Living in the Solution

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  • Give God Room to Work

    “What sort of God would it be who only pushed from without?” ~Goethe

    My wife filed for divorce in April of last year, after eleven years of relapses and broken promises.  By the time she filed for divorce, I had been sober for five months.  I felt as if I had been given the “gift of desperation,” and I began to pray out of that desperation.  Although I wanted her back, I began to pray simply because I had to sit with my emotions now, rather than turn to a drink.  I was constantly in a state of fear and suffering, and I asked God – whoever or whatever that was – to take it away. 

    My higher power is of the “Good Orderly Direction” variety.  My interpretation of the third step – turning my will over to God – is to do the most good to those around me.  I believed that the best thing for my children was to save my marriage – but that was in defiance of my wife’s wishes.  I also believed as a husband it was my duty to serve my wife.  So what did that mean when she said that she didn’t want to be with me anymore?

     I often wondered what role my desire had in all of this.  I have often said that the third step means doing the right thing whether I wanted to or not.  In this case, I desperately wanted to save the marriage and I believed it was the right thing to do.  However, this program also teaches acceptance.  Do I just accept something I do not want?  Do I just accept what I believe is not an optimal outcome for my children? 

    I fought and fought and fought, but ultimately ended up divorced.  There have been many times over the last 18 months where I felt like we were close to reconciliation.  There were many short-term wins.  We have had many intimate moments.  But ultimately today, I am still divorced. 

    During the divorce, I was counseled to “Give God room to work”.  I was never able to do that.  I was never able to give her space.  I was constantly begging and pleading my case.  The harder I pushed, the harder she pushed back.  The reason she filed for divorce was not because she fell out of love, but because she didn’t want to be dependent on a man who was so unstable and unpredictable.  She wanted some space to breathe and I did not give that to her. 

    She will never be coerced into reconciliation.  After all we’ve went through the last couple years, I still believe it’s possible.  Ultimately I believe that she wants to be married to the father of her children.  But she has to feel like she is making that decision on her own, without my overbearing influence.  I have to show her that I respect her enough to give her freedom, if that is what she desires.  One of my biggest character defects was that overbearing nature, and by setting her free to figure out what she wants, I am also working on that character defect.

    Today I have learned what it means to “let go and let God.”  I have learned what it means to “Give God room to work”.  The harder I try to bend other people to my will, the harder they will defy it. 

  • The natural world is a spiritual house

    I’m currently reading a book called Anathem by Neal Stephenson. He’s a deep thinker—sometimes a little too deep for me, honestly. One idea he explores is the interplay between the spiritual or mental world and the physical world: the question of whether purely conceptual things actually exist.

    Take “love,” for example. You can’t see it, hear it, feel it, or taste it in a physical sense. Yet it alters your brain state and influences your actions, creating measurable effects in the “real” world. I think most people would agree that love exists. So why do so many struggle to believe that “God” exists—that a non-physical entity could have measurable effects on the physical world?

    Another sci-fi book, Endymion by Dan Simmons, presents love as a “fundamental force of the universe,” comparable to gravity. Love binds people across space and time and can be viewed as a creative force. What would humanity look like without it?

    In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck describes serendipity as the unexpected grace that seems to guide us when we sincerely walk the path of growth, truth, and love. I read that book at the very beginning of my spiritual journey, and it may have been the first time I truly questioned my old worldview—that of a purely mechanical universe governed only by physical laws.

    Recovery, in a sense, is order emerging from chaos, which contradicts the natural tendency toward disorder. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the total entropy (disorder) of a system either increases or remains constant in any spontaneous process. Yet everything about recovery, humanity, and life on Earth seems to contradict that basic law. The human brain is the most complex object in the universe, and we believe it emerged spontaneously over billions of years?

    In my opinion, there’s another force at work here—one we do not yet scientifically understand.