The latter steps (10-12) of the Twelve Steps are those of maintenance, and where we agree that life must be a day-at-a-time proposition we continue on our journey of recovery.
Preceding those maintenance steps are the steps of making amends—Steps 8 and 9. Everything about the steps is deliberate, planned, structured, done with detailed reflection and unstinting commitment. The more serious we take the process, the more embedded is recovery.
But it’s not just Steps 8 and 9 that are about making amends. The whole program of recovery is about the practice of a life of making amends. It’s about learning to hold short account, knowing that the more responsibility we take for our attitudes and behaviour, the more we control our peace, our hope, our joy, and the more people experience the transformation that’s occurring in us.
This is the truth of life: the more we look inward and understand our impact on our world, the more we have control over our inner world and the better we take our external world. And the more we live a life of amends, the less we’re susceptible to those who continue to live a life of making excuses. The less we’re affected by those who haven’t grown.
Having seen the fruit of change in our own life, having experienced the power that comes from taking our responsibility, it bemuses us when others continue blaming others, losing the power they could very well have.
A life of making amends is the wisest way of living life because it’s the right way to live.
When we get life wrong, hurt people, don’t consider others, or mess up in any way, there ought to be a commitment and continual practice of making amends.
Being committed to living at peace with our world and all the people we relate with is the way to inner peace.
In seeking forgiveness, we receive forgiveness, and earn forgiveness. And where we’re not forgiven, we grow in grace in forgiving the person who cannot forgive because we feel a pity for them that their heart is not geared to grace. Of course, it’s incumbent on us to apologise so sincerely that we mend the brokenness between us and the other person—as far as it depends on us.
Importantly, making amends is always about the other person we’re to make amends to. Sometimes it would put them in a tenuous or even hurtful position. A true life of making amends is about empathising with others, feeling what it would be like for THEM to experience our amends. To make amends without thinking about how it will affect the other person is potentially quite a selfish act.
When we come at life from the context of others—to value others above ourselves (Philippians 2:3)—we find it’s the very design of life. This is not to say we don’t value ourselves; on the contrary, the more we value others, the more we value ourselves. By valuing others we’re saying all humanity has value.
When we esteem everyone, nobody has power over us. See how a commitment to loving everyone as much as we can is a commitment to the wisest way of life, the overcoming life. The life that takes and takes and takes thwarts itself. A life that refuses to make amends ends up being the misguided and regrettable life.
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