Step 4:  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

While step three is probably the most important decision in your life, step four is probably the most difficult.  None of us wants to look at our faults.  It is so very painful.  It brings out feelings of guilt, shame, embarrassment, regret, remorse - sometimes almost more than we think we can bear.  That's why we covered them up with rationalization, transference, and suppression in the first place until we were a many-layered psychological onion of pain covering up pain.  In order to heal, we have to begin to peel away those layers, one at a time.  But the pain must be borne if we ever want to feel whole again.

A moral inventory of ourselves may force us to rethink what truly is right and wrong.  We live in a world of moral relativism.  The bad guys don't always wear a black hat and the guy in the white hat may not be that pure inside.  Somehow right and wrong have gotten lost in a swirl of grey. 

The moral inventory must be searching.  We've been sweeping things into the corner for years, building those layers of protection.  Now we have to begin stripping them away.  This won't happen in a day or a week or even a month.   But if we truly turn our lives and wills over to Jesus Christ and seek Him through prayer, scripture study, and meditation, He will lead us to a a more clear definition of morality, giving us as much as we can understand at a time.  My experience has been that as I see and cope with that understanding, the Lord will help me peel away another layer of the onion.  In this process, we pass through the refiner's fire as more and more dross is burned away and the gold that it at the center of the soul is revealed.

The moral inventory must also be fearless. Be prepared.  It will be painful.  It is for everyone.  We sin differently, but we all sin.  Looking at those sins can be terrifying for the strong emotion just the memory of them evokes.  We will want to pull back and shy away from being honest with ourselves and with God.  That is why it takes courage to take step four.  In the words of Mark Twain: "Courage is the resistance to fear; mastery of fear, not absence of fear."
 

I think that a fear of what God must think of me is at the root of most avoidance of this step.  If that's the case with you, let me tell the story of Grandma's Duck.

Grandma had a pet duck that she loved dearly.  One day, her grandson was playing out by the pond with his slingshot and accidentally hit the duck and killed it.  He was horrified by what he had done.  Rather than face Grandma, he hid the duck's body in the bushes and ran back to the house. 

 

Unfortunately for him, his sister had been playing jump rope outside.  As soon as he got back into the yard, she told him she had seen him kill Grandma's duck.  She told him he'd better take all of her dish washing turns from now on or she would tell Grandma.  Since the little boy didn't want his grandmother to know, he agreed to the bargain.

The days went by.  Every night after dinner, he would get up from the table and do the dishes.  He did them when it was his turn and he did them when it was his sister's turn.  When Grandma asked about it, the sister just said that her brother had decided he liked to wash dishes.

After about a week, the little boy's conscience was bothering him so much that he decided to tell Grandma about killing her duck.  After the boy's tearful confession and apology, Grandma took him into her arms and said, "Thank you for telling me.  I know what happened.  You see, I was at the window.  I was just wondering how long you would let your sister make a slave of you before you came to me."

So as we work on our inventories, let go of the fear of telling God.  He already knows anyway.  He was at the window.

To be continued tomorrow.

Text © 2012 Gebara Education

Picture of Thomas Paine poster downloaded from Facebook

Picture of duckling from www.123rf.com