Thursday, October 22nd

I had been reflecting on grace when my son and his partner spent Thanksgiving with us. This was a miracle of grace itself, because my son, who had been lost to drugs for much of his life, had found sobriety, inner peace and a supportive partner. During his visit we talked about the years of family life he had missed, including the growth of his daughter into a teenager, the death of his grandfather and my marriage eleven years ago. During quiet moments he worked on The Twelve Steps Guide to recovery. A recovery program steeped in God’s grace:

Twelve Steps of Narcotics Anonymous

1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

My son was working on Step 7:
“After we get prepared for the elimination of our character defects, we now humbly ask the God of our understanding to remove our shortcomings. Through the process of Step 7, true positive alteration will advance us to a new realm, full of tranquility, peace of mind, and an increased sense of purpose and fulfillment. For us to humbly ask God to remove our deficiencies, we ought to be unpretentious and compliant. Anticipate only the best to unfold as God begins to work miracles in our lives. It is imperative that we fully trust that God will lead us to the peace that we seek. This will be an ongoing process that will harvest loads of rewards in our lives.”
The word grace appears 24 times in the steps, and finally in step 12:
“if that degree of humility could enable us to find the grace by which such a deadly obsession could be banished, then there must be hope of the same result respecting any other problem we could possibly have.”

God’s grace is freely given, undeserved, unmerited, unearned. This Thanksgiving I give truly thanks for the miracle of grace.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. (Anne Lamott, Grace)