At Some Point, You’ve Got to Flush It Down—Why Recovery is Your Job, Not Divine Intervention’s.

I was sitting in a meeting recently, listening to someone talk about their “God Can.” They explained that whenever they have problems they can’t fix or carry, they toss them in the “God Can” and let God deal with them.

And I get it—there’s comfort in that, the idea of offloading your mess onto something greater, and for some people, it works. But for me, this idea doesn’t sit right. It’s not that I’m dismissing anyone’s faith or experience—far from it. I believe in a higher power, too, but it’s not one that takes my problems away. It’s an internal sense of moral order, rooted in love and compassion for humanity and the world around me. It’s something I can access within myself, and it guides me through recovery in a way that is personal, not imposed by a set of religious rules.

Here’s the issue with the “God Can” approach: It’s like cleaning up the ocean and dumping the garbage in a landfill. You think you’re done, but the mess isn’t gone. It’s still there, just buried somewhere else, causing harm in a different way. In recovery, we can’t push our problems aside and expect them to be fixed by an outside force. We need to get our hands dirty. We need to sort through the mess and figure out how to deal with it. That’s where the real work of recovery begins.

I don’t think anyone should feel like their recovery is invalidated because they don’t believe in a higher power the way others do. As AA says, your higher power can be anything you choose—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. For me, it’s the belief that we all have the capacity to create a moral compass within ourselves, grounded in love and a commitment to the collective well-being of humanity and the earth. This allows me to walk alongside others in recovery, regardless of their beliefs, and support them in their journey.

What I do have a problem with is when we start relying on an external force to do the heavy lifting for us. Faith and hope are important—they give us the strength to keep going when we don’t have it in ourselves. But accountability is the core of recovery. It’s about facing your problems head-on, understanding your role in them, and actively working to change your behavior. That’s how we clean up the mess. That’s how we move forward.

There’s a fine line between accountability and faith. Faith can carry you through the hard moments, but it’s not the tool that does the work. It’s easy to blur those lines and think that prayer, or relying on a higher power, is enough to make everything better. But without the active step of doing the work—sifting through the garbage, learning from our mistakes, and repairing the damage we’ve caused—we’re just moving the mess around, hoping it will disappear on its own.

If we don’t recognize that line, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. It’s like thinking you can just pray the weight off without ever hitting the gym. Hope is essential, but it’s not the solution. It’s the motivation to get up and start dealing with the problems that have been holding you back. That’s where recovery starts: in facing the mess, not running from it.

Recovery doesn’t need God or a higher power to fix you. It needs your willingness to face the shit you’ve been avoiding. You can lean on faith for strength, but the real work happens when you hold yourself accountable and do the hard, sometimes messy, work of changing your life.

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In my next piece, I get into what my higher power actually looks like—and how I learned to live “one day at a time” without dropping my life in God’s suggestion box.