I, as an alcoholic and addict, need to be extremely cautious about ‘listening to the secret wish at the bottom of my heart’.
I have a fulminating, florid, and indefatigable ego.
It’s an absolute stinker.
I am 100% on board with the idea of God having a plan (or a set of plans) for me.
I am quite sceptical that I (and I might gingerly extend this to other alcoholics, addicts, and anons) can reliably access the endpoint of that plan and then plot a splendid course to attaining it.
Even if one achieves the endpoints, one might remain entirely unaware of its real importance—the most trivial seeming life could be of enormous significance in God’s plan; the grandest and most ostensibly high-achieving life could be as nothing in God’s eyes.
Almost any felicitous endpoint reached in a life is arrived at by a circuitous, serendipitous, and improbable route: even if the endpoint is accurately foreseen, any human attempt to reach it is likely to fail.
The more important point, however, is that the ego will establish grand, self-aggrandising, self-centred, and usually preposterous plans for the individual, all furnished with spiritual justifications.
Evidence for this lies in the comically narrow range of careers people in recovery seek to switch to in their first ten years.
By contrast, I have never seen anyone arrive at a baleful result by simply putting one foot in front of another, humbly and (largely) silently discharging the obligations before them with diligence, and taking up the opportunities offered spontaneously by the universe.
That is the system that has worked for me.
Yet I have seen countless examples in recovery of Discerning God’s Will, devising a hairbrained plan, and coming a-cropper, spectacularly so, often crowned with alcohol and drugs.
That’s been my experience, too, although I was spared the final step into the barroom, the drug den, or the unscrupulous or naïve prescriber’s office.