"From whence shall come my help?" -Ps 121:1

My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of the tornadoes that swept through the middle of the nation yesterday. I'm reminded of the passage from the Psalms where the psalmist is expectant that the God who made heaven and earth is able to help us, even in the midst of such tragedies. During the Easter season, we reflect on the Resurrection which only takes place after the crucifixion. I have been comforted in my own path of recovery by the fact that God is able to bring a greater good out of any evil that we must endure.

In the midst of addiction or terrible amounts of weight gain, one can be left stupefied by the situation. "How is it that I got here? How could I let myself go like this? Is there any hope for me left? Where can I find the help I need? Aren't all those weight loss solutions just gimmicks? I've tried everything, nothing is working, why can't I just lose the weight and keep it off?"

Step one of the twelve steps is the admittance of the situation. We admitted that we were powerless over our addictive behavior (or substance), that our lives had become unmanageable. Our lives have become totally out of our control. Our weight cannot be checked just by a few days of fasting or a couple days at the gym. It always seems to creep back. When we take that first bite of that troublesome binge food, we have no way of predicting how much of it we are going to eat. We can't stop the insanity. And now we need to admit it. We are powerless.

But from where does the power we need come? Step 2 gives us this. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. The 12 Steps are reluctant to define this power as God, so as to be as inclusive as possible, but is pretty explicit in the next step (Step 3) that we made the decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. In short the three steps can be summed up as "I can't. God can. I think I'll let him."

Recovery begins when we recognize the situation of our powerlessness, and realize where the power we need comes from. True surrender to this high power, to our loving and caring God, is the basis of the 12 step program of recovery. "From whence shall come my help? Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth."