This celebration of service reminds us to be grateful to the sponsors who help us find new life as we recover from the storm of alcoholism
Tonight as we shared about being of service, I was reminded of a story I heard several years ago. On the morning after a severe thunderstorm, thousands of starfish had been stranded on a narrow beach by twenty-foot tall waves and high tides. There among them, a five-year old boy ran frantically back-and-forth along the beach picking up starfish and returning them to the ocean. When an adult bystander criticized the boy for his futile attempts, asking what difference it would make to the millions of starfish he couldn’t possibly help, the boy responded: “It makes a difference to the ones I do help.”
Let’s celebrate that you and I are the ones who have been helped! We are the few souls who have been touched by grace and reunited with sanity through the compassionate guidance of sponsors who cared enough to individually pick us up and introduce us to the road of happy destiny. Indeed, we have been touched by God through the helping hands of other alcoholics. I often share that not even my wife, who has loved and tolerated me for twenty-seven years, which is half our lives together, would be willing to set down and listen to seven hours of the wreckage of my past, like my first sponsor did when we went through my Fifth Step. (Besides, she had a front row seat!)
Today, I am able to practice compassion because I have seen it; two men, whom I call “sponsor,” have clearly shown me what it looks like to care for the newcomer – me – whose life had been compromised by alcohol and the poor choices that resulted. Because of these two men, today, I can transmit something I have got, and I’m pleased to say that I caught it from them. Through their example, they’ve transmitted compassion, empathy, tolerance, patience, and many of the other characteristics associated with restoration to sanity.
If I may shift gears to another analogy, when I stop playing Dorothy long enough to be of service to another suffering alcoholic, I am able to see that I am the one who is often thoughtless, needs courage, and lacks compassion. When we first come to AA to trudge the yellow brick road of happy destiny, we are so enamored with and alternatively disdainful of ourselves, we all think we’re Dorothy. Everybody can’t be Dorothy; some of us have to be scarecrows, tin men, and cowardly lions. By being of service and getting out of ourselves for a while, we begin to see that we are both Dorothy and everyman or everywoman. We alternate between having and lacking thoughtfulness, compassion, and courage. Although we still suffer from the Dorothy complex of me-me-me, we can now relate to the moron, the egomaniac, and the faint-hearted because, on a daily basis, we are a reflection of all the other bozos on this bus.