The description of Bill Wilson's vision which marked the beginning of his sobriety is characterized by the fact that it represented the first real apprehension in his life of a power greater than himself. In other words, he became aware for the first time of the existence of God as he understood God; prior to that time, God was more or less a cipher, but from the time of his vision in the hospital God remained real for him.

Whether our sober lives begin in a similar way, or whether our own spiritual experiences are of the "educational" kind, as the Appendix to the AA Big Book describes them, it is generally true that our initial understanding of God in Program is of some entity that is a partner with us in recovery. If we were atheists, agnostics, or believers before we sobered up, most of us see God as we understand God as a power which is able to help us do what we were never able to do before -- to attain and maintain sobriety.

But Step 3 doesn't speak of any sort of partnership. Instead it suggests that any real recovery will be based on handing ourselves over in our entirety to God. Probably most of us originally thought of the Third Step as simply words -- it never occurred to us that this "handing over" might be something that was required of us.

But our working of the last three Steps shows us that Step 3 is serious. In the practice of Steps 10, 11 and 12, we learn that lasting recovery can never be based on a partnership between ourselves and God. Instead, we find that we are to be absorbed into God, that God is everything and everyone -- including us. This is the true "vision for you" of which the AA Big Book speaks.