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

My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He said, "Why don't you choose your own conception of God?"

That statement hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years. I stood in the sunlight at last.

It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning. I saw that growth could start from that point. Upon a foundation of complete willingness I might build what I saw in my friend. Would I have it? Of course I would!

Thus was I convinced that God is concerned with us humans when we want Him enough. At long last I saw, I felt, I believed. Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view.

This was Bill's experience with the third step, called the White Light experience.  Mine was a much slower process.  I had been brought up in the Catholic church and was taught that god was punishing and judgmental.  I was going to hell there was no way out I was doomed.   So what did it matter through my using career and into my early sobriety this was what I believed.

When I came into AA was told I had to turn my will and my life over to God I thought that isn't going to happen.  Look what he has already done to my life.  It was Him not me or my addiction that had gotten my life so.  Whenever things went bad in my life the old tapes would play "God is punishing and judgmental" I was being punished again.  There was no trust in me for God He merely wanted to punish me.  It was as if He took joy in watching me suffer.  Then when I came into AA and heard people talking of this loving and caring God I was astonished where could he be?  The people in AA that had this concept of God were happy.  I wanted what they had but God would have to work through them as I didn't trust Him.  I used the group as my Higher Power for a long time.  Unlike Bill where the "Scales of pride and prejudice  fell from my eyes."  For me they were peeled slowly and sometimes painfully.  But through working all twelve steps to the best of my ability I had a Spiritual awakening.

Today I have a God that loves me and cares for me.  A God that I can and joyfully do turn my will and my life over to.  I have found that as long as I trust in God things will be OK.  But if I trust in Dan or someone or something else events don't turn out as well.

So whether you have an experience like Bill's or like mine this program works.  If you need  your AA group as your Higher Power use it will work.  The twelfth  step says Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps...  This is the part to keep in mind today work the steps and you will have  the Spiritual awakening and the comfort and serenity that you see in the members of AA.