The topic of "home group" at the Unity & Service conference in Concord, CA

Thanks everybody. I'm Don Landis. I'm an alcoholic

like to take a moment and thank Kent and Debbie for inviting me to come and participate in the Unity and service conference. This is a big deal and I'm really thank you all for being here and it's been a humbling experience for me so far. Just being able to listen to the talks I've heard and the the people in their love for service and what they've been doing in their lives and how they apply this it. It just makes me feel proud to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and my heart is full and it

thank you so much for that. And I want to thank Claire for taking such good care of me. And you didn't set the record, but you came close to most emails sent for one speak engagement. Thank you for your your devotion to organization. That was very nice And and I

they printed them out. I could do my bathroom and wallpaper. It was amazing.

But I like that. I see that enthusiasm. I go, I like this drunk. It's my kind of drunk. Let's overthink it. Yeah, that's great.

But I like that. I like that

and my new best friend Dominate for picking me up at the airport, which is an incredible spiritual experience. You know, just a couple of drunks and, and we just spent a lot of time together. You know, it picked me up in Oakland, took me to Concord, you know, got me an awesome sandwich. We had lunch together and they took me to the hotel, you know, and said, OK, dude, and he's gone, you know, and so maybe like an hour, hour and 15 minutes, something like that. We hung right and in a short hour and 15 minutes we fixed a A.

It's not easy, but we were focused. We covered a myriad of topics and

little feedback for you. A is going to be fine, but you all need to pick up your game a little bit. Just telling you just need to pick up your game a little bit. So thanks Dominic. That was awesome, man. I really enjoyed it and I have, I've been tasked and blessed with the opportunity to talk about Home group

and what's a Home group? Everybody goes, well, I know what a Home group is. I got one, buddy. I've had one for 30 years. That's great. You know, I think a lot of people and Alcoholics Anonymous don't understand the significant spiritually of having a Home group, of how deep this goes, how open it is, how endless the possibilities to be of service and grow spiritually are by simply being a member of a Home group. And what that represents.

And the first thing I had to understand when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous is what was the difference between a Home group and a meeting? Because they would say that to me. Oh, it's not a Home group to the meeting.

I didn't really get it and I get it today, you know. And our literature in the AA group will tell you the main difference is that what ends at the meeting continues with the Home group. So our 12 step work and a Home group is not held in check by the geography of the meeting location or the duration of the time. Our 12 step work continues past that time and pass the geography of the meeting hall. And that's the main difference that our literature states.

But I think it's so much more than that. I'll give you an analogy. You know, I when I were a much younger man's clothes, I played a lot of basketball and I played basketball seven days a week. And I mean, it was my life, but I also played very high level basketball. I played played in high school, I was all city in Los Angeles and I played in junior college. And before that in junior high, I played in club ball. We traveled all over the country, but I also played a lot of street ball. You go down the local rec center and you just do some guys there. You just pick up sides and you just play basketball.

And to glance at it, if you didn't understand what was really going on,

kind of looks the same. Same ball, same court, same rules, guys kind of doing the same thing. But it's very, very different. Because I'll tell you what, you take a street ball team and you put them against a real organized club team, a team that practices 3 * a week, a team that these guys have been together for years and years and years with one goal and they will slaughter that street team.

It's a completely different animal. And that's what happens in difference between a meeting and a Home group. See a Home group, the spiritual preparation. A Home group has a plan in action for what happens when the new man or new woman walk in the door. A Home group goes to assemblies together. A Home group gets information from their GSRS. It's disseminated and shared among themselves. A Home group talks amongst themselves at coffee and when they're out playing golf. And they're doing the things socially because now they're friends and they have these friendships

that are described in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Is there you will meet lifelong friends and commence your common journey shoulder to shoulder. So when you walk year after year after year, with your heart and your mind to tune to the welfare of others, a plan develops. So when a new man or woman walks into a room, there's no discussion. There's not what do we do? Who's going to talk to that guy? It just happens intuitively

and naturally, and it doesn't happen in meetings.

