Tom I. from Southern Pines, NC – “Steps 10, 11, & 12” – Stateline Retreat – Primm, NV – 12/11/2005

Morning, folks. Tom, an alcoholic.

Delighted to see you. I’m a member of the Primary Purpose Group of AA in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and I am delighted to be here. Well, I won’t go into it. I’ll tell you one thing, it’ll test your spiritual program, be doing a meeting in Whiskey Pete’s, by golly. I look like Whiskey Pete kicked in on me this morning.

I see my reputation got ahead of me a little bit. I was a bad drinker. This is Tom Smallwood’s book. Nobody here could lift it but Calvin—heavy-duty thing. Other than just thanking you for a great conference—it’s been just a super, super deal—I want to give you a little bit of a clue about how I want to take off this today.

I really do want to thank you guys for this. I think it genuinely is, like my buddy said, a unique conference. I’ve been to a ton of them, but this is the only one I’ve seen that was built entirely around the Steps. And another thing that was unique about it: the youngest speaker was 30 years sober. Man, this was a geriatric display. And what assembled was some of the best, who did some of their very best. That’s just outstanding, outstanding work, and I was just honored to be in the middle of that.

I came down—reason I’m huffing, not huffing in the usual sense, but the reason I’m a little out of breath is I got all the way to the door and realized I did have my notes. What I had was my bill from the Rio in Las Vegas. What happens at the Rio in Las Vegas stays at the Rio in Las Vegas. I had to go back and climb 10 floors of stairs. That’s a lie. Wore me out riding the elevator.

I want to express appreciation to the folks here. I know Bob and I were riding by this place one day, and he was on—I couldn’t imagine him being on—the cell phone. We were thinking about starting a special project to give him a cell phone implant so he would pick it up. And he was on the phone with this facility, talking about this conference, and now we’re here in fruition. So I appreciate that great work from not only Bob and the Las Vegas crowd, but Palmdale, L.A., a bunch of folks around that germinated this idea and then supported it big time. So it’s just great to see this and great to be here for the fruition.

Let me tell you what I want to do. One of the few advantages of being old is you get to meet some of the old historic figures in AA. One of them was Sam Shoemaker. Sam Shoemaker was a wonderful friend. He was a minister of some stripe and a great friend of AA, and he described our fellowship as “shirt-sleeve Christianity” or “shirt-sleeve spirituality.” It was a good, apt description that he observed.

Today, I think I’ve got about two jobs here. This has been a high-energy, high-level, very, very skillful, beautifully presented program, and you couldn’t help getting pumped up pretty high with this caliber of stuff. My job is to get it dumbed down a little. Some of y’all will be on I‑5 before long, and I’ve got to get you prepared to go back out there in that world and be ready to practice road rage and all that kind of stuff. You leave here too blissfully supreme and you may get knocked out. So anyway, I want to get you prepared.

I want to approach this in a way that Sam Shoemaker called “shirt-sleeve spirituality.” I think these last three Steps—I want to approach them as sort of the spiritual life in combat boots. I don’t want to get into the poetic very much, and not get into a lot of ritual worship or anything like that. I want to take a look at those Steps, not only because I like to do it that way, but because I think it’s somewhat the message of those last three Steps.

I’ll tell you one of the things so we can just kind of relax and enjoy. I’m going to quit—I probably won’t be finished—but I’m going to quit at 11 o’clock. I was going to say “or two hours, whichever comes first,” but let me be comfortable, so I’ll either quit when I finish or no later than 11 o’clock. So we can just kind of relax and enjoy.

What I want to do is just kind of visit with these three Steps in the style of action, in the style of putting this program to work as a way of life. In 10, 11, and 12, I think we start talking about a word we rarely talk about around here: a word called “leadership.” Leadership is not a dirty word, it’s not an inappropriate word. It’s an extremely important, valid word to describe some of the responsibilities that we have in AA if we’re going to be responsible members. Leadership is a very important aspect of service. You see it in a lot of faces: sponsorship is leadership; taking on the responsibilities to put this idea into fruition and make it come into a great conference—that’s leadership. And without it, nothing happens. So I want to visit in that area and talk about leadership as it comes out of those Steps.

