My cause and choice of weapons were poor. I suffered a million blows by a thousand and one foes. I arrived at this center a wounded refugee. And so they come in by the hundreds each week from the junkyards of our inner cities, dead to the spirit and dying from loneliness, reaching out from their last reserve of strength, longing for someone to reach back to them to help them find recovery. He can now feel loved.
Total surrender is an alien concept for most non-recovering people to accept.
That a Higher Power, a Power greater than ourselves, that God could take us through the dark rapids of life safely if we agreed to let go of our own self-will is not an easy principle to adopt. Acting on this principle is, however, critical to the process of rehabilitation. Surrender means abandonment of personal control over things you really have no control over anyway. Dealing with the knowledge that you must forever refuse using the crutch of alcohol and drugs to get you through each day must also be accepted if permanent recovery is to be achieved. If I really want to be productive in life, I know that I will never be able to use alcohol or drugs again.