The second annual Fellowship Of The Spirit convention in Cuyahoga Falls, OH

He's going to share his experience, strengthen hope on sponsorship and the importance of Home group. With that, I'll give you Mike.

Hi everybody, I'm Michael and alcoholic

if you guys wouldn't mind praise for any prayer with me. Appreciate it

God.

So we decided things I cannot change regards to change the things I can

do I you know what a great this weekend has just been been amazing. We had a

get together last night and I talked to with a couple of fellows and it was like a family reunion. There was children running around and people playing cornhole and kids swimming and folks talking about, you know, times past and so forth. It literally felt like a family family reunion. They give me, they wouldn't tell me the topic. I tried to get out of doing this and my Home group unanimously voted against me for this. So I, I didn't think we had time and schedule do it. And then they wouldn't tell me my topic and I said, well, the other folks have

for a while, why can't I have mine? They they waited till this Tuesday to give my topic. So I'm pretty nervous following Gary. I listen to Gary on online quite a bit and they're like Jack and all these guys are my heroes and they hear the stories between Gary and GAIL and talk about the old timers and the history and the concerns that they have.

That's still like a little little part of I suppose I feel like a little part of a big hole.

I guess that's good. My experience just trying to keep it brief and run on time here. My experience and sponsorship any points of a Home group. I, I, I guess I got the same story as a lot of folks where I came into I I got sober in abandoned basement. I begged God to help me and immediately something, something happened inside of me. A change. I was, I didn't mean to come to Alcohol Anonymous, but this is this is where I ended up and I got a sponsor immediately and the and

ship and not the not the bad mouth, but I, you know, you're on step one and just think about that for a while and things like that. And I did it and it was working for me. But about six months over everything in my life, just I was losing my mind and I knew from experience before that I wasn't going to make it long. So probably about this is a six months over, which isn't a very long time anyway, but about four months over, I was talking to come into a workshop

and I came to a workshop at four months over. And that's where I met Jack and a few other folks. And, and my first impression was this is too much a a they're doing too much.

And

so I came back one more time because I didn't want him not to like me.

And then I just quit and I left. And then two months later, which was about six months, I, I needed help back and I needed to go where there was too much AI need all I can get. Like you heard Gary talk about today, word for word, line for line right out of the big book. And that's what we did. I asked Jack to sponsor me and that's exactly what he did. He took me through the big book,

page for page, line for line, and it changed my life.

It changed my life dramatically.

I start sponsoring pretty soon. I one of the things I remember is I would go out to the treatment center and Jack said

conflict of scheduling. He said, why don't you go back to the treatment center and try to help when you have a little bit more to offer? Wouldn't that be the way to go? I said, yeah, that makes sense. So my just my first party, if you want to call it that, I start sponsoring about four months sober and I would take the bus to meet them. And he was doing real good. And I was sharing my experience with little. It was at the time

and he, you know, he got a job and he's got a car and his license and he was making more money than me. I mean, not that I was sober from a great deal of time anyway, but he wouldn't write a horse step. And I, you know, I knew the importance of it because I had written some inventory by a brief inventory and I did have a major experience with inventory, 5th step and, and making amends small as far as time. But the quality of the sobriety,

my life was changing rapidly

and he wouldn't write a four step. So I tricked him into coming over my house and I locked him in my house and tried to get him. I'm trying to make him do it. He didn't do it anyway. And

that's my experience

and

the, the early, the, the thought behind that is, man, I've been given such a gift that I know if you do this, it'll work for you too. And you want you to. And I'm just so new. I just don't know any better. I got to make you do it somehow. And if you do it, it's going to work. And he still, it doesn't. His name is Ian and

he never made it. He's

a he's in the penitentiary serving pretty good time now, and he just never was able to. I don't know. It's a gift.

Went through the workshop page for page, line for line, learned how we do the things that Gary was talking about. And just like I said, it's real simple. It's right in there. And but it's a foreign language to a lot of the people. And I heard guys on tape say there's a difference between the spirit of the fellowship

in the fellowship of the spirit. The difference is the people who do the work and I have a camaraderie. There's a fact like last night at the at the at the cookout, it was a family. It was a fellowship of the spirit that some of us had never met before, but it was it was a family. Probably the only family reunion experience that I have in my life is certainly

how could you not love somebody

who come to you and ask for help? I think when someone comes to me and asks for maybe I'm just so new at it that I haven't learned enough lessons and I got knocked around enough. But when someone asked me for help, I just feel it is such an honor and I'm so grateful and I get excited for them. My life. I like I said, I got sober, abandoned basement and my life rapidly changed up until this day, up till today.