To kind of lead into that, just think a minute about the Promises. I won’t read them, but those Promises are kind of an interesting piece of our book. They describe what sounds like almost an idyllic existence. You know that if we do these actions, some things will happen that are beyond belief to a first-time observer. And what it says at the end of those is that these things happen and we will be amazed. Right at the beginning it says we’ll be amazed before we’re halfway through. We don’t have to finish the amends process to start realizing the Promises in our life—we’ll be amazed before we’re halfway through. It lists a whole range of things that defy imagination, and those things are really true.

Right after that—I’m not going to read a whole lot to you, because I memorized the whole book. I do lie a little. But I’ll just read this little part: there’s not a whole lot of reading to do with Step 10, but I’ll read the introduction into 10 and a little bit that catches the flavor I want to get at.

We’re through with those Promises and it says these things are going to happen, they’re being fulfilled all the time, and they’ll materialize if we work for them. And then it says: “This thought brings us to Step 10, which suggests we continue to take personal inventory and continue to set right any new mistakes as we go along. We vigorously commence this way of living as we have cleaned up the past. We have entered the world of the Spirit.”

Now listen close to this part: we’ve entered the world of the Spirit. We’ve just gotten through with this fundamental surrender and hope in the first three Steps. We’ve looked at understanding what alcohol is about, how desperate the condition is. We’ve opened up to another human. We’ve made that tremendous decision in Six and Seven for new life. In Eight and Nine, we’ve gone back and started to repair some of the damage. And so now we move into a different dimension.

It says we continue to take personal inventory; we vigorously set right mistakes; we commence this way of living as we’ve cleaned up the past. But now we have entered the world of the Spirit. The next sentence is a real good one for me: “Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness.” It’s not an overnight matter. It should continue for our lifetime.

We continue to watch for selfishness, dishonesty, resentment, and fear. When these crop up, we ask God at once to remove them. Then listen to the action: we discuss them with someone, and make amends quickly if we’ve harmed someone. We don’t go into Freudian analysis or deep think-tank stuff. We don’t labor over it. We get restored to life. We don’t transcend life, we get restored to life. And it has its bumps and things, and so when we get into some screwball thing, we take care of it quickly before it turns into the resentment that Sandy was talking about so well the other night.

We deal with that very quickly, and then we resolutely turn our thoughts to someone we can help. Love and tolerance of others is our code. I think that’s the tone of these Steps: certainly we grow, but we don’t spend the rest of our lives staring at our navel in inventory. What we do is get on with the business of living. As we live, we’ve got corrective measures available to us, but we don’t waste a lot of time on that. What we do is immediately turn our attention to how we can be of help to others. That’s the theme of a lot of Step 10 to me—it gears us up for action.

Let me talk a little bit about that thing “grow in understanding and effectiveness.” That can sound like a throwaway cliché kind of thing, but I think there’s a heavy message in that. Now that I’ve gotten through dealing with this self-centered condition, I now shift my focus to a strange expression of selfishness—this is the weirdest selfishness in the world. It’s about 10% “gimme” and about 90% “give.” If we don’t learn that elusive secret, we miss the whole deal, because we learn that it’s in helping others that we strengthen and gain our greatest rewards.

So now we look to understanding and effectiveness. What does that mean? I want to give you some examples of what I wrote early this morning in understanding and effectiveness, looking at the terrain that we’re in. I want to visit a few of these things—not to react in alarm or dismay or chagrin or any of that, but just to develop understanding of the problems I observe. As I get through with the critical care time, it’s time to start taking a responsible place as well. I want to have some understanding. It’s not enough to have alarm or concern. I want to be able to understand things I see.

A couple of examples. Some of you probably read it—a Conference report came out maybe three or four years ago, something like that. I was in an Area office at the time, and for the first time in my history in AA, which goes back almost 49 years, every number that we track in this fellowship was down. Every number we track—numbers of groups, numbers of members, literature sales, Grapevine—everything that we count was down. Well, that’s kind of a startling thing to hear when you’ve never heard anything but “up.” But now we observe that things are going down.

Last year I was up in Chicago; Sandy and I were doing a workshop and we had a panel. The panel was made up of a Class A trustee (non‑alcoholic), a trustee-at-large, and two delegates. They were a very well-informed group. I don’t normally go to the mic unless I’m invited—I’ve stayed up enough—but it was too good an opportunity. So I stood up and said, “I’d like to ask a question: how are we doing?” I cited what I just told you and said, “How about telling me how we’re doing now? Are we better, worse, or the same?”

