Meeting change -

12 Steps to Sobriety
Wednesdays 5:30 p.m.
St. John American Lutheran Church
1912 W. 13th St.
Sioux Falls

This meeting is changing from an OPEN AA Meeting to a CLOSED AA meeting effective immediately.

Blue Book Meeting
Al-Anon Room

Thursdays
5 p.m.

Westside Alano Club
1509 W. 1st St
Sioux Falls, SD
605-332-9323

The Web Committee is pleased to run an article written by Jay M. from the Akron Beginners Group for our July blog ~

Recently I was speaking with a friend who happens to be on the Nominating Committee.  She was lamenting the fact that so many people she asked to consider serving on the Executive Board did not even think about it before answering “I’m too busy!”  Another excuse she received as “No way I am getting involved in all the politics.”

Now I am not foolish enough to think that everyone is able to serve on the Board, either because of time or temperament.  But everyone is able to render some service to Alcoholics Anonymous.  If you go to the Council meetings, or look at the makeup of the various committees, or even the roster of those who volunteer at the Office, the cast of characters is pretty much the same all the time.

And what of sponsorship?  A young woman who I met at my home group finally found a sponsor after being turned down six or seven times.  The excuse?  In every case they told her they were too busy.

Really.  Isn’t it a good thing for those folks that whoever was their first sponsor wasn’t too busy?  Isn’t it a good thing that all the people who kept the doors open when those folks wandered into their first meeting weren’t too busy?  Isn’t it a good thing that when they were confused and scared in the early days that members of the Fellowship weren’t too busy to help?

And politics?  They make it sound like it is the U.S. Congress.  Politics in AA is called reaching an informed group conscience.  Politics in AA is what took one side who wanted an entirely Christian Big Book and the other side who wanted no mention of God whatever and ended up with God as we understand Him.  Politics in AA is what has put together every piece of Conference approved literature.  Politics in AA, if done on principles and not personalities, is a spiritual exercise.

As for being too busy?  Your job and family and hobbies leave no time for service work?  I ask how busy would you be if you were not sober?  Would you be busy with a job you were fired from and a family that left?

Copyright Akron Intergroup News; June, 2008

District 5 meets the first Sunday of every month ~ 6 p.m. ~ unless otherwise indicated ~

Westside Alano Club
1509 W. 1st St.
Sioux Falls, SD
605-332-9323

Service is an important part of sobriety!  Please send your General Service Reps (GSR’s) to participate in District 5.

The Web Committee is pleased to post an article on sponsorship by Artie, for our May blog ~

Although not a resident of Akron or the Midwest, I subscribe to your Intergroup newsletter. (Ed: thanks Artie!) Thank you for your Intergroup News.

My name is Artie and I’m an alcoholic. My sobriety date is 7/14/76, and prior to retiring and moving to South Florida over seven years ago, I was from Long Island, NY and NYC. My home group in New York was the Sunrise Group, Jones Beach group. The man who Twelve Stepped me and became my sponsor was a construction superintendent and a tough Irishman. Nassau County, Long Island, didn’t have rehabs or treatment centers in 1976. There was Freeport Alcohol Hospital for a seven day detox. They used to fly men in from Iceland for seven days.

My sponsor, John, said to me, “If you want what we have, do what we do, and if you do what you did, you’ll get what you got. Don’t drink and go to meetings.” He told me that the first 164 pages of the Big Book  was a design for living, but I wasn’t capable of understanding that then, so I was to read the stories and try to identify. He took me on 40 or 50 Twelfth Step calls that first year.

We didn’t get them after they sobered up. We helped them sober up, he kept it simple, just what I needed. Ninety percent of meetings in New York were in church basements. My sponsor said we don’t save souls, but we do save a few rear ends.

He said that if I had a dimes worth of AA, to give a nickel away and down the road, I would get a quarter’s worth back. He shared only what he had experienced, not his opinions. He never gave me a bum steer. He died doing the limbo at an AA dance at K of C hall, 16 years ago in his 30th year of sobriety.

As for my sponsoring, I sponsor much the same as John sponsored me. I had six pigeons in New York over the years. They still call me every week to keep in touch: Three cops, two priests and a regular guy. I’ve only had one guy I took from a Twelfth Step call to the present. He’s 86 years old, and very active in AA. He lives in Pennsylvania now and is very active in AA there.

I don’t push my pigeons into the Big Book  or Steps. I try to get them to feel the Fellowship of AA first, the way it was given to me. (Yes, I said pigeons.) I was a pigeon, my sponsor was a pigeon, and his sponsor was a pigeon. I let them know that if they want to be a sponcee, find another sponsor.

Here in Florida I sponsor five guys whose sobriety range from two years to thirty years.

After John died I asked Ron to be my sponsor. He’s coming up on 47 years of sobriety. I call him everyday and he’s become a great friend. He was the founder of the Sunrise Group, Jones Beach. Today, those who go to treatment get a lot of knowledge, but unless they turn knowledge into spirit this program won’t stay with them. I feel that the experts in the disease of alcoholism are not MD’s, PhD’s, counselors, or treatment centers; the experts in the disease of alcoholism are in the rooms of AA.
 
