The 12 Step Program - Step 6 (Part 1)

Step number six is the step I am talking about in this episode. Number six is: “I was entirely ready to have God remove all of these defects of character.”

So, some of you may have read my book entitled, Gifts From God, and the gift that I associated this step is the gift of readiness. As you know by now, all of the steps to discuss here are from the first edition of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, but using my personal wording to make them more personal for me. Also, the wording of the steps is little bit different than those steps you will see in the current edition of the Big Book because some of the wording has changed over the years. I, however, preferred the feeling in the wording from the original, first edition.

As I said, I associate this step with the gift of readiness. As I look at the sixth step I can start to imagine my human self beginning to work on that tabula rasa that is one of the goals for my happy humanity. This is due in part, actually mostly, to that third step where I decided to turn my will and my life over to the care of God’s direction. In the fourth step I identified those things, (at least as many as I could at the time), talked about them in the fifth step, and now, at this sixth step, am reviewing them deciding if I truly want to eliminate those things that have not been good in my life. I have gone over each one and decided, with God’s direction, that I would like, in a perfect world, to be free of all these defects of character.

Believe it or not, after making this decision many years ago, I still have a few of those defects arising at the most inopportune times. I forget to depend on God’s power to cleanse myself of these defects. Thank you God for this program, because I still have step number 10 to help me continue to recognize these defects and deal with their appearance almost immediately.