For those who didn’t hear my luncheon talk Saturday at Bozeman, I’d like to share in summary what I said then to bring you all up to date on what’s happening with Central Office and with me. As of April 21st, I am no longer employed at View Engineering. For a long time, I’ve felt the need for a sabbatical, but things came to a head at work, and I resigned. Carrying the double load had been telling on me for a long time. My wife Iris is planning to retire early from her job in July. To tide us over, we’ve put a piece of property we own up for sale. We both feel we’re at a new beginning. We’re looking to God for guidance and courage. We feel good about this, even though we can’t project how this will all work out.
Wednesday, June 3rd was moving day for Central Office. SA is now the proud occupant of an office in a commercial office building in downtown Simi Valley, California! Historic move! And Mike and Curt didn’t spill paint on the carpet. And what would we have done without Bob’s red truck and healthy thy back and Lee’s support? And of course Nan was there supervising what went where. She’s the one who found the place! After the used furniture was all moved in and the Central Office transplanted from my garage, we all stood in a circle, holding hands, and dedicated the place to God’s work and the fellowship and said the Lord’s prayer together. There were not many dry eyes in that circle. Furniture and rental expense came to $1000. In the very midst of the move, SA got a $1000 check from an individual member who, of course, knew nothing about the move! Just another indication, it seemed, that we were doing the right thing under God’s guidance and blessing.
SA’s phone number remains 818/704-9854, which moved with the office. This means that I can no longer be reached directly at that number; my new private line at home is 805/583-3579.
From February 21st to June 6th I was in process of seeking discernment in the matter of my relation to the work of the Central Office. I put myself under the direction of a man who helps others in practicing a method for obtaining direction in crucial decisions. The process is one where the individual avails himself of all possible means at his disposal: the rational (including advice from others), the intuitive, and finally, direct personal guidance. This process goes on over months, so it takes place in a broad sampling of one’s life-conditions and moods over time. The task was to spend an hour in prayer every third day on each of these three approaches, marking down at the end of the hour whether the answer was Absolutely Yes, Maybe Yes, Don’t Know, Maybe No, or Absolutely No. The question I put to this process (once I discovered I had been asking the wrong question), was “Shall I dissociate from my role as Central Office manager but remain SA trusted servant?”
Interestingly, the last of the assigned prayer periods fell on the morning of June 6th, during the Bozeman Convention, the very day I knew I would have to give my report. The answer was very clear to me; all of the fourteen X’s had fallen in the “Absolutely Yes” column. I thus told the fellowship I was dissociating from my previous role as manager of the SA Central Office, but would remain trusted servant if the fellowship wanted that. As life would have it, this coincided with the week of moving the office out of my garage, a process that began when the last secretary we hired to take Nan’s place didn’t work out. At the same time, Nan agreed to become office manager. All things just seemed to work together.
As it stands now, Nan is both office manager and secretary, getting other part-time help as needed. She is responsible to the fellowship, as she really always has been, only now directly so, without me in the loop. This is why I suggested that a committee be formed to oversee the work of the Central Office to take my place. At present, Nan works Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and is able to keep up with the volume of work. The work is going more efficiently, now that she does it all in one place. Phone calls that come in when she is not there are recorded on the office answering machine, and she takes them from there. It will be up to the committee and the fellowship to say whether this and other practices are acceptable.
I still take the letters and calls that Nan can’t handle or pass on to other members. Instead of working in the Central Office, however, I handle these and other SA tasks at home, in what is once again my study.
Regarding my request that SA have a committee to suggest a new procedure for determining national group conscience, let me give some background. When there was a small number of groups in the country, the way we got national group conscience decisions from the whole fellowship was by newsletter or phone calls. We could get a large percentage of groups to vote in this manner, sometimes 100 percent. This procedure no longer works; we don’t get enough response back from the groups. The procedure started falling apart when we asked for feedback on the First Step Inventory; those results are still inconclusive. (A compromise was reached when we agreed to put the three pages in the Meeting Guide and make them available via the Loose Literature List.) What really got my attention was concerning the decision on whether to raise the price of the SA manual from seven to ten dollars, as suggested in St. Louis. Only a handful of groups/individuals have responded; the results do not represent a true national group conscience. A better procedure is needed.
In my talk at Bozeman I cautioned against the If-some’s-good-more’s-better temptation, suggesting the “least possible organization” approach.
What encourages me is the way the fellowship is becoming responsible concerning Seventh Tradition self-support and Twelfth Step world services. At the St. Louis convention I asked Terry M. to analyze this need and present it to the fellowship, and he did that. The result was a committee that advised him of suggestions, which were then passed on to the fellowship. The procedure of passing a second basket at meetings exclusively for our world service Twelfth Step work (Central Office) is beginning to have an impact! Groups seem to be taking to it naturally. It was this demonstration of responsibility that encouraged me to share more responsibility with the fellowship, now specifically in the matter of the Central Office and finding a better national group conscience procedure.
As I said in Bozeman, we are now proceeding at a more measured pace in these matters, as need and leadership arise from within.
At the First National Conference on Sexual Compulsivity/Addiction held in Minneapolis last May, in which I participated, a few of us SA members were able to reopen dialogue with Sex Addicts Anonymous. I am pursuing this, and as I mentioned in Bozeman, will report again at our December convention in Los Angeles. At that time I also plan to have ready another look at our national policy on our relations with the media and publicity. I’ll see to it that a copy of my letter to the committee is included with this Essay. I urge you all to read it.