And I'm not saying meetings are bad. I go to meetings. Meetings have their purpose, but they are not a Home group and they do not serve the function of the Home group.

Many times new men will stumble into my Home group, and my Home group currently is the SOS men's group.

Now we meet on Wednesday night at 7:00 in St. John's J, St. James Church on 14th St. in the Fair Haven district of Bellingham, WA. It's been my Home group for the last 12 years and every now and then we'll get a new guy that stumbles in and he can't believe what happens to him and if he stays there, if he's lucky enough to stay there and we'll do everything in our power to make sure he has a home there. He will share later with us what he was experiencing in Alcoholics Anonymous because he was just going to meetings. He got a directory and he was just picking meetings at random and going into them,

he said. Nobody talked to me

and I was so afraid and I was so unshaky and I didn't know what was going on and I didn't understand the language. And I sat in the back of the room, the meeting would start and people were laughing. They were telling these stories and know what they were talking about. And I stood up and we all held hands and prayed and everybody left and walked right by me like I wasn't even there. And I didn't know what to do or what to say or, and I didn't know this stuff. They're talking about getting a sponsor. And I didn't know what that was.

And I go and I came to this group because I didn't even get in the door. And four guys grabbed me and introduced himself and they got me coffee. And then they walked me around the room and they introduced me to all their friends. They started asking me questions about myself. How long was they sober? Did I have a sponsor? Did I have a big book? Hey, would you come sit with us? Hey, what are you doing after the meeting? We're so glad you're here.

The spiritual politeness, this invitation to a new life can only be offered in a Home group, in my experience, and it saves and changes lives. And we talk about the traditions and the traditions to the group or what the steps are to the individual. And we talk about our first edition. We talk about our unity. Well, what is our unity? Our unity is I can't expect you to do it

if I'm not willing to do it. That's the short form of unity. The next way to look at unity for me is what kind of a a do I want?

What do I want when I walk in my Home group? Do I want to be fired up? Do I want to be filled up on the inside out? Do I want to see those people and go, man, it's so good to see you? Do I want to feel like we're actually standing for something and doing something together? Well, I have to participate in that.

I have to bring that unity as an individual. And that's difficult for me because I'm important

and there's chatter in my head

and I have a big life outside of Alcoholics Anonymous and it's the Mandy. And sometimes I forget to change gears before I walk into Alcoholics and Anonymous because I'm at the end of a 10 or a 12 hour day where I've been slaying Dragons out there in the real world. Thank you very much. And now I got to get to my Home group. You know where those guys are. You know, those guys I sponsor that don't want to listen to what I have to say, those guys.

And I'm tired, and God, I've been doing this a long time, and that's a bad attitude to bring in Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I'm not bigger than that. I don't have the power to do anything about that. So I have to bring the spiritual significance of unity in there, and I can't do that on my own. So I have to get together with God, my higher power, as I understand Him, and I have to ask for that before I get out of the rig.

It's time for unity. I do sales for a living. I spend far too much time alone with the committee, you know what I mean? So when I get to the meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, anyone that knows me knows this. They've never seen me turn off my rig and get out ever.

Haven't done that since I was new. I shut it off and I sit there and I pray and I say the same prayer. I always say some variation of this. God. I'm walking to a meaning of Alcoholics Anonymous and I got a lot on my mind. I'm thinking about business and thinking about money and thinking about how I'm going to pay my bills. I'm thinking about the football game. I'm thinking about this weekend trip. I'm thinking about everything that has nothing to do with what's going on in that room and what God would have me do. God let me leave this in the parking lot where it belongs, safely in your care. I know it'll be here for me to pick up when I get out.

Let me walk into the meeting to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Let me show in some degree, by my actions in the way I carry myself, how grateful I am for this undeserved gift. Now, what's interesting about that unity that we practice in our Home group, detaching from our worldly affairs, leaving the politics and the money and the football and all the things that are interesting and part of a whole life, leaving them in the parking lot because they have no place in the meeting hall of Alcoholics Anonymous. That principle applies in all areas of our life.

