Step 3

Step 3:"Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of
God as we understood Him"

"We now say yes to this Power, deciding from here on to follow
spiritual guidance in making every decision."

I have been reading a lot about step 3 because this is such a tough
one. This is easy to talk about but to actually do this on a daily
basis is a really tough thing for such a control freak like me. I have
such shakey ground with trust and faith that trusting something to a
power outside of myself is something that I really, really struggle
with. In the writing that I've done about steps one and two, I can
fully appreciate that I AM powerless over food, that my life was
totally unmanageable and that it was going to take a power greater
than me to relieve me of this obsession and insanity. I heard that
taking step three is like making a decision to buy a house. When we
first make the decision to buy a house, we do not just pack up our
stuff and move into the house the next day. It is a process that we
have to take slowly. After deciding to buy a house, we have to find a
realtor, then we have to find a bank or banker, then we have to hire
inspectors and contractors and then we have to wait for the escrow to
close and then we have to sell our houses and then we have to clean
our house, then we have to hire movers and finally, finally later on
we get to move. We have been thinking and acting on this decision and
by the time we finally get to our new house we have been actively
involved in this proecess for a long time.

This step used to really freak me out because it felt like I had to
get this 100% right and that it was like commiting myself to a new
spiritual path forever and forgetting about my past experiences. In
reaity, this is a decision based on faith, faith that has slowly been
building through the examination of my life over the course of the
first two steps. In writing about these steps in such detail, I have
really been able to lay all the evidence out on the table so that I
can look back and see how appropriate it is to make a decision to turn
my life over to God. . But it is just a decision-- a decision that I
can make over and over and over again. It is not just a one time
decision-- it's a decision that happens each time I say the third step
prayer or ask for God's will and not mine. If I'm having a crappy day,
I have to keep making this decision over and over again. I'm ok with
giving my will over for about 15 minutes at a time and then I find
that I've slowly pulled it back and am now holding onto the reigns of
my life again with tightly closed hands.