A famous early Christian writer wrote:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

In our lives, our recovery, and in our religious faith, we have learned to think of God as something outside ourselves, something or someone to whom we can appeal for help, someone who judges us or condemns us, someone who saves us or rescues us, someone who loves us for a reason or without a reason. Someone, in fact, who treats us like a child.

The key thing is that we think of this God as somehow other than ourselves. Although we say that we are part of God and God is part of us, we don't act that way. We don't believe it.

And then we come to Steps 10, 11 and 12.

In the practice of these Steps, we come to depend on our experience rather than any prior belief. Step 11 talks about contact with God, not belief in God. Step 12 talks about waking up. These are things that we do, not articles of faith. And as we work these last three Steps, we find that our experience of God is not of an entity that is other than we are, but with whom we are completely and absolutely one.

So why do we hesitate to practice them? Not -- as we so frequently assert -- because to do so will somehow bring about the death of God. It's because it will bring about the death of "I." It was never true that God and I were separate, but that wasn't because God doesn't exist. It's because "I" don't exist -- and that requires more courage than just about anything else to accept.