I used to come home from work or I'd come home from a long night of Alcoholics. Now I'm as I've been married 20 years to Eileen boy meets girl in a a campus. Sometimes it works. I love her like good poetry. Having said that, I will walk in after a long day of a a in work or a long day of work and I walk. I used to walk in the house and she'd say honey was your day. And I think to myself already with the questions

I

and she started tell me about what the dog had done that day or something that happened that day. And I would look at her and I'd be exasperated. Go honey, honey, can I at least get my boots off? Can I get my boots off? And she'd go fine, never mind and walk away. And I've done it again. I've done it again because I'm not practicing unity in my home.

And now I shut the rig off. Before I go in the house, I say a prayer like this. I say, God, I know there's a woman in that house and I know that she's been waiting to talk to me all day long. About what, I don't know,

but I believe she's a gift from you, God, and my job is to show her that I love her the way that you love her. So please put let me put my selfish needs aside and let me just be with her. When I walk in that house, the first thing I do when I come home is I find Eileen, whether she's in the backyard or she's upstairs or she's in the kitchen or she's on the couch with the dog watching TV.

And I just sit down there and I give her a kiss and ask how her day is. And then I listen. You know what I found out? This big sacrifice I made, this big sacrifice I made for unity, takes about 10 minutes.

I was breaking my wife's heart for 10 minutes

and I start to see how these traditions go so much deeper than I really thought they did and how they can really change my life.

I want to talk a little bit about group conscience. When I was new, my sponsor told me he would tell me what our group conscience was and what my opinion was, which is really wise. It gave me the opportunity to sit back and I like day and I like the, a, the business of a, a, you know, I love the meetings, but like a lot of times when you're new, they, we don't encourage new people to go to the business meetings and it's crazy. We tell them all, you're not ready for that yet. You know, you might not understand what's going on. It might we're afraid it's going to rub the wrong way. We That's wrong.

Newcomers love conflict.

My first business meeting 2 old timers got into it about something, I don't know what, but they were going at it like 2 rabbit doctor. I'm just going at it and I'm sitting there chopping on my donut, drinking my coffee, smoking my Marlboro, you know, just

it was awesome.

And then the most bizarre thing happened after the business meeting. I'm ready because I'm a street guy. I know what's going to happen. They're going to find each other, going to talk it out, you know what I mean? And they went up in there laughing and hugging. Go Boy, you really got me going in there. I got to tell you,

I'm like, OK, we're in bizarro world now. It's a

so everybody in this room, because you're affiliated with the service structure and you understand group conscience, You say the only thing that matters is how God expresses himself in our group conscience. What does that mean?

It means I got to be more concerned with what you think about something than what I think about it. Maybe your spiritual condition is better than mine this day.

The more I care about something, the more I think I'm right, the more I better listen to you.

My wants, my fears, and my desires will distort my view of reality, and they will make me think I know what's right. And it has gotten worse as I have stayed sober longer.

Oh, it's awful. You know, I'm coming, I'll be 25 years sober in about 13 days. And I'm like, oh, I've never been worse in terms of like having to practice of genuine humility. Like it says in our long form of the 12th tradition, a genuine, not the one that you act human, like you've got humility, like a genuine, like, I don't know everything and mean it, you know, and like have to listen to people with like 10 a tenth of the time you have. And they make a good point. You have to go. And Jesus, they're right. It's killing me, you know,

informed group conscience.

I want all the information. I want it all given to me, and then what? Then I want to vote on it new

something in Alcoholics Anonymous that I've experienced the time I've come in and we've changed it at my Home group, and I'll tell you what we do.

We don't vote on any motions. The night that presented, we discussed them endlessly

and we let everybody talk about it, everybody get their pin. We don't vote, we table it. We will vote next month. And the reason we do that is it introduces a principle that's not talked about much in the service structure, but it's in our literature. It's called prayerful consideration.

You're asking God to express himself in our brew conscience. Now we're going to discuss something none of us knew we were going to discuss. We haven't read the motion. We haven't read the background information. We haven't read the intent. It's all going to be. And what's going to happen is my ego is going to be president. My ego is going to say this is how I feel about this at the moment

and then there's other people stating their opinions and that I might not agree with them. That just makes my ego bigger, not smaller, and suddenly God's not in the room.

