I learned a lesson about grace when I experienced its flipside a number of years ago, after I was laid off from a corporate communications job in health care.

Seeking employment, I dutifully worked my network, including a breakfast meeting with a woman I had recently worked with. She had just started a new job as a vice president at a competing medical group, and I thought she’d be a great contact for potential jobs in the industry.

I did most of the talking, acknowledging my disappointment with the layoff but expressing how much I was looking forward to the next position, and trying, as we conversed, to put my best foot forward, hoping not to sound desperate. After all, it was a bit of a sales pitch. I needed a job.

The newly minted VP mostly nodded her head as I talked. When I finished, she paused, used her napkin to wipe her mouth, and said, “You know, I’ve never missed a paycheck.”

Wow. I was momentarily speechless, stunned really, thinking to myself, “how is that helpful?” I was able to mutter politely, but half-heartedly, “oh, good for you,” and then motioned to the server for the check.

I eventually found another job—no thanks to that contact of course—but that incident has stuck with me over the years. I’ve come to realize, as someone in recovery who believes in a Higher Power, that her less than empathetic reaction was a decided lack of grace.

Happily, again as someone in recovery, I’ve been able to witness far more examples of grace’s presence than its absence.

For example, I’ve been to a number of AA meetings where a speaker, or maybe someone receiving a medallion, will credit his or her recovery to, at least in part, God’s grace.

I also recently visited with a woman in recovery who served 48 months in Shakopee Women’s Prison for possession of methamphetamine. She said she recognized her incarceration was a lesson in grace. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she told me, because she got clean and sober, going through the prison’s six-month treatment program.

Google “grace” and you’ll discover a range of definitions. The word itself, according to Merriam-Webster is, “Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin gratia favor, charm, thanks, from gratus pleasing, grateful.”

The divine is constant and always there, we are the ones who move toward and away from grace.The author Max Lucado points out, in his book on grace, “We talk as though we understand the term. The bank gives us a grace period. The seedy politician falls from grace…We describe an actress as gracious, a dancer as graceful. We use the word for hospitals, baby girls…and pre-meal prayers.”

Of course, there’s also the phrase, “There but for the grace of God go I,” which those of us in the fellowship hear a lot at meetings.

Also, consider the hymn, “Amazing Grace,” written by a former slave trader who had found God’s grace, which, as he wrote, “saved a wretch like me.” This resonates for many of us addicts and alkies. Just like the person in the hymn, we all were lost once. As AA’s “How it Works” states, “We are not saints.” But, through grace—and the 12 steps—we’ve been found. In other words, as mere mortals we fall from or enter into grace. The divine is constant and always there, we are the ones who move toward and away from grace.

One applicable definition of the word, which comes up in a Google search, is from an older article (2013), “A Journey of Grace,” in Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine. It poses that grace is really “God’s favor or help…some people define grace as God’s unmerited divine assistance.”

And how does grace relate to our recovery? Recently, a woman at a 12-step meeting told me that she thought the “grace of recovery” is the freedom from addiction.

The term or concept of grace, along with God or a Higher Power, appears throughout AA literature and in the 12 steps: See steps two, three, five, six, seven, eleven and twelve.

God, grace and the Higher Power are especially referenced in the chapter on step eleven in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, better known as the “Twelve and Twelve.” Step eleven states: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

The step eleven chapter acknowledges that there are people in recovery who will find that those “claims for the power of prayer” are “unconvincing or quite objectionable.” Indeed, there are those who have a hard time with the “God thing.”

These references are not meant to be a religious obligation, according to American Addiction Centers, a national provider of substance addiction and mental health treatment, which discusses the 12 steps on its website. Instead, these references are meant to “help people rely on something other than themselves to help them abstain from drinking alcohol. This can mean seeking help from friends, family, licensed professionals, religious beliefs or anything that can help one ground themselves and work toward sobriety.”

With that in mind, the “Twelve and Twelve” chapter on step eleven goes on to declare, “We all need the light of God’s reality, the nourishment of His strength and the atmosphere of His grace.” And, further, “As we have seen, self-searching is the means by which we bring new vision, action and grace to bear upon the dark and negative side of our natures. It is a step in the development of that kind of humility that makes it possible for us to receive God’s help.”

Angelo Gentile is a Minneapolis-based freelance journalist. He recently wrote about The Promises for The Phoenix-Spirit.