No God but God

I often hear people in recovery meetings—or read in recovery literature—that they have a problem with “the God thing.”

I used to bristle when someone said, “I don’t believe in God.” I don’t react quite that way anymore. I still believe in God with my whole being, but I can understand the resistance more clearly.

In fact, recovery has helped me recognize something uncomfortable about myself: there have been times when my problem wasn’t that I couldn’t believe in God. My problem was that I didn’t particularly want God to be there.

When I want to run things my way, control people, manage outcomes, arrange circumstances to my liking, and insist that life conform to my expectations, God can seem terribly inconvenient.

God gets in the way.

Recovery has taught me that perhaps the deeper question isn’t simply, “Do I believe in God?” but “Am I willing to live as though I am not God?”

That is a very different question.

The God We Reject

I used to like the saying: “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in, and I probably don’t believe in that God either.”

Today I might put it differently: “Tell me about the God you would like to believe in, and I may believe in that God too.”

When people reject God, sometimes what they are rejecting is a particular conception of God: an arbitrary cosmic ruler, an angry judge, a supernatural puppeteer, or a deity who should prevent every tragedy but inexplicably refuses to do so.

Stephen Fry famously raised the example of children suffering from bone cancer in explaining his rejection of God. It is a powerful objection because it points toward one of humanity’s oldest questions: if God exists, what are we to make of apparently meaningless suffering?

I don’t pretend that Christianity makes that question disappear.

But I have come to believe that rejecting one conception of God is not necessarily the same thing as demonstrating that there is no God. Sometimes our argument is with the God we have constructed in our own minds.

We All Worship Something

The chapter “We Agnostics” in the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book makes a fascinating observation. It suggests that even people who considered themselves unbelievers eventually discovered that they had been “worshippers” all along. They had worshipped people, money, possessions, sentiment—and themselves. They had stood before sunsets, oceans and flowers with something remarkably close to reverence. They had loved. They had trusted. They had placed their faith in things.

“In one form or another we had been living by faith and little else.”

Perhaps the human question, then, is not simply whether we worship. It is what we worship.

Recovery has certainly shown me how easily I can make gods out of things that cannot possibly carry the weight I place upon them. Food can become a god. Approval can become a god. Comfort can become a god. Security can become a god. Another person can become a god.

And perhaps most seductive of all, I can make myself my god.

I can live as though my judgment must prevail, my desires must be satisfied, my plans must succeed, and other people must behave according to my expectations.

Then recovery comes along and says something devastatingly simple: You are not God.

Strangely enough, I find tremendous freedom in that admission.

Reality Is Larger Than What We Can Measure

I have also become increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption that only what can be scientifically quantified can meaningfully be called real.

Science can analyze the chemical composition of a tear. It can describe the neurological processes associated with grief. But none of those measurements fully tells us what it means to weep beside the bed of someone we love.

We can study the biology of attachment, measure hormones and observe activity in the brain. But none of that exhausts the meaning of the sentence: “I love you.”

That is why humanity has always needed poetry, music, art, prayer and story alongside reason.

Some realities are known not merely by measurement but by encounter.

Love is like that. Beauty is like that. Grief is like that. And I have come to believe that God is like that.

This doesn’t mean abandoning reason. It means refusing to make reason smaller by insisting that only one particular kind of knowledge counts as knowledge.

The Recovery Doorway

Recovery begins for me with acceptance.

Acceptance does not mean liking everything that happens. It doesn’t mean refusing to change what can be changed. It means becoming willing to encounter reality as it actually is rather than as I demand that it should be.

That includes accepting my limitations.

I cannot control other people. I cannot control the future. I cannot guarantee outcomes. I cannot rearrange the universe according to my preferences.

And once I genuinely accept those things, a remarkable possibility appears: Perhaps I am not the greatest power operating in reality.

That is the doorway through which the language of a Higher Power begins to make sense to me.

Recovery doesn’t require me to understand God before beginning the journey. It asks for something much smaller and, perhaps, much more difficult: willingness.

Could there be a Power greater than myself? Could reality contain more than I presently understand? Could I become willing to stop demanding that God fit inside the boundaries of my own definitions? Could I seek rather than dictate?

For me, the answer became yes.

And Then I Ran Into Jesus

There was a period in my life when I could have described myself as not believing—or at least not knowing what I believed.

But when I tried to imagine what divine goodness would actually look like if it were expressed through a human life, I kept running into Jesus Christ.

I found myself drawn to the way he welcomed outsiders, confronted hypocrisy, forgave enemies, touched the untouchable, and gave himself in love.

And eventually my reasoning became remarkably simple:

If I trust Jesus, and Jesus tells me there is a God, then I must take him seriously.

No God but God

Recovery continues to teach me that my greatest spiritual problem may not be atheism. It may be idolatry.

The question isn’t merely whether I intellectually affirm God’s existence. I can say that I believe in God while spending the entire day behaving as though I am God.

That is where surrender becomes more than theology.

When I stop trying to control people, places and things, I am acknowledging God. When I accept reality rather than demanding that reality obey me, I am acknowledging God. When I surrender an outcome I cannot control, I am acknowledging God. When I admit my powerlessness and become willing to receive help, I am acknowledging God.

And when I discover that the Power greater than myself is not merely an abstract force but a presence capable of love, relationship, forgiveness and transformation, belief becomes something more than an argument.

It becomes encounter.

Perhaps that is why recovery has changed the way I think about “the God thing.” I am less interested now in winning arguments about whether God exists. I am much more interested in asking: What am I treating as God today?

My appetite? My fears? My plans? Other people’s opinions? My need for control? Myself? Or God?

For me, recovery keeps bringing everything back to this:

I am not God.
There is a God.
And I can let God be God.