The director of the local C.G. Jung Center, while he was still a minister, used to say:

The role of the Church is to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.

For many of us, that has been the role of our 12-Step program too. When we first arrived, we were filled with doubt, and one of the most significant achievements of our recovery was to develop faith -- faith in our Program, faith in other people, faith in God, and faith in ourselves.

Left to itself, faith can become complacency and a refusal to expose ourselves to any sort of lessons or practices that might shake that faith. That is what brought so many of us to a sincere examination and practice of Steps 10, 11 and 12. Our practice of the first nine Steps over and over had become something we talked about without much doing anything. And we also had a feeling that we were still missing out on something -- that, despite the confident assertions of others in Program that we had arrived, we had overlooked something of considerable importance.

As we work Steps 10, 11 and 12, we find that much of what we counted on in our recovering lives is once again called into question. We find that we must rediscover the message of Program, and that to do so may involve questioning our friendships, our relationships with other people and with God as we understand God, even things like our jobs or our very purpose in living. We discover that a life built on doubt can be more rewarding than one built on security and complacency.