Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

Mark 9:24

What if I don’t believe? If I don’t believe I can stop? If I don’t believe in spiritual tools? If I don’t believe in God?

Luckily, unbelief is to be expected. And, it isn’t the roadblock we may think it to be.

In fact, contrary to what you may think, belief in God is actually not a requirement to begin receiving help and relief from addiction.

AA text has a whole chapter entitled, “We Agnostics”, which addresses this in more detail.

And the Bible is full of very human people struggling to fully believe and failing on their own to live up to the ideals of their Creator.

It’s safe to say that unbelief is so common it may even be necessary to fully grow into or expand our faith.

For the scholarly, yet addicted, the prospect of belief in God will cause groans. We may be used to wrapping our heads around a problem and applying rational solutions to it.

But recovery is a curious concoction of rationality and spirituality.

And the former grows out of the latter.

It isn’t necessary to believe to start. One thing is, though. Action. We cannot wish ourselves into relief. We cannot will ourselves out of despair. In some things our willpower had proved sufficient, but it had failed us here. If it worked, we wouldn’t have been beaten into our current state.

Fortunately, though, we’ve been beaten down enough to become coachable.

And our coach doesn’t care if we believe the drills will work. He just wants us to do them. He knows the results even if we can’t fathom how it’ll work.

And it’s here that our unbelief ends up serving us in the most unlikely ways. We have reached a degree of willingness that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

God, thank you and forgive me for my unbelief.