Fifteen months ago I volunteered to serve as Chair of Denver’s Intergroup. I didn’t particularly want to do it. I’m not very good at schedules, and it meant showing up at a specific time and place once a month for two years. Nobody else was stepping up, however, so I decided to give it my best shot. So far I’ve missed two meetings.
The Detroit Area Intergroup has been grappling with how to handle youth (i.e., children and teens under legal age) who wish to attend SA meetings. We’ve been discussing this ever since one of our local meetings sent away two girls last year.
I’m Jerry L., Chair of SA’s Translations Committee (a subcommittee of SA’s Literature Committee). Our committee handles requests for permission to translate Sexaholics Anonymous and other SA literature from English into other languages.
I had never thought of myself as unstable, nor ever noticed anything particularly erratic about myself until about three weeks after I got sober. My first several meetings were somewhat numb experiences.
As is often the case, I was desperate when I crept in to my first SA meeting at the end of December in 2007. I was desperate for so much then: sobriety, recovery, a hug from my daughter, a night without tears, a glimmer of hope from my wife. Desperation became my buzzword.
On occasion, I like to tell this story to newcomers who want to treat me as if my 40 years of sobriety and gray hair give me some great wisdom: I bought an old house and moved in without doing any repairs.
Accepting God’s will for my life, when it conflicts with my own desires, is a difficult part of recovery for me. One of the things that helps me do this, however, is to remember that I’m incapable of properly running my own life. When I was in charge, things got messed up badly—and not just because of my addiction.
I wanted it: a beautiful leather reclining chair and ottoman. Ads claim it as the most comfortable chair in the world. I’d tend to agree because a friend I was visiting offered me the use of his chair when I contracted a cold at his house.
One morning this past winter, during a depression, I was meditating downstairs in my bedroom while my wife was eating breakfast upstairs in the kitchen. She sneezed, and my initial reaction was annoyance (not the most spiritual reaction, but human enough).
Recently, when our SA regional representative joined one of my regular face-to-face meetings, I shared how important my morning sobriety renewal phone meeting calls have been for my recovery.
