“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”In step three of AA you are making a decision: it’s that simple. You make decisions all day everyday, right? Making a decision to turn your will over to God or a “Higher Power” can be just like putting on a new pair of glasses and seeing everything more clearly. Step Three Of AA: Turn It OverWhen we’ve taken steps one and two, we have learned and accepted that our lives are unmanageable, we are alcoholics and a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. What if we were to surrender the manageability part? We can surrender a lifetime of self-will run amok by making the decision to turn it all over to a Higher Power and allow someone and something to care for us. We can stop wearing ourselves out trying to make and force everything to happen as if we were in charge of everything in the world. Recovery is a spiritual process and step three is when the doors of hope, faith and trust are opened allowing us to once again take a deep breath and feel the serenity: a gift of sobriety. The essence of step three is turning over your will, getting out of the way, and being restored to reality, honesty, balance and peace of mind. Step Three Of AA: Seeking KnowledgeWhen working on step three we take a look at how acting on self-will means behaving with the exclusion of any consideration for others, focusing only on what we want and ignoring the needs and feelings of others. While we were busy pursuing these impulses, we mostly left a path of destruction behind us, and we definitely lost touch with our conscience and a Higher Power. However, while working the third step we begin to focus our attention on seeking knowledge of a Higher Power’s will for us. Making a decision to turn our lives and will over can’t do anything unless we take the actions necessary to turn it over. Simply making a decision without following it up with action is meaningless. For example, you can make a decision to go to a meeting, but if you don’t leave your home for the rest of the day, it won’t happen, will it? In AA there are many helpful recovery tools that have worked many times over at maintaining sobriety and a connection with a Higher Power. There’s actually a very effective and simple prayer adapted from a prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr and known as the “Serenity Prayer,” which can help you as you are seeking knowledge and make your decision to turn it over on a daily basis: “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” With the “Serenity Prayer” you can learn to accept with serenity the current reality of your condition and that although you cannot control the choices and actions of others, you can decide how you will act in each situation. You may not be able to change some things in your life, but you can make a decision to change your willingness to surrender, trust and seek knowledge. | 
