As I sit here today just thinking, I am thinking about one of the great gifts I was given in here. And that’s the Twelfth Step which was handed to me almost at the beginning.
All I was able to do in the beginning I found out was to greet newcomers with a smile and a handshake. I say the beginning, but that’s not quite right in the sense of what I was doing. My first sponsor took me out with him almost everyday. There were no rehabs back then, and the hospitals didn’t treat the alcoholic for alcoholism. And I think there was only one detox in the city I lived in. So calls to go out came around almost all the time.
My going out on these was me being dragged along. I helped pick people up off the ground and out of bad places. I was just like another alcoholic I knew. He said his sponsor always dragged him around and when his sponsor sat down to talk to the newcomer he made him sit on the other side of the room and remain quiet. One day he went up to his sponsor and asked him what good he was doing just sitting around like that. His sponsor told him he was the most important person in the room. He said he would be finishing up talking to the newcomer and tell him that if the man didn’t stop drinking he was going to end up just like that alcoholic on the other side of the room. And I knew then I felt the same way.
In fact I think I was the perfect example back then. I remember one older woman, who had been sober for years, came up to me after I had been in the program for a couple of years. She had a big smile on her face and gave me a great compliment. She told me how really good I looked. She said that when I first came in I was the sickest drunk she had ever seen. She said I looked so sick I made her sick looking at me and convinced her that she never wanted to take a drink again. So at least I helped someone early on.
The reason all this came up was because I was talking to someone last night about how well he was helping others. I told him that I know how much that kind of thing always helped me. And it still does. Whenever I have the opportunity to help another alcoholic, whether new or old, I have no idea of whether I have helped him or not. All I know is that as a result of that I very often feel I have been the one helped. It’s like a gift I receive in doing that. I know that I don’t expect that, but it often just happens to me that way. I feel grateful I know. It comes to me as a lesson in humility I know I need. How powerless I really am. That my Higher Power is doing for me what I’m unable to do by myself.
I remember that after a while my sponsor sent me out on a Twelfth Step call early on with a newer alcoholic than myself. It was for a doctor of psychology, who had been drinking and had two grand mal seizures that day. He had burns all over his face and his upper body. His tongue was chewed up and had to be fixed. Anyway there we were and I really had no idea what the message was I was supposed to be taking to him. But I guess I did tell him how important sobriety was for me and others. After about an hour he asked us to leave. I felt I had failed.
I just shook my head and went back to my sponsor and asked him why he had sent me on such a mission. I told him I really didn’t know what it was I was supposed to be doing. I mean I didn’t know the message. He just smiled quietly and told me that he knew if I could win the argument with myself that he knew I could stay sober. I guess that was it. It was the beginning for me to stop being resistant to what this program was about. Made me grateful.
I certainly learned from my old sponsor and a lot of those old timers that I need to practice the program this way through the Twelfth Step. That if I want to keep this program I’m going to have to give away what was so freely given to me. And the feelings I just described are what makes me so grateful for what I have been given from the beginning in here.
Anyway I needed to stop and think about this today. It spells out for me what it is I am supposed to be doing in order to remain sober a day at a time. To learn how to practice these spiritual principles in all of my affairs. I know that when I go to meetings that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. To be part of the group, as spelled out in the Fifth Tradition. That the group ought to be a spiritual entity whose primary purpose is to carry the AA message to the alcoholic who still suffers. And that could be an old timer as well as the newcomer. I know how much help I have received in here and how much I’m supposed to be doing to help others like myself.
This was a good day for me to stop and be quiet. To be aware of what this is all about. I am grateful for each and every one of these days I have been given…a day at a time.