Tonight, the man chairing the discussion meeting at my home group picked what I initially thought was a rather obscure topic: Routine. I have been sitting in A.A. meetings for a long time, and I honestly can’t remember routine coming up very often as the actual topic of a meeting. We talk about resentment. Fear. …

“Turn it over.” “Acceptance is the answer.” “More will be revealed.” “Just do the next right thing.” “Let go and let God.” Spend enough time around Alcoholics Anonymous and you will hear these phrases hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. And here’s the uncomfortable part: Most of them are true. That’s precisely why we need to be careful …

I was sitting in my home group last night when a woman with solid sobriety said something that stopped me. We were talking about the warning on page 85 of the Big Book: “It is easy to let up on the spiritual program of action and rest on our laurels.” She said, essentially, “It’s not …

Where does responsibility end? What belongs to them, and what belongs to me? The phone rings. Or a text arrives. Or the silence finally makes sense. Someone you sponsor has been drinking. Before you can even respond, your internal questions begin. Did I miss something? Was I too demanding? Too available? Not available enough? Should …

“Healing may give you a new life, but it’s gonna cost you your old one. Are you ready?” There’s a catch to recovery that nobody really wants to talk about. We want the new life. We’re just not always sure we want to give up the old one. We want peace without surrendering control. We want freedom …

I was in a Big Book study tonight when someone asked a question I had never thought to ask. We were reading “The Family Afterward,” and we came to this sentence: “Those of us who have spent much time in the world of spiritual make-believe have eventually seen the childishness of it.” One of the members …

Last night I was listening to Corey D. from Owensboro, KY, speak at a meeting at our Area Convention when he used a word that caught my attention: Sponsorable. Then, a little later, he pulled out an old A.A. saying I hadn’t heard in a long time: “If you wanna drink, that’s your business. If …

Last night, my sponsor and sponsor brothers gathered to read Bill Wilson’s “AA Tomorrow,” written for AA’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1960. What struck me was how little distance there seemed to be between Bill’s questions then and our conversation now. We were talking about our lives: our families, fears, relationships, responsibilities, and the temptation to …

AA teaches us how to live without drinking. It doesn’t prevent our hearts from breaking. This has been a hard year. In December 2016, I left NYC after living there for 14 years and moved back home to Texas to be here for my aging parents. They didn’t physically need me at that point and …

There. I said it. Meetings are NOT the solution. I realize that may sound like a strange thing to say in Alcoholics Anonymous. After all, I go to meetings. I love meetings. I have a home group. Some of the most important moments of my recovery have happened in AA meetings. I have heard things …