The non‑alcoholic trustee almost ran to the mic; he was anxious to talk about that. What he shared—I wish I could tell you it was good news—but he’s an extremely well‑informed man. He said, “I wish I could tell you it’s up, but every number is down further, or the same.” In the real world, folks, you’d call that a recession. There’d be a lot of alarm about that. But it tends to be sort of unnoticed here. Those are things of understanding. You’ve got to have the information to have some understanding. That’s a big concern.

So what do you do about that? I don’t think you have to start having revival meetings, anything like that. But having some understanding and knowing the problem generally creates some willingness to try to do something about it. Important thing to know: the numbers are down, first time in history, and they’re not getting better as far as I can tell. I’m concerned about that. I hope you’re concerned about that.

I could go on with many other examples of what that reflects in our relationship with the world around us. You could find a lot of other things to be concerned about. But in understanding and then in effectiveness: what is it that we do?

I was involved in a Conference that did a panel on effectiveness. It was the first panel in the memory of any person at that Conference that they’d ever been to in AA that was about effectiveness. We don’t tend to deal with that a lot. We tend to be people who treat something—if we do it once, it becomes a sacred tradition and we do it forever. Doesn’t make a difference whether it works or not. We just keep on doing it, routinize everything. That’s the way we are.

I’ll give you an example. A while back, I was asked to do an anniversary meeting in a place at Princeton University, very enlightened, sophisticated place—home of Princeton University, a really outstanding community. The anniversary was for a group formed for the express purpose of dealing with people who had been mandated into AA. Their motivation was that these folks tended to get shuffled around rather than getting a meaningful welcome. So they formed this group to provide a special environment to welcome them in—good intent.

So I’m chatting with the two founders of the group before the meeting. I said, “Tell me how it’s going.” One of them said, “Oh yeah, going great, man. We’ve got people all the time. We’ve got folks here every week. Going good.” The other fellow said, “Wait a minute. What do you mean by that?” I said, “I mean, how’s it going in terms of: do you see people that you work with in this group moving on into recovery?” The two guys looked at each other—sort of blank stares—and said, “Do you know anybody?” “No, I don’t either.”

Now, come on, guys. Give me a break. Eleven years in a far above-average community—I don’t care what you’re selling, if you don’t make a sale in 11 years, you better take a look. Something’s bad wrong. Good effort isn’t enough. It presents the question: is what I do effective leadership? I think that’s the message of this Step—when I start thinking of others, rather than just reacting in dismay and discouragement, it’s important to take a look at whether it can be done better.

That example troubled me enough—not just that one, but generally—that in my little community we decided to tackle it. We have indeed eliminated mandated paper‑signing meetings in our community and replaced them with a better deal. So concern, understanding, and then effectiveness. That’s just one example of being alert to the quality of work we’re doing, because we don’t want to waste your time. God, nobody does.

Now, the revolving door. Probably not a person in this room doesn’t have some active concern about the revolving door. We have huge numbers of people come to AA, and it looks like about an equal number leaving—or maybe more, because our numbers are down. I’ve been concerned for many years about this whole business of the revolving door. I think very few people come to AA prematurely. I think most people come here at the court of last resort. To demonize the guy who walks in—“Well, he wasn’t ready,” or “He didn’t want it”—that’s not a good enough answer for me.

I’ve got to take a look at the quality of what I’m doing. How well do I accommodate that person in AA and give them a solid introduction to what this program is about? That’s what I have to do if I want to improve in understanding and effectiveness. I looked at that for a long time. I started doing a thing—I’m not going to tell you my bad stuff, but I’ve got a lot of goofs I could regale you with—but I’m going to talk about the W column instead of the other one.

What do you do about a thing like that? I started looking around for things I thought might work, and I stumbled into a thing called Big Book workshops. Some of us are aficionados of that activity. What I saw in that was an element of realism and real connection that went a step beyond just the average meeting. So I just decided to do one. I didn’t know how, never been to one, but what the heck—“You got a book, what more do you need?” So I said, “Shoot, I’m gonna do it.” Got a buddy on the phone, we talked about it, and we did one.

