Thanks to everyone who attended the “Welcome Home” convention in Akron the weekend of July 11-13, 2008. A total of 636 people attended the convention; 434 SA members and 202 S-Anons. Twenty-one people received scholarships.
Although I’ve been a member of SA since January 2000, my sobriety date is January 1, 2007. At times, I’ve felt extremely frustrated with my lack of continuous SA sobriety—especially when compared with my 23 years of sobriety in AA.
What it was like. I enjoyed my first convention in the place where it all started. My cell phone’s background screen now has a picture of the gatehouse where Dr. Bob and Bill W. first met. When I open my phone, I say a prayer of thanks to God for the Twelve Steps.
God led me to a place I hadn’t been before, to be with men I didn’t know. Why? To allow me to build on my experience, strength, and hope in recovery from sexual addiction. He took me to the Big Bear men’s retreat this past spring.
Yesterday marked two years of sobriety for me. Prior to my sobriety date of May 24, 2006, I can’t remember having gone two days without acting out in the previous 30 years. For my sobriety and so much more, I am forever grateful to the program and to the fellowship of SA.
Dear Fellow SA Members: I look forward to seeing many of you at the Convention July 11-13 in Akron, and I hope that you will attend the SA business meeting (“SA Today”), which will be held during the convention.
My Lord, I thank you for again providing us the opportunity to come together, to share, to help and be helped.
I’m just an ordinary person, but special in the eyes of God. I’ve been involved with SA since 1993. It took me six years to be able to maintain any sort of sobriety. Until then I had not surrendered my “right to lust.”
Often when I’m in an SA meeting, I’m not really listening to the words of the readings. I’ve probably heard the words “Many of us felt inadequate, unworthy, alone, and afraid . . .” (SA 203, “The Problem”) a thousand times. But one day, the meaning of these words really hit me:
About five years ago, my sponsor in another fellowship talked with me about Step Eleven. This was before I found SA, and I was busy imposing my self-will on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was the epitome of “half measures availed us nothing”—nothing except for maybe a check mark on Steps One through Ten, indicating I had completed them.
