Step Six – Entirely Ready

Step Six – Were Entirely Ready to Have God Remove All These Defects of Character

In our heart and mind, we become ready to let God do what we could not do on our own; remove the character defects.  After listing our inventory and reading it in the presence of God and another person, we should have a clearer idea of who we really are. We embrace ourselves with compassion after re-examining the past events that formed our personality. We looked at them, we named them, and we come to the realization that we are not those past events and circumstances, no matter how much we may have been responsible for our part in any of them. The character defects are not our fault. Being entirely ready means that we have a deeper connection to our Higher Power and that we trust enough to no longer cling to our old habits of thought and behavior. We are ready to move on without dragging along the wreckage of our past. We want to be free for good, no turning back.

As humans, we often feel the need to justify ourselves or solicit the opinions of others to validate that we’re OK. If we consider our divine origin, and that we are God’s child, we are always OK. No one outside of us can have a reasonable level of understanding of our true self or our life experience. At this point, if we have done our steps well, we don’t need the approval of others. We only have concern that we are pleasing to God; not to save ourselves from judgment, but to live up to His ideal of unconditional love. Through these steps, we learn to love ourselves more deeply as we discover our innermost being.

 What we had learned and experienced in the past gave us a false perception of ourselves and the world, which kept us sick. Our free will, and our ego, can keep us stuck in the old patterns and reactions if we try to take back our own limiting power. We are tempted to want to do things our way, but it doesn’t work.  Reviewing our past events, we see that we usually didn’t do a very good job on our own. We just don’t know another way yet. If we are ready, God can give us what we need for the lasting evolution of spirit and mind.  We can move ahead without looking back in fear and anxiety, and the experiences that have haunted us for so long will be seen in a new light.  We can stop judging others and ourselves as bad or wrong. We can stop fighting against ourselves and others. When we are truly ready, God can change us. We must be willing to move forward without knowing exactly where we are going at every moment. We must get out of our head and stop trying to solve our own problems. Not having the birds-eye view, as our Higher Power does, we don’t have all the answers.  For right now, we just need to be ready to let God work on us.