I was talking to someone in my recovery group the other day, and they had been recently consumed with worry about a lot of things in their life and the following idea popped into my head to help with that. It had to do with emptying my head of all worries by writing them down and separating them into three lists. This idea comes from the three kinds of things mentioned in the serenity prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
The first list gets the title, “Things I can change.” All the items that I have control over and that I have stewardship and responsibility for. This could be a small debt I can easily repay, mowing the lawn, doing dailies, etc.
The second list gets the title, “Things I cannot change.” It contains all the items I’m worried about that I know for sure aren’t mine to control or that I just don’t have the power to control. This could be running my wife’s life, changing other people, controlling my kids, controlling outcomes, etc.
The third list gets the title, “Things I don’t know whether I own or not.” It contains all of the gray area things on the list where I lack the wisdom to know whether they should go into list 1 or 2 above. This could contain things like standing up for myself in certain ways, choosing the right words for a difficult conversation I need to have with someone, giving my wife or others feedback. These are the hills that I am unsure about dying on.
Once I’ve dumped all anxieties into these three lists, I turn list 1 into a to-do list organized by priority. I have to take action on the things I own and have the power to act on. This gives me a sense of accomplishment and capability and gets rid of the procrastination feelings.
I give everything in list 2 to God completely. Let God run those things because I can’t. I should have enough train wreck behind me to know this intuitively.
I then hand list 3 to God as well. He knows which of those things should go into list 1 and 2. I don’t. So I give it to Him somewhat like list 2 with the exception that if God finds something in there that should be in list 1 – owned by me – then it’s God’s responsibility to give it back to me in an obvious way.
It turns out that I’ve been making the above lists in my mind for years without ever having written them out, but I often got things in the wrong columns by trying to control things I couldn’t, not taking action when I needed to, and pretending to know all things. Writing them down helps me to separate them out from each other and for me to do the things I own, let go of the things I don’t own, and let God figure out the gray area.
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