If I really want God to express it, don't I need to pray about it? Don't I need to meditate about it

now? I Maybe you're a different cat than I am. Maybe you're more spiritually developed than I am, but I have a great deal of difficulty sometimes in a business meeting setting doing very productive prayer and meditation.

I find that when I take the information at home and I can be alone and I can get on my knees and I can pray for God to give me an intuitive thought or idea and I can meditate about the information, Quite often how I felt in that business meeting

changes. And you know what else is interesting? The things I didn't think I was listening to or the things I thought I disagreed with start to seep in around the perimeter and I hear them without emotion and I see the truth in them. So we try to, in my group, practice prayerful consideration at all times. We don't vote right away. We give people a chance. Like we say, go to our neutral corner and figure it out.

I want to move on to the 4th tradition. Did a great job in that, by the way. By the way, I think the 4th tradition is incredibly sexy. I dig the 4th tradition because, well, for me, because I, you know, when I'm new, this is what I hear. The 4th Division, I can do anything I want.

Pretty attractive, you know,

long as it doesn't affect other groups or a Hazel Hall. Yeah. Details. Details, you know, But I love the idea of autonomy. Autonomy is exciting. Autonomy is a rocket ship. Autonomy allows you to, you said it, create the fellowship you crave. It is the straw that stirs the drink. It's our economy.

Don't complain about your Home group. Change it. What do you want? I moved from Los Angeles almost 13 years, 13 years ago, 2004 coming up on 13 from the largest, most active, vibrant activist tradition respecting hard charging, 12 step carrying couch commitment giving a a group in the country, the Pacific Group. I love that group

and I love my group today. But I'll tell you what, when I got there, it was different,

and I was looking for the enthusiasm and the energy and the flow, and it wasn't there.

And this is what I said. That's a shame. Boohoo, Don, what are you gonna do?

And I prayed and I meditated about it, and I got a clear answer. It said, we're going to see what kind of program you really have. And what I did is I got involved in my Home group, and this group was not a Home group at the time. And I'm going to give you a quick idea of what can happen with a group of drunks because of the structure of Alcoholics Anonymous and what happens in our service structure. So 12 years ago, I walk in this room is about 12 guys in there. They're a meeting. They're not a group and it's a closed meeting.

So I started attending the meeting on a regular basis.

I decided I want to make it my Home group and ask them why they're not registered. Nobody has an idea. And I said, well, we don't have to wait till we have enough guys to do everything there is to do. All we have to do is register as a group and make sure we have AGSR that's going to attend the district meeting and I'll be the GSR. So we go ahead and we register with New York. And these guys were blown away because I come in with the GSR package. They go, where'd you get that? I go. They sent it to us.

That's their job. They had no idea. They go, this is amazing. I go, yeah, it's

we start getting some enthusiasm in the group. Guys start making it their Home group. The attendance starts going up. Now we're up to 25 guys about three years into the deal. We got a service Rep at every arm of the service structure attending the monthly meetings. We got AGSR coming back. We got guys that are going to the area assembly. They don't have to go. They just want to go and support our GSR. Things are happening. I become DCM of the District. We start looking at we're growing and guys are becoming home groups. We're using the yearly inventory the way it should be used. We're making our yearly inventory a spiritual

piece of business. We're examining the 13 questions in the pamphlet, the AAA group, and we're taking them and we're discussing them. We're not making motions. We're playing action items out of them and then we're going back and we're not dealing with them at our monthly business meeting because you deal with them with your monthly business means an inconvenience. We set another night aside every month simply to review our inventory.