The first one we did was going exhaustively through every line in the book. It wore you flat out, I’m telling you. The last long-term one I did took 18 months. God knows, I thought I was going to get a watch or something when we got through. It was a long time. I know we have incredible attention spans, but that’s stretching it. It was too labor‑intensive, taking too much time. If you’ve got a lot of things you want to get done, you can’t just tie down to one thing and make it a career.

I just finished one last week, as a matter of fact, that we did in 14 weeks. I love the format. But my question is—and time will tell—does it have equal effectiveness? Expediting the process is not satisfactory if it’s not effective.

It was enormously effective. I’ll tell you how effective it was, and I’m nervous every time I say this, but I say it because it’s God’s truth: not a single person who has gone through that entire process has ever drunk again. I’ve been doing them for several years. Not a single one. I don’t think it’s a magic bullet. I don’t think there’s anything radically new about it. I really believe that when I intensively practice these principles as a way of life, there is no room for failure—no room for failure.

That’s one thing of effectiveness, among many: newcomer meetings that can do an effective job of taking new people and helping them understand what this activity is about.

Now, singleness of purpose. My buddy last night did a wonderful, well-articulated presentation on singleness of purpose. I just want to underline that a little bit, because it is a huge problem, and it’s something I want to have better understanding about than I do. I’m not up for grabs on it; I’ve got a very strong position that I hold today, and it won’t change easily. At the same time, I’m not blind. My God, I can see what’s happening, and my concern is that we’re not dealing with it very well, generally speaking.

I have the great privilege of traveling all over the place, and almost everywhere I go, high on the agenda of things we worry about is singleness of purpose. There are large areas of this country that have given up any pretense of singleness of purpose—they don’t even use the words. I believe that’s fraught with a lot of peril. My buddy spelled it out darn well. Let me say it a little differently, but it’s the same thing.

When I look at singleness of purpose and why I’m alarmed, it doesn’t have to do with my personal preferences for who I hang out with—God, I could care less. It has to do with the integrity and vitality of our program. What happened in Akron, Ohio, when Bill and Bob met, was this: here was a decrepit stockbroker and a rundown doc, both on their last legs. The stockbroker had found a vision he didn’t understand very well, but he fervently believed in it and developed an intense thing about the solution he’d found. So he got this doc, and they sat down and talked, and among the things Dr. Bob said was, “Finally, somebody understands.”

What formed that day was the basic tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s the basic tenet of what we’re doing here this morning. That’s the basic tenet of the International Convention. We never do anything more important or more noble than one alcoholic opening up and sharing with another. What was formed that day was an ethic, a belief that when one alcoholic talks to another alcoholic at gut level, something happens that had never effectively happened in the history of the world. It has a unique value.

What it comes down to, folks, and why I stand as firmly as I do where I stand, is this: I believe that tenet. And that tenet is either right or it’s wrong. It either matters greatly or not at all.

If it’s right, then every one of us sitting here today, if you’re an AA member, has an absolute responsibility to defend that tenet for the next person who walks into this room looking for the trustworthy environment of Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s our responsibility. None of us has the authority—we may have the recklessness—but none of us has the authority to reshape a program of which we’re just one member. I guarantee you I’m not going to be the one who says, “Well, that doesn’t really matter. It’ll be all right. You’re close enough. Just lie about it for a while; maybe you’ll catch it.” That’s not good enough for me.

If that tenet is not true, then it doesn’t matter. It couldn’t matter less; that fat lady with ice cream is just as welcome as could be in closed meetings. That either is true or it’s not. What I’d like to ask everybody here to do is not just decide what you think at the pop-quiz level, but search your own conscience about that. Do you really believe that tenet is vital to the health and well‑being and effectiveness of AA? If you do, you’ll probably take some action. I’m not talking about being nasty to people; I’m talking about having a real purpose that that principle serves. It doesn’t determine what we’re against; it determines what we must support and maintain.

It is my accepted duty to be sure that the next person who walks in this room gets as good as I was given. That’s my duty. If I don’t do that, I’m abdicating responsibility. When you start looking for understanding and effectiveness, there are lots of places to look. That’s just a couple of them.

In order to accommodate folks who are not quite alcoholic, in order to accommodate folks in AA, we have to compromise the program. We have to compromise the integrity of the program. I submit to you that you can’t compromise the integrity of the program to fit the individual peculiarities of the people walking in the door. If you do, we lose our purpose. What needed to change when I walked in these doors was me—not the group.

