Last weekend we began a brand new series @ The Gathering called “12 Steps Up: How messy people mature.”
We’re taking the 12 steps from AA, an amazing process of not just recovery, but maturation, and applying it to everyday life.
Last week we started with Step One: Wake up. Wake up and recognize that you are powerless to change your life. You’re powerless over the ups and downs, the adversities. It rains. It rains on the good and the bad.
The second step is Look Up. When you wake up, and you look around and see the reality of your life, you have one of three choices. You can look out around you to circumstances – good or bad – knowing that if they are good today, they could change tomorrow on a dime and be bad. Or you can look to the people who may or may not be there for you.
Once you’ve looked outward, you can look inward and you see the wounds and the pain. You see things in your life and your attitude that make you sad and angry because they are things you can’t seem to let go of and get over. And then you can look up. That’s what happens in the second step. We begin to believe that a power greater than us can restore us to sanity.
So tomorrow we’re going to be talking about how to Look Up in real, practical terms; not just some religious cosmetic cover-up of how life really is, but how we can truly, truly look up and connect to God in powerful ways. Tomorrow we’ll talk about three things God dares us to do, and the one thing we have, only one, that He wants. God doesn’t want your car, your house, your money. He doesn’t want your song. He doesn’t want your attention. But there is one thing He desires. We’ll talk about it.