A lot of guys you know,

can't make them do anything. I learned that within and I beg them and try to get them to do things and you can see things in their life and sometimes they just, they got to learn their self. Next off. I think that's the hardest part for me for sponsoring somebody and and trying to take them through the work and taking them through the book. And on the other hand, I've sat with guys in my living room and read them in the book and watch their eyes brighten up and watch them almost come to life right before me.

Miracle in that is beyond any words that I can articulate. I've been, when I asked Jack's sponsor me, he gave me two things. Are you willing to go through a workshop and are you willing to facilitate a workshop? And I said, I'll do anything that you tell me to do. The desperation here you're talking about, I had it and I went to that workshop and I did, you know, did whatever I was supposed to do and my life changed. So I don't know. I did a few more. I was asked to do a couple other people's workshops and then I started facilitating workshops and

workshop I did was in my living like like they used to do is in my dining room, coffee, cake or whatever leftovers we had, we put them out and that first workshop, no one stayed. They made it to the first that we made it to the 4th step and it was over. No one stayed. And then the room was open at Saint Thomas Hospital and I started doing a workshop there. And

but I learned so much from reading the book to somebody else and answering their questions and trying to look inside of myself for an experience

to the question that they're answering so that I'm just not giving them something out of nowhere.

My life was dramatically changed by then. The second workshop, I think one person it was, it was a woman. She stayed, I think she stayed that she she liked.

I have sponsored a few women that just didn't work out very well because either they like me or I like them. And so I quit doing that. And

my third workshop, I sponsor a whole bunch of guys right now. I sponsor a lot of fellows and my each and every single one of them are individuals.

They got a finger point. It's different from everybody else's. We do have a disease and we're not unique in that way. But how someone receives it, I find for myself could be two different things. Inevitably, I my my suggestion to them would be to be in a workshop and I sponsor so many guys, it's easier for me to get them all together. And what happens as a result of that is they become a brotherhood. They become a tight knit family that I'm get to be a part of. That's powerful and

talk about going to get an ice cream and stuff like that. We do that, but we go fishing or we go hunting or we go out to eat. I mean we do these things that that you hear you heard Gary talking. I heard GAIL talking about last night a brotherhood that when I was on a fishing trip in March, walleye fishing trip and I got a phone call from

from the paramedics in the civic. One of my guys, they had him in the in the end because he had overdosed. He had been secretly sneak using snake drinking and he almost died. And the pain, the hurt, the sorrow that you get from that you love him and you don't want to see no one hurt. We left our fishing trip, we came back home and to be with that guy and he's doing great today, back in the book, doing what he's supposed to do.

I got other guys that, you know, they just come and they just do anything you tell him to do.

I mean every single thing. It's kind of weird when you get a guy like that because

it's almost like something's not right here. And

but even then, even those guys are. I think I actually, it's not that I'm closer to any of them more than the rest, but it's just different in every single way. So my experience with sponsorship is I can't transmit something I don't have and I only know one way. I know the way that I was sponsored. I know from trying to come in the program before and guys taking me through,

you're on step one. If you think, think about it for a week and it and it didn't work.

So how dare I, how dare I tell somebody else to do that because I'm too busy because I got stuff going on. How dare I do that too one of my fellows, I can't do it. So whatever the sacrifices, someone made it for me. So I feel like I am responsible to do that for someone else. My last, the last workshop that I facilitated was about 80 some people that came to it and I had no idea

at all that it was going to be that many people and it scared the crap out of me. I walked into the room and there was just the room was too small for the workshop

and it just. But then my next thought was once we get the 4th step, we'll see how many he was left and, and it's surely thinned out. But what the magic in that? That the power of God, and to see God and other people start from the beginning of the book, start working through steps just like the book talks about, and you get to see them transform into whole other people.

It's a miracle. It's a powerful thing that we've been given. It's a powerful thing, a gift

that the Father do with the works. It's got nothing to do with me. I don't believe that I'm special in no certain way. I believe that I'm blessed to have somebody else have taught me the way that I could teach that, and I'm accountable for that.

I think God bless his sponsorship.

When somebody asked me something that I don't know about, I say a prayer or I call somebody else who doesn't,

uh, just to tie these two things together, value importance of a Home group, which we started a Home group here. It's in that backroom over there on Tuesday nights. You've heard Dusty mention it. We, we heard so little about traditions and concepts and it steps out of the book is a very popular too much either. So we, we do that. Our Home group sponsors work those workshops. Our Home group also sponsors a a a meeting in a home for homeless folks

and with all kind of different disabilities and issues. So we do those. That's all Sunday night in our workshops on Wednesday nights

and our format of our meeting is depending on what month it is like this month would be August, it'd be the 8th month. So we do step 8 tradition 8, concept 8 chairperson choice pertaining to the big book. It's got to be can't bring a topic, it's got to be from the date book. So we are primary purpose in that way. And

when we first started, we ran into some some some learning, growing pains and trials and tribulations, if you want to call it I, I'm the secretary of that meeting.

