Welcome, welcome, welcome. I am so glad to be back with you. This is Dr. Anita of course and we are on a change journey here at In The Light. We've been digging into the 12 steps. For those of you who are just

jumping in, it's not always about addiction to a substance, it's just about how hard it can be to change. So we've been checking out the 12 steps and we won't

cover all of them this season but there are a few that really stand out to me

because they're so important to absolutely any type of change or growth or recovery.

Over our last two episodes we were inspired by step three.

We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood

him. What experiences good, less good, and traumatic have shaped your understanding of God. Parents, preachers, and our own meaning-making all

shape our image of God, and that is the God that we are in communion with when we pray.

See, when you step into that prayer closet,

you gotta ask yourself, who is it that I'm talking to?

What is it that I believe about who God is?

And last week, Elder Christie let us know that God's word and God's presence

will answer that question if we stay in both long enough. I hope our prayer episode inspired you to approach your

conversation with God and your spiritual warfare with a whole new energy. In the

presence of God we learned so much about ourselves.

Prayer and the word have often sent me into self-examination mode.

When we stand in that divine light, we will see ourselves more clearly and wrapped in God's unconditional love for us.

We can look at our strengths and our weaknesses, our victories and our failures, our gifts and our

vulnerabilities without devaluing ourselves.

Doing that means that we can live our life to the fullest

by embracing all of who we are without any shame.

So that's our focus in this episode and it's inspired by step four.

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