So that kind of issue is deeply embedded in that simple‑sounding little thing. I hope you’ll give serious, serious thought to that and do whatever you can in that area, because it really is going to matter.

You mentioned a group in New York. I don’t know how many places I go in this country where I look for some of my old buddies who have deserted the home base of Alcoholics Anonymous in the city. To me that’s almost holy ground—the place where the thing started—and it seems like it ought to have a pivotal role in how AA grew around it. In many places, old‑timers have simply walked away. They didn’t just die off; they walked away, moved to the suburbs, whatever. Conditions became so inappropriate and uncomfortable that they just left. That’s what I mean by abdicating.

Now it looks like I’m going to take two hours on just one paragraph, but that’s why I told you we’ll quit anyway, whether we get through or not. I’d rather do one thing thoroughly than see Europe in 21 days.

The other thing I’d draw your attention to—and you probably already have your attention there, but I’d like to wrestle it anyway—is the strange developmental process in AA that’s been occurring. Another advantage of being old is you can remember the changes that have occurred in the fellowship, in the character of the fellowship. In those early days, our time was spent not studying books and learning all the infinitives that go with the First Step. It wasn’t that. It was action—intensive work with other alcoholics. The program was a program of action. The intimacy, the fellowship, the sense of belonging was profoundly important.

Over the years, we have moved in a different direction. You can certainly tie it into the advent of treatment, because treatment had a lot of effects on AA. Some looked good: for instance, if you’re concerned about support of our expenses, at one point a good share came from the treatment industry. We went for, what, 25 years before we ever sold a million Big Books. Then for a number of years, we sold almost a million a year. But guess who bought them? The treatment centers—you’ve heard of the $30,000 Big Book. So there was a tremendous influx. There was a stimulation in the increase of meetings that grew out of that, a lot of impact on language, on terminology, on how we see ourselves in groups. A lot of things happened.

One that causes me concern—not just owing to treatment, but certainly with it as a major contributor—is that we started to move away from well‑ordered, purposeful, structured groups into casual gatherings or meetings, which are not really groups at all. There’s no pass‑fail; it’s a continuum. On one end, I belong to a strong, purposeful group. I know some of you do. Many of you belong to strong, purposeful groups. That’s where I belong; that’s my group.

That kind of group is where I want to belong, but it’s no better than any other down the continuum. They all function under the banner of AA, and just because something doesn’t conform to our model doesn’t mean it’s not just as legitimate as my home group. We’ve got the most generous qualification for membership you could possibly have: if you say you’re a member, you’re a member. No committee, no résumé, no Rorschach test. If you say you’re in, you’re in. You stay until you either quit or drink, whichever comes first—you’re history either way.

Groups are just as easy: any time two or more alcoholics join together for the purpose of recovery, they can call themselves an AA group, as long as they’re not hooked into something else. Is that loose or what? If we wanted to form a group at Whiskey Pete’s whose purpose was to provide a counterculture for people who didn’t like structure or service work in AA, they could legitimately call themselves an AA group, and nobody is going to shut them down. So it’s not pass‑fail; it’s a matter of where we lose the vitality, or whether we lose it. Where do we lose the things that are important?

Among the few concerns I have in AA, my greatest one is what I’m talking about right now, because that’s the infrastructure of the program—that’s where members are born and grow and develop. If you look along that continuum down to the end where it’s a casual gathering with no leadership, no structural leadership whatsoever, the meeting just occurs. It happens when the people walk in and its value extends for the life of that meeting, and then it’s over and that’s all there is. I submit to you that to deal with the formidable problems we confront in dealing with alcoholics, that ain’t enough.

If you start looking at a fellowship that reaches around the world, where does leadership come from? How much leadership are you going to get out of that kind of gathering? What you’ll find most of the time is a one‑dimensional program: it has to do with me and “How am I doing?” It’s pretty hard to treat a self‑centered condition by focusing on self. I don’t think that flies too well. That’s my biggest concern. I think that bodes most ill for the future, and it’s one of the concerns I hope you’ll give some thought to, because those things resolve when the conscience of the fellowship moves effectively. That’s why I like to talk about this kind of thing—because I think it’s vital to our health and well‑being.

