Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our
lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
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Two mice, one white and one
black, little by little start to gnaw away the vine. Nearby you see a luscious-looking
strawberry. Holding tightly to the vine
with one hand, you pluck the strawberry with your other hand and pop it in your
mouth. How sweet it tastes.
My sponsor once said to me, “I’m not in charge of what you
say; but I am in charge of what I hear.”
So went our evening on Friday with people hearing this story in
different ways. I love it how koans do
this.
Beginning with our experiences with Step One, we found
ourselves being chased by a tiger of a different form: By our disease. Our conscience. Or by something we made
up…the stories we tell ourselves, or being stalked by "a hundred kinds of" fear.
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And the tiger down below, “waiting to eat me?” Can we be sure about that? If the chasing tiger can take on many forms,
so can the tiger below. Maybe it’s Tony
the Tiger. We really don’t know since
that part of the story has not unfolded yet.
As another person said, the chasing tiger is our past, the tiger down
below is the future.
The two mice – black or white, good or bad, the way we
usually see things (duality)…and then, of course, carry these thoughts into the
future, usually to bad outcomes. But it
says one white mouse and one black
mouse. Either one or both could play a
part in my future; but right now, they’re just gnawing. Lots of things in our
life are being gnawed on, aren’t they?
Another person solved her anxiety of gnawing mice and decided her “vine”
was really thick and no need to be concerned right now.
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Bill K.
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