Seaweed: Bush-League Pinch-Hitter

Power:  Ability to affect or influence; control or coercion.

Try everything and THEN ask for help from my higher power.  That is so completely hilarious in its brilliance that I can't see straight.

"We began to get over the idea that the Higher Power was a sort of bush-league pinch hitter, to be called upon only in an emergency.  The notion that we would still live our own lives, God helping a little now and then, began to evaporate."

A pinch-hitter is usually a baseball player that isn't good enough to be on the starting team, someone who comes in to bat once for a really terrible hitter.  And the bush-leagues are the really crappy leagues ("a low-ranking or inferior level among groups, professions, organizations, etc").  So the implication is - if I understand it correctly, dubious as that may be - that I consider my higher power to be an inferior, secondary substitute playing in an inferior, low-ranking league.  That sounds about right for me.  That sounds just about right.

I got a long way to go . . .