My home group: one night a guy came up to me and said, “Tom, we need to do a group inventory.” That’s an unusual request—very few people ask for a group inventory. I said, “Why is that?” He said, “Well, we’ve got too many addicts in here.” I swear to God, I’m kind of addlepated sometimes; I hadn’t quite caught on what he was talking about. I said, “Let me take a look, see if I see the same thing.” What it was: somebody was loading up a bunch of kids from an adolescent center and bringing them over. Most of our wounds are self‑imposed, not inflicted on us.

These kids were coming over; they didn’t know if they were alcoholics or goats. They were just kids—crazy kids. Our guys, in their zeal to make them feel welcome, were involving them in the meeting. You’d have a 14‑year‑old child, not an alcoholic at all, conducting a meeting. AA meetings are run by AA members, that’s a given. It wasn’t always a given, but it’s a truism now: meetings are run by members. That’s what we’re doing.

So we said, “All right, let’s talk about it.” Pulled a little group together, talked about it. We decided two actions. One, we’d go over and talk to the director of the house. They asked me to do that, and I did. Nice lady, MSW, couldn’t have been more cooperative. Nobody had ever told her we had such things as open and closed meetings—they don’t teach that in social work school. We just pompously assume everybody knows. Well, everybody doesn’t know. The minute I told her about it, she said, “Oh my God, yes, I didn’t know about that. There’s no problem; we’ll deal with that.”

But that’s not good enough, because when you’re running a place with a bunch of wild ones running around, you’re not going to put a lot of order and discipline in that. So we started something—25 years ago. We set up a newcomer program that met at the same time as our regular meeting and dealt with newcomer stuff, limited to the first three months of sobriety. We made it an open meeting. What that gave us was an environment in which we could, without a lot of caustic interaction, reasonably help those young folks figure out where they needed to go. And by the way, we took in a lot of members in the process—it wasn’t just for wayward folk.

When people are coming out of treatment facilities, a lot of times we overrate the quality of the preparation. What treatment does is lower the barriers enough that somebody can come to AA; it gives not one day of recovery in the world. When somebody walks in out of a treatment center, I don’t care which one it is, they’re a brand‑new member of AA and need the same kind of orientation and guidance that a brand‑new person does. For the past 25 years, I haven’t been in a group that didn’t have a strong newcomer program. It invariably is one of the most important tools we have. It’s simply a way to look at a problem, understand it enough, and do something effective about it. That’s what I like: being in a world where we’re making things work, not just criticizing what exists.

The whole message of that—we’re through half a page of Step 10—I just want you to get lost in that. I’m going to sprint to the finish of that and move over to Step 11 a little bit. The other thing I’ll visit for a minute: in that second part of the Tenth Step reading, it’s almost like a mixed message. When you read through it, if you’re a super optimist like me, you can jump to conclusions that are dangerous to your health.

It talks about the new attitude that comes when we start getting focused and into the program, start getting recovery. We’ll see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part—of course discounting the first nine Steps, which might have a little to do with it. It just comes; it just descends from manna. That’s the miracle of it. We’re not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we have been placed in a position of neutrality—safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. That sucker is gone. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor afraid. That is our experience.

That’s some really whoopee kind of news, isn’t it? That dude’s gone, like a lobotomy; we got a whole new head there. But read the bottom line: “That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.” The minute I’m not in fit spiritual condition, all bets are off.

It’s easy to let up on the spiritual program of action and rest on our laurels. What’s a laurel? An accomplishment. I could say, “My God, I’ve been doing this almost 49 years. I ought to just quit and let somebody else do it.” Well, I don’t give up that easy. At my group one night, I’d been on the road a while, and when I came in, I just did stuff. I grabbed the coffee pot; I felt like washing the coffee pot. Young girl came up and said, “Why are you washing that pot?” I said, “My God, girl, that thing was dirty.” She said, “Well, that’s my job.” I said, “You’re going to have to get a little quicker on your job, because I’m going to get mine.” There’s plenty of room at the doing place, but I’m going to do mine.

I’m not going to let up on that spiritual condition or the expressions of it in my life. It is easy to let up. We’re headed for trouble if we do; alcohol is a subtle foe. We’re not cured of alcoholism. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. Every day is the day we must