in my imagination. They were simply my best friends. And they accompanied me everywhere! I can ...
Post a Comment
Read more

I’m Not Powerless Over Food

Recovery · Emotional Balance I’ve been journaling about my experiences in recovery and comparing different Twelve Step programs and their areas of focus. Looking back over where I’ve come from, I can see that I’ve made real progress—but I can also see that my understanding of my problem has changed. Recently, in an eating-disorder Twelve Step meeting, someone shared that they had originally been a member of Overeaters Anonymous but eventually came to realize that they were not powerless over food . That stopped me in my tracks. Yes. That’s true for me too. I came to the same realization a few weeks ago. Food Isn’t What Overwhelms Me I’m not powerless over food. Food itself doesn’t overwhelm me. What overwhelms me is my emotional reaction to people, places, things, and situations that don’t conform to my expectations. My overeating has often been a response to those feelings. I’ve used food to fill an emotiona...
Post a Comment
Read more