I know the discouragement and self-doubt of sitting in a meeting room by myself over and over again and waiting for someone to come. Then when they came, I spent years being discouraged at the people who didn’t stay. In our early days in Bozeman, one other member who had often been the only other person in the meeting, said, “Why aren’t people staying?” I was finally able to laugh and ask him back, “Why would a person be crazy enough to walk into a meeting with us two lunatics and want what we have?” It takes time to have enough to offer people to stay.

The slowest and hardest lesson to learn is surrender. We don’t do the work. God does the work. And God does the work as quickly as we let him. Bill W. of AA, in the first three months after his spiritual experience, said to his wife, Lois, that the program wasn’t working. She said to him, “On the contrary, Bill, it is working. This is the first time you’ve been sober for 90 days.”

On an oldtimer tape I have, a guy said that in his first four years from 1935 to 1939, when the Big Book came out, there were only three people with over a year’s sobriety in New York — the guy speaking, Bill W., and Hank P., who left AA after the book came out. Imagine Bill’s agony of working for four years with drunks and having so little external to show for it. But Bill stayed sober. And his pain certainly must have been a big help in inspiring him as he was writing the book.

On the other end of the New York-Akron axis, Dr. Bob was able to get a group started and was a part of keeping it going as long as he lived. It spun off the Cleveland group and there were 5,000 who went through the hospital helped by Dr. Bob and Sister Ignatia. Do you think Bill was able to avoid a lot of soul-searching about that one? But Bill kept on.

I’ve worked with hundreds of people. Only a few of them are sober. But in the last five years most of the people I’ve worked with closely are sober. I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that I have to keep reaching out so I can stay sober today.