Step 7

Step 7:  Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

Principle - Humility

Personal Inventory

Having taken our inventory, a huge step that we have undertaken, and having faced our weaknesses and shortcomings, we are now ready to move on to the next step:  to ask our Higher Power that those traits that contributed to our problems -- our shortcomings and weaknesses, be removed from us.

Note the word "humbly".  This word implies that we have a certain attitude that accompanies our request.  To be humble means to have an honest and realistic assessment of ourselves -- our strengths and weaknesses.  We neither undervalue nor do we overvalue ourselves.  We are in touch with our assets and liabilities, which we discovered in step four, when we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  Basically, we have a clear picture of ourselves.  Now that we have seen on paper what our liabilities are and are ready to have them removed, we approach our creator, our Higher Power, and with humility, we ask that these shortcomings be removed.

Each step is a foundation for the next one.  By having arrived at step seven, we have come a ways in our spiritual journey.  We have already recognized that we had a problem with our gaming and that our lives have become unmanageable.  We realize that there was some form of insanity in our behavior and we came to believe that sanity could be restored to our lives.  We knew that we had been beaten by our addiction, that our lives are in awry and that our own will power could not bring order or healing to our lives, thus we made a decision to turn our lives to the care of a Higher Power.  

Next, we faced one of the most difficult tasks in the 12 steps:  to take a thorough moral inventory ourselves, omitting nothing and going back as far as we can possibly remember in our lives.  An even harder step is we shared with another human being the exact nature of our wrong doings.  Finally, we realized how self-defeating these character defects have been in our lives, so we have become ready to have our Higher Power remove them from us.  Now we actually petition to our Higher Power to do that very act:  to remove all those defects character that have caused us problems, and we find that most of our problems were our own making.

When we are ready, we say something like this:

My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen

a) In your journal, write out a prayer for each shortcoming that you are entirely ready to have removed.

Humbly ask your Higher Power to remove it.

b) Write out a prayer for each shortcoming that you are not entirely ready to have removed.

Humbly ask your Higher Power to make you ready to have it removed.

c) Than write a description of how you would be, without the shortcomings that you are not yet ready to have removed in 7b.

The 7th step is completed. On to step 8 and more action.

1/24/2015 Formatted for new website. Liz W.