He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah‬ ‭6‬:‭8

When the shroud is removed and we crawl back into the stream of life, it is exhilarating. And terrifying.

Maybe this is the first time we’ve considered what it means to try and follow God’s will. Maybe we’ve hit our head against the wall in this regard before.

Wherever we are in our faith and in our sobriety, we point in the same direction and have the same goal. We need a guide.

Friends and mentors and meetings do well to point us toward the solution. We are looking for something bigger that we can live by and for and through.

We are looking for God.

In this quest, discouragement nips at us and often gets the best of us. It’s easy to fall victim to the trap of not knowing what His will for us is.

We have helpful encouragement along this line in recovery literature. Keep leaning forward. Keep coming back. One day at a time. Clean house; help others.

And further, in the source material itself, we have passages like this reminding us very simply of some core truth.

Justice, kindness, humility. These are good. And they’re together—keeping each other in check. This keeps us from weaponizing justice or looking for backhanded compliments for our kindness or wallowing in self-pity and calling it humility.

We seem to be able to go overboard with anything. So it is helpful to remember to carry all these attributes with us to accomplish His good.

God, mold me into a useful vessel.