Lots of meetings / Lots of chances,
few meetings, No meetings/No chances.

By Artie
West Palm Beach, FL
but always a New Yorker!

===========================
© Akron Intergroup News; May, 2008. Used by permission.

The Web Committee is pleased to run a previously written article by one of AA’s co-founders, Bill W. It has been edited due to space limitations.    

     WHEN IT COMES TO THE PRACTICE of AA’s Step Eleven – “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”– I’m sure I am still very much in the beginner’s class; I’m almost a case of arrested development. Around me I see many people who make a far better job of relating themselves to God than I do. Certainly it mustn’t be said I haven’t made any progress at all over the years; I simply confess that I haven’t made the progress that I might have made, my opportunities being what they have been, and still are.

     In Step Twelve - carrying the AA message to others - I’ve found little else than great joy. We alkies are folks of action, and I’m no exception. When action pays off as it does in AA, it’s small wonder that Step Twelve is the most popular and, for most of us, the easiest of all. This little sketch of my own “pilgrim’s progress” is offered to illustrate where I, and maybe lots of other AAs, have still been missing something of top importance. Through lack of disciplined attention and sometimes through lack of the right kind of faith, many of us keep ourselves year after year in the rather easy spiritual kindergarten I’ve just described. But almost inevitably we become dissatisfied; we have to admit we have hit an uncomfortable and maybe a very painful sticking point. Twelfth-Stepping, talking at meetings, recitals of drinking histories, confession of our defects and what progress we have made with them no longer provide us with the released and the abundant life. Our lack of growth is often revealed by an unexpected calamity or a big emotional upset. Perhaps we hit the financial jackpot and are surprised that this solves almost nothing; that we are still bored and miserable, notwithstanding. We know we aren’t doing well enough. We still can’t handle life, as life is. There must be a serious flaw somewhere in our spiritual practice and development.      The chances are better than even that we shall locate our trouble in our misunderstanding or neglect of AA’s Step Eleven - prayer, meditation and the guidance of God. The other Steps can keep most of us sober and somehow functioning. But Step Eleven can keep us growing, if we try hard and work at it continually.     As he goes along with his process of prayer, he begins to add up the results. If he persists, he will almost surely find more serenity, more tolerance, less fear and less anger. He will acquire a quiet courage, the kind that doesn’t strain him. He can look at so-called failure and success for what they really are. Problems and calamity will begin to mean instruction, instead of destruction. He will feel freer and saner. His sense of purpose and direction will increase.

The Web Committee is pleased to welcome Brad S. as our guest blogger for April!

“In any meeting, anywhere, A.A.’s share experience, strength, and hope with each other, in order to stay sober and help other alcoholics.  Modem-to-modem or face-to-face, A.A.’s speak the language of the heart in all its power and simplicity.” Alcoholics Anonymous, Fourth Edition, p. xxiv, Reprinted with permission.

I couldn’t bear the pain of loneliness and despair that I drank myself into, as I sat and stared at my computer screen.  It was the first Thanksgiving after my grandma died.  I was in an empty house.  At least there was beer in the fridge.  Every day, I would tell myself that I wasn’t going to drink any more.  I couldn’t get myself to throw alcohol away, so I tried several hiding places.  Truthfully, my hiding places did nothing to slow me down or to make me stop.  So my new routine was to take a few drinks whenever I could and then beat myself up for the rest of the day.  Then I would check the blogs.

I read my first blog four or five years ago.  It was the journal of a man who found sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous.  His name is Dan.  I found other sober blogs, too.  Other people who were staying sober through A.A. were writing journals of their lives, and they would leave comments on each others’ blogs.  Blog posts that were celebratory were met with comments like: “Congrats!” or “Keep coming back!  It works!”  Blog posts that were more disturbing were met with comments like “I’m praying for you, buddy,” or “Have you talked to your sponsor about all of this?  It might be a good idea!  Hang in there!”  I started my own blog and was a regular poster by the time Thanksgiving hit.  When I started blogging, I never knew that some day I was going to go back to drinking. By November, 2005, I convinced myself that I ran out of all options.  I was tired of going back to A.A. meetings.  I gave myself every excuse for not going back to the meetings.  I wrote an honest email to Dan explaining that it was just too painful for me to ever go to another meeting again.

Dan got my email, and quickly sent a reply that simply said, “Go to that meeting.  They will accept you.”  For whatever reason, I put all my excuses to the side, and took Dan’s advice.  I went to my first meeting in a long time.  My own sobbing and tears prevented me from putting together very many words.  The room was filled with love and they all welcomed me back.  Even though it took another month for me to stop drinking, I was on the right path again.  I found a sponsor, started working the steps, and got involved with service work.  Specifically, I have been given the TREMENDOUS honor of working on a committee to create and maintain the Sioux Falls A.A. website!  This month, our website celebrates it’s second birthday! THANK GOD that Dan reached out to me through a short email when he did.  He made it possible for me to take the necessary step out of my house and into an A.A. meeting.  I pray that the web committee will continue to make that kind of moment possible for many more people to come.

