Our Business

I always come back to the pure power of recovery.... Of the person that has reached out their hand and offered to that person how is need of help. That person that is scared and is not knowing what to do. All that they know is that they need to be in a meeting. Maybe their friends of family member urged them to go... Maybe they saw the movie Flight with Denzel Washington and could relate to tearing up a hotel room because the mini bar bottles just looked so damn good.

No matter what the reason... Everytime that I see it or am part of that process it makes me feel more alive then amything else. Like that is what I was out on this earth for..... To be there for people, just like there where people there for me. 

Watching someone come in and be so broken right down to the bone... but know that there is hope.

Today I was in a mens meeting... and i had all kinds of my own crap going on in my head. I was really trying to get my head where it should be when i am in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.. in the solution.  The meeting is a Big Book study meeting that goes for an hour. We take turns reading a paragraph out of the book and we go in an order. After a couple of people had read I heard something that completely took me off guard.. and something that I had never heard in a mens meeting before...

I heard a woman's voice reading... I didn't know what to do. I could feel my skin start to crawl because i was uncomfortable. No one in the room said anything and the woman just kept reading.... and then i heard another woman read.  As i thought to myself about what should be happening next i just thought that I would do what I always did in a situation like this in AA. It was something that i learned many years before when I was at my mens homegroup in Pacific Grove... just defer to the men who had more experience and more time then I did. Men like these had taught me how to become a man... so I didn't do anything.

As we finished the reading it was time to share and it turned out that both of the women were in dangerous situations and really needed a meeting. Both had a string of bad days and had not been to a meeting in months. If the men in that room had turned those women away.... who knows what might of happened... but we didn't. I was so proud to be a member of that group today.

Two other men spoke about crazy scrapes that they had been in over the past 10 days... losing jobs and families... and getting arrested. Through it all they knew where they had to be when all of that stuff stopped... and there were men (and women) that were right there for them.

On the Monterey Intergroup's Website they have a really great saying that pretty much puts it all into perspective....

If you want to drink... thats your business.
If you want to stop.... thats our business.

Damn straight.