Army of Heaven
Prayer Group
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In 12-step work we embrace the magnanimity that permits each member to entreat God as he
understands Him. Yet God can only do for us what we have faith in Him to be able, with whatever understanding we muster in our need.It is limited understanding of God, our addiction-blinded sense of His power and ways, which bog down our gaining and accepting His gift of
sobriety and the ways and means toward it. We do not aspire to understand God nor all that happens to us in the unfolding of personal healing.Taken over years, if it all could be written down, we would find an immensely
complex, multidimensional phenomenon, something not dissimilar to a hive of 10,000
bees gathering diverse nectars to make one honey. Imagine knowing which bees went to which
flowers in which order, the totality of one hive's coordination in a season,
and we begin to appreciate what God is doing for each human, in the voyage through
transformed earthly life. We are not built to grasp or monitor the abundance of multiple parallel processes that are leading each person to health in mind, body and spirit. There is only trust in God, in the Holy Spirit, Who is the Spirit of Truth and the swift messenger serving the work of all things being made well again, through the indestructible offering, the Christ, the perennial medicine of salvation. When recovery is only a self-directed process, sooner or
later we are grimly thrown back upon an inability to run our program with
necessary thoroughness and depth. If there is the profound realization that I cannot cure myself of my weakness, and a turning of everything over to the Higher Power of the Holy Trinity, we are blessed to do our small part: 'let it be done to me according to your word'. God loves us that much and provides for us in ways we cannot grasp. We give our little to God and He does the rest.The twenty helps are things
we let God do to us. Some are painful, many not. But painful or not, all of the mysteriously
sequenced moments of our walk into new life are assured in our simple yes
to any of the twenty ways, at any time.The
Holy Spirit is at work in every advance that appears in the asking for
self-mastery - serenity the gift, the pearl of great price from God
Himself, Who is serenity itself. The twenty ways can be engaged in
any order, yet they are
organized in the order of potency. We
could elect to eliminate television or Internet from our household and
we can elect to receive Jesus every
day in the sacrament of the Mass - the reason priests get up every
morning, to avail
the best possible treatment to those who would say yes in God's infirmary. Both are beneficial, but it is the latter
that will deliver us more swiftly.Therefore, with faith, take the strongest dose. From human perspective, God works often slower than we would
like. There may be falls along the way, which remind us in humility where we truly are in the bigger destiny we cannot clearly yet see coming. But with each cycle of
persisting error, we experience 'fear and flood' less acutely, less intensely.
Perseverance,through falls and rises, will reveal a splendor imponderable by any other
perspective except by having endured with patience, for the eventual day
of lasting sobriety. Like a woman after childbirth, the night of perseverance is quickly forgotten in the daylight of an unshakeable peace built from long-suffering refusal to quit "faithing" it to happen, and the patience for God to deliver us in His perfect time.An addict can never anticipate the solidness of sobriety when it finally comes.It is why we must persevere, because we are hoping
on a highway to glory. Sobriety is a glory.
In 12-step support group work, we are given an ordered process to take up, that will assist recovery, a mercy and blessing for those willing and able to follow. The prayer
group offers a gallery of helps (20) that lead to the revelation of faith
that God orchestrates the script of our recovery.