Higher Power

The term Higher Power is used extensively throughout 12-step communities. It's sort of a loose designation for God. As a Christian I first balked at this terminology when I began attending recovery meetings. After all, I know the Lord, right?! His name is Jesus and He has an identity and a character. But the Lord initiated me on a journey that would broaden not only my title of Him, but reveal my own limited thinking.

As a Christian I want to represent the Lord accurately. I also want others to represent Him accurately (a subtle but very certain manifestation of my co-dependency). I would feel threatened when others did not use the appropriate terminology when talking about God, and I felt an almost instant compulsion to start correcting their concepts. I felt they were making God too small. Their limited, personal understanding diminished the wonderful Savior that I knew. Little did I know how much stinking thinking and pride were involved in my own outlook, and the Lord began to turn the tables on me.

The concept of Higher Power in Alcoholics Anonymous comes from Step 2: Came to believe a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. When we began studying this step, it seemed easy enough for me, I knew the power of the biblical God. I thought I had this one down, but one day the Spirit whispered to me, "yes, but do you really believe that I'm bigger than your problems? Your mouth speaks the words but your heart is full of worry and doubt." I had to sit down and begin to review what I really felt & believed. And I began to realize that I so seldom let go and trust in His higher Power, Wisdom, Timetable, & Ability to take care of the things troubling me.

In the weeks to come I started to look at my problems, my feelings about those problems, even my prayers concerning my troubles, in a new way. Was I confident that His Higher Power would take care of the situation? Instead of worrying prolifically over the situation, did I accept by faith that God could and would restore the situation? And instead of detailing all the tremendous difficulties and impossibilities of the situation in prayer (which basically filled me with more fear!), I began to hold up my problems to His hugeness. What a difference this made. For too long I had been stuck in the smallness of my own thinking, my perspective warped by my own feelings of worry. Just coming to Him in prayer as He is truly a Higher Power released faith so much more frequently. And the first (and maybe best) benefit of this was feeling peace.

Today when I find myself fretting over situations for a long time, when I have lots of doubts about something when I go to prayer, I stop and ask myself if I'm viewing them in the light of my Higher Power. It usually reveals that I am not, and coming back to this basic concept of my Lord leads me back to a simple place of letting go & trust. Because I am a worryaholic, it has taken lots of practice, but it sure is working better than the old way.

I have lots of names for Jesus: my Savior, my King, the Almighty, my Best Friend, my Lover, my Helper in the time of trouble, my Tower of refuge, the Lifter of my head. To all of this I now add He's my Higher Power, and it has added a whole new richness in my identity of Him.

As far as accurately portraying Him? Well, why not let someone start with Higher Power? Why not let people's first glimpse of a personally interested God begin with a concept that there's someone out there greater than themselves and they need that greatness?! When it gets right down to it He is GREAT. I have only begun to scratch the surface in my own experience of that greatness. I'll let the Holy Spirit not only ever broaden my idea of my Lord, but let Him start where ever He wants to in revealing His identity in another person's life.