NOT YET

There's a famous section in St. Augustine's Confessions.  He's had a wild youth - drink, women, and other things.  Now, he's slowly coming to his God. But some part of him is still resisting. He finds himself praying: I most wretched in my early youth had begged chastity of Thee and said, "Give me chastity and continency, only not yet." He doesn't want God to cure him too soon; he still wants what he calls "the disease of concupiscence" to be satisfied rather than extinguished.
     I so understand that "not yet." Any addict (and others) knows that terrible ambivalence - the desire to change and the fear of change. Who will I be without my old habits, whatever it is I lean upon? How will I get through? I'm the one who...how will I give up that story I tell myself? These questions come even when we sincerely want to change.
     What takes us across? I wish I knew and could bottle it and hand out free samples. Some people spend their lives without having gotten across while others do; it's a mystery why that should be. I used to think it had something to do with intelligence or temperament or something else bred in the bone. But when I look around at people who have left ambivalence behind and managed to surrender, I see very few common denominators. There is probably the same percentage of good guys and bad guys as in the rest of the population. That's just the way it is.
     Some people never come to the bottom of their self-destruction but some people do and they're the lucky ones. Surrender, the admission of powerlessness, is the moment when "I can't do this anymore" reverberates through your being. There's nothing else to do but to give up and turn forward, even when the hope that there is another way is faint and flickering.
     Why for some and not others? Some would call it grace. Whatever it is, it's happened for me and I don't take any credit for it. All I did was pay attention and let the path unfold. Of course, that's not "all." At every significant turning, I was willing to surrender. Why? Well, that's the mystery.