Brad S. 
 

The Web Committee is pleased to welcome Brian K. as our guest blogger for March! 

Hi, I am Brian, an Alcoholic.

I got sober in 1982 while living in Denali National Park, Alaska…it was known then as McKinley National Park.

I went to my first AA meeting in the Fairbanks Alaska Alano Club, 140 miles north of Denali while there on a grocery shopping trip.

The first summer I depended on my home group of three or four members and an occasional court ordered member, in Healy, AK that met once a week. A couple of us would drive 50 miles north once a week to Clear, AK for a meeting in a guy’s house and 25 miles south once a week for a meeting that no one else ever came to in Cantwell, AK. We had been asked by a village elder to bring the Athabascan Indian band that lived there a meeting. We did it and stayed sober…but the only one who ever came was a curious local preacher.

During the second and third summers of my sobriety I lived 50 miles out in Denali National Park at a road camp and I could only get to an occasional meeting. I joined the L.I.M. or Loners-Internationalists and Homers Meeting and subscribed to their newsletter. I wrote to people all over the world who where in a similar situation. They could not get to regular meetings and got and stayed sober through correspondence. What a gift that was! Every night I would sit down for at least an hour, say the Serenity Prayer and have a meeting by answering letters from my new friends. Several of us would exchange tapes of ourselves as well. This of course was before the advent of the computer and internet as we know it today and I am sure that is a welcome addition to loners now. For the first three years, I would go south for a part of the winter to the lower 48 and take in a lot of real meetings and that felt very good.

The fourth summer I lived there we had the local home group meeting of The Tri-Valley Trudgers and the Cantwell meeting was started up again by a new resident of the town. That however is another story as I also had a new wife and she was in AA as well….we are still married 23 years later and have both been continuously sober the entire time, thanks to our Higher Power and the program and members of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the blessings I have today is abundant AA here in the little town in southern New Mexico that I live in and can and do go to two meetings a day.

May God Bless all…my as yet, unmet friends. Thanks for listening and thank you for my sobriety.

Brian K.
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

The Web Committee is pleased to welcome Wilma T. as our guest blogger for February -

Thoughts Precede Feelings

by Wilma T., Sober Men and Women United

The Program has taught me that my thoughts precede my feelings.  The way I feel is a product of the way I think.  We cannot think ourselves into a better life.  We must live ourselves each day into better thinking, and a new way of being.  Just as I must be responsible for my actions, I can also be responsible for my feelings by acknowledging them, and then try to adjust the thoughts that influence them.

As I pray for the ability to be a better person, I ask for the willingness to give up those ideas that are negative to myself, or others.  Once I let go of the resistance, then new ideas began to form.  I realized that as I surrendered to the teachings of the Program, I was able to monitor my thoughts, and change them if I didn’t like them.  This of course, wasn’t easy at first, but as I continued to apply faith, and effort, the less difficult it became.  New ideas led me to new attributes.  I began to outgrow the tendency of doing the same things, and experiencing different results.  I started being liberated from guilt, secrets, and shame.  The things that I couldn’t have comprehended in my old way of thinking, I began to see clearly. 

These new ideas and attitude that I incorporated broke down some old barriers.  For instance, if my old idea of thinking that I could recover by myself had continued, I wouldn’t be here today.  I would have remained isolated, and narrow-minded, and never would have grasped the “WE” concept of the Program.  Without the idea to change, and my willingness to do so, I wouldn’t have experienced all the comfort, joy, and strength that I’ve received through the Fellowship.  Letting go of the self-defeating idea that I couldn’t be comfortable in my own skin really gave me the opportunity to get better acquainted with myself.  I became humble enough to believe that what has worked to change the lives of others will work to change mine.

Also, if my idea of the fear of writing an article had not changed, I would have never written.  I wouldn’t have known how much inspiration I could be open to in the absence of that fear.  When I’m stuck in a negative idea it always contributes to my not being all that I can positively be.  It is with our attitudes, and relationships to people and things that we must learn to live.  New ideas are cultivated as our recovery progresses.  We have a choice to either think positive, or negative.  What we do with the ideas, and blessings we’re given make a lot of difference in our life, and the lives of others.

I’ve been blessed with being an open-minded person.  I have new friends, and sober relationships.  I believe that I have positive directions, and I trust that God will continue to guide my efforts.  If I hadn’t put new ideas into action, I would never have been able to know what it meant to change, and be well thought of.  Today I feel more peaceful, and secure.  I can even cope better.  The consistent application of positive ideas in our lives will give us rewards far greater than what we can imagine.  Positive ideas make way for positive outcomes.

We have the Steps as guiding principles for every action that we take.  The Program works, and will convince us if we’ll submit to it.

copyright Akron Intergroup News; January, 2008