Over three decades of my life, from age 34 to 64 years old, the Lord has led me to return to the Twelve Steps of recovery over and over again. He has used the Steps to peel away my pride, one layer at a time.

It’s sort of like reconstructive surgery. You can’t reconstruct an area of the body—like a badly burned face or a severely injured limb—all at once. The reconstruction has to be done in stages. The patient can only endure so much at each stage of the process. They need time in between to adjust and to heal.

So it has been for me in working through the Steps.

Working through the Steps eventually gave way to just plain working the Steps, as I came to realize that I would never be through with the journey. I would never finish working or practicing these true principles of recovery in my life.

The reconstruction of my heart, like the reconstruction of a body, takes time. In fact, it takes a lifetime in mortality to allow these true principles to really sink in.

And so I’m still here. I’m still at it.

~Colleen H.

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