Diana Gutiérrez

I was gifted with an extraordinary example of faith when I met Diana Gutiérrez, a young medical student, in Panama. Diana shared with me her story of having just broken up with her boyfriend because something didn’t seem right. She made the very conscious decision to break up and put the relationship in God’s hands. She said, “God, if this is for me, I will leave it in your hands. If this is not for me, you’ll take it away.” What ensued allowed Diana to see that her boyfriend was not in love with her but, rather, obsessed with and dependent on her.

This idea of putting our problems in the hands of God is one I struggle with but it always pays off when I do it. My first struggle is that I believe God gives us so many abilities to deal with life. Second, I don’t want to be a passive person. But I’ve learned that turning something over to God does not mean either of these. Today, placing my problems in God’s hands means for me that I am asking a deeper wisdom to guide me to what will serve God and the Universe best, not just what I want for my own selfish, predetermined needs. This is so well described by my favorite mystic, Father Richard Rohr, in his book, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, throughout his chapter on Step 11: “When you ‘pray,’ you are supposed to take off one ‘thinking cap’ and put on another ‘thinking cap’ that will move you from an egocentric perspective to a soul-centric perspective...I call the first perspective ‘the calculating mind,’ and I call the second perspective ‘the contemplative mind.’...The first mind sees everything through the lens of its own private needs and hurts, angers, and memories. It is too small a lens to see truthfully or wisely or deeply. In short, prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us, or as Step 11 says, ‘praying only for the knowledge of his will.’ True prayer is always about getting the ‘who’ right. Who is doing the praying? You or God in you? Little you or the Christ Consciousness? The contemplative mind prays from a different sense of Who-I-am. It rests, and abides in the Great I AM.... People’s willingness to find God in their own struggle with life and let it change them-is their deepest and truest obedience to God's eternal will.”

Today my approach to turning my will over to the care of God can vary. My friend, David Charpentier, always reminds me “more will be revealed.”

Sometimes it is me simply meditating on an issue, asking the Universe to “help me to see what I cannot see.” I liken this approach to the wonderful quote from Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And, still, sometimes it means I am verbally asking the Great Spirit to help me resolve something I cannot resolve, understanding that it may not get resolved the way I want. Turning over a problem to the Universe may also simply be recognizing the truth proposed by Albert Einstein when he said, “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” For me that means some problems can only be worked out spiritually, not by my hard work and thinking.

The result of my turning problems over to a Higher Power are always positive, even if it just makes me pause for reflection before acting. The result is so beautifully articulated in AA’s Ninth Step Promises: “God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”

Thank you to Diana Gutiérrez for teaching this 50+ year old a lesson you learned much earlier than me! I learned a great lesson in faith from you.