The reason I am the secretary of that meeting is because our secretary decided to chair another meeting at the same time as that meeting. And we told him that you're the secretary, you need this a commitment, you need to be here. We didn't like it and you got really upset about that. And and that's another thing I see a lot of is the power of

the approval of others

versus principle and the things that we learn here, the things that we get taught by doing the work out of the book. So we lost our secretary and I became the secretary that way. And everyone was just me and Dusty and a few other people who would just come. We were the Home group, Dusty and I, and I remember being at Home group mate Home group meeting with me, Dusty and someone who had just signed the book. And one of the questions was how do we make our meeting grow up? What do we got to do?

We talked about it and we grew conscious it and we had to come up with a couple things. One thing was, well, we can compromise

the integrity of what we know

and strive for the approval of others and everybody and anybody and everybody is going to come here and they're going to be all kind of different frolicking and so forth and so on. But our meeting will be popular. We could do it that way, or we can keep it spiritual and we can just let God do it. So that's what we did. We decided to go with the spiritual. And since then, I think we've got about 15 Home group members. This is probably about in a year's time.

We've got 15 Home group members. The attendance has gone up and you heard GAIL and Harm today talk about your distance concepts. We, our format is to get some, get a speaker to come in and talk about Concept 8 and the difficulty in finding a speaker to come in and share their experience with Concept 8 and bring a topic for that so that we can put it into our practical application for our life. It's difficult.

It's very, very difficult for us as 100 defined speakers.

So we almost, I told someone everything I told you that we had to lower our standard, not we didn't compromise our integrity. We lowered our standard a little bit that if we got a speaker that at least it would do the research necessary to be able to give us the facts about the concept so that we can know it so that we could practice it in our Home group. And that's what we do. We've had folks on our our Home group and come to a Home group meeting and they'll be a topic for a new

reading that we want to add or rebrand into some problems and we cast a vote or this is something that's going on. We discuss it and group conscious speak. So let's vote on it. And I mean, this just recently happened and you guys been sober about four years. And he said, man, I think you guys so much for letting me be a part. I've been sober four years, never got an opportunity to vote in a Home group.

So I was like, I don't understand. I'm not been sober long enough to know any other way. These are the ways that I was taught. So when I hear about some of these other ways, I just

I just don't know. I don't have experience with that. So we try to take the traditions and we try to take what we learn in the concepts. Like one of the things is a a right of decision or the we, but we anoint you or not anoint you. But if we

if you get voted and you get nominated for position, then we trust you with the authority to make decisions. We learn that from a concept speaker.

So today an example of that from our Home group. The Home group was two years old. This is our second conference was we nominated Javier to do the kitchen. So sure, I got ideas and sure he got ideas and everybody got ideas, but we let we gave Javier the authority to make a decision in the kitchen. And as you can see, it worked out perfectly fine. We had dinner. It was like a family in here. We had a family sitting dinner for everybody and it was just,

it just was powerful. The principles and the group conscience. I've not always agreed on everything that we've had in Group conscious in the minority in our Home group always gets to say, so why don't you vote with this? It could be one, we've not yet experienced that one where the whole thing turns over yet, but we have heard our minority and why they didn't vote that way. That's something that's valuable to us because it's the principles that were given to us to do this a certain way so that we don't mess it up.

My alcohol is known. This is very important to me. I, I got sober in the band basement, didn't mean to come to AA and I came here and my life changed. My life changed. I've got my family back.

I see my little girl running around helping today.

That's a miracle given custody of my daughter when I was one year sober and we've been together ever since. So gets coached little girls softball. I'm busy all the time doing stuff, but alcohol had not been for the power of God-given to me through these suggestions and Alcoholics Anonymous. This wouldn't happen to me. So I thought you deeply the principles of these traditions and I want to know more. I want to know more.

The trouble with that is it's not popular

and there's a struggle sometimes I want you to like me, but man, this give me my life back. So what do I got to choose the principles And it's not we've not we've had some struggles and trials even with our own interview as far as doing what we've been doing. But thanks to you know, I get lonely. I can pull up a Gary Brown tape online.

And hear that, you know what I mean? I'll call Jack. I hear these other guys that come from that some way, shape or form that Denver young people and hear those guys talk about

the primary purpose and, you know, these things that don't work for me, that I hear so much in Alcohol Anonymous that I don't understand. But I get to hear them say it and validate it in me and I get to share that with my guys and it makes us family. It's a powerful fellowship of the spirit. I won't keep you guys. Thank you so much, I love you.