“10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
We have few tools. Inventory. Confession. Apology. Prayer. Meditation. Work. That’s literally it. But that’s enough.
I can get agitated, wondering if I am getting things wrong, in large and small matters. In inventory I can disclose the mistakes I have made. One can see only a fraction of those. There’s no need to ‘go deep’: any attempt to untangle the tangled, read the runes, or dive down into the muddy reservoir of feelings, thoughts, and impulses is doomed to failure. That’s why, in inventory, I need only ask the question and write down what’s sitting there, obvious, waiting to be picked, the overripe, low-hanging fruit, hiding in plain sight, unconscious because I’m not paying attention not subconscious. Anything else is time-consuming, speculative, and highly likely to be wrong.
But will I not therefore miss something? And will I not therefore bring down doom upon myself, unwittingly, because I haven’t investigated and catalogued every neuronal misfiring? No, because God will do for me what I cannot do for myself. This means that, if I am making mistakes that are too complex or hidden for me to spot (under the heading, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know’), God’s quite capable of giving me a simple corrective measure that corrects the problem of which I am not even aware.
In short, therefore, I do take inventory, but I keep it simple, listing and disclosing the obvious. More importantly, I ask God what to do today. I am surprised at how often there are indicated changes in direction, approach, activity, and so on in every part of my life, changes that I do not understand and seem to be arbitrary. Whenever God tells me to stop something, start something, or do something differently, especially when I do not understand why, it is probably because I have been making a mistake and did not realise it. Rather than waiting for me to spot it, God simply redirected me.