Letting Go Without Giving Up

I spent yesterday in service to AA. I began the day at 7 AM with my friends Owen and Robert driving to Oregon to attend my first Area Assembly, the semi-annual meeting where the General Service Representatives (me) from around southern Idaho (the area) gather to conduct the business of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is intensly, what’s the word? Boring. It really is amazing to me that when you get a group of 150 alcoholics in a room that anything productive gets done at all.

I used to have a terrible bias against the service structures of AA, thinking that “AA as such ought never be organized” should exclude the kinds of middle management “service” that we do. But having attended this meeting I see the importance of this work and the value of having the process be so cumbersome. There is no more efficient way of carrying the conscience of individual groups up, to the larger group conscience, to get important work done. The most important work we’ve done recently has been to provide financial and experiential support to carry the message to Idaho’s large Spanish speaking community, including books and other literature, translation equipment so those groups can participate at assemblies and round-ups, etc. I am happy to have been able to participate in directing the use of 7th tradition money for that purpose and I am grateful to know what this kind of service is about. The process of getting that done, though, is an exercise in letting go of the outcome and not giving up on the process.

I got home at 7:30 PM and made my way to the 8 o’clock meeting and when I got there I called one of my sponsees who I had given directions for starting his 4th step a couple of days before. Without going into any of the sad details, in the last conversation I had with his parents at 9:45 PM I shared my experience with them that no one who ever stood in the way of the natural consequences of my use ever did me any favors. Helping me never helped. Because of the terms of my sponsees out-patient program and his disregard of those terms, he was thrown out of his house last night.

I had great hopes for this kid. He’s smart. He’s attractive. He’s talented. And he’s a real alcoholic, at least as nearly as I can tell. He’s the kind that actually has the best shot at getting sober the way we do it in AA; what we call a Type IV Alcoholic. He has that level of powerlessness and that level of unmanageability. I still have great hope for him, but I can’t manufacture willingness for people. God knows my own willingness was hard to earn. I know if he somehow manages to find that willingness he’ll be able to recover. He has to find his own way here. I pray he will find it soon.