And we had these growing pains along the way because we really respected the 7th tradition. We're one of these groups. We're not afraid to talk about money. And we started talking about money. We started talking about self support and we couldn't answer it. We're like, well, what is self support? And we got the literature and we looked at it and it was vague in our opinion, you know, because we're paying our rent, we're paying for our cookies, we're paying for our coffee. We got a little money leftover. You know, we're kicking some money

to the district. We're kicking, you know, 60 to District 30 to Area 10 to GSO, but we don't know. We don't know if it's enough,

so we contacted GSO. We said what is self support in GSO? And they couldn't give us a straight up, but they gave us a range of what they felt it cost to facilitate for each group of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now this is like eight years ago and at the time it was like 262 dollars or something and we were so far below that. And the guys, this is a port important. When our guys heard that we were that far below the suggested idea for a group donating, they felt terrible about it.

Nations went up,

then another guy said why don't we do the birthday plan and we introduced the birthday plan with everything going to GSO. Now you Fast forward, you know like I said, I've been at the group 12 years and currently right now for the last three years, we're the largest donating group in our district. But we only meet twice, twice a week, yet we have the largest donations in our group. We've been donating over $500 a year well past the suggested mark to GSO. Now, this isn't about look what we're doing and we're better than you when I'm talking about the principle

was information that when Alcoholics received the information, they were told what they needed to do to become self supporting. They opened their hearts and they opened their pocketbooks to them and became a spiritual piece of business. But we talked about money in a way that maybe maybe would be offensive to some people. We found that people can take it like we talk about like, hey man, just because you didn't stop at the ATM, but that's not the basket's fault. You know, you need to put the pinch on somebody sitting next to you and borrow 5 bucks. I'll tell you in my sponsorship family, the basket does not suffer

and I'm not going to tell you what our suggested donation is, but we make that donation and I'll tell you if those guys don't have the money, they'll turn to me to response. Can I? And I'll go absolutely, you know, but I'll tell you that, you know, the knife cuts both ways. There been a few nights where I opened my wallet and I go, I couldn't believe there's no cash in there. And I got to turn to a guy sponsor and go and they just, oh, absolutely sponsors great. You know, they just couldn't be happier that I forgot to bring the money. But we talk about stuff like that,

but we talk about the 7th tradition and how important it is

in our group. But we didn't get there overnight.

And once again, talking about autonomy, the thing about autonomy is we've got a lot of young guys in our group. We got a really weird mix. You know, we got some old dogs in there. We got some mid range guys. So we got a lot of guys five years and under, a lot of guys in their first couple of years of sobriety. They're on fire with Alcoholics Anonymous that are going to meetings that are getting service commitments that are starting to sponsor other guys. I mean, it's a lot of enthusiasm, but you got to keep, it's like herding cats, you know,

and, and they're like we were when they're young, they need a lot of stuff to do. And so we started about six years ago. I came up with this idea and I remembered it because my old Home group, there was always something going on, you know what I mean?

And I missed that. We're always playing ball on Saturdays or somebody was putting a play on or somebody was moving. There was a lot of activity. So you could keep your hands busy and keep your feet moving, you know, until your head, until God in the steps kind of calmed your head down. There was a lot of and it wasn't any of that going on in Bellingham. So I made a suggestion. I said, let's, let's, let's have an activities chair. They go, what's an activities chair? Well, you know, we'll give a commitment to somebody and his job will be to take suggestions from other group members and come up with an activity that's affordable and a lot of fun. And then we

all do an activity outside of the rooms and we'll make it a family night since we're a men's group. That way we can invite our wives, we can invite our SIV, Nick and others and our kids. And we'll make it affordable so it won't exclude the newcomer. And that'll be the criteria. And they said, well, would you do it? And I said, well, yeah, sure, I'll do it, you know. And so we came up with some ideas and one guy said, you know, they're semi pro hockey right down the road and that might be a lot of fun. I go, OK, so I look into it. It's not bad. It's like 14 bucks a ticket. Is that a big arena? It's a really good reviews and everything. So I tell the guys, OK, we're going to go to

is going to be a date. I'm going to make the sign up list. I'm going to put the sign up list up. What I want you guys to do is sign up, tell me how many tickets you want, all order the tickets and when they come in you guys could pay me for them. Okay, so they said 70 guys, 70 tickets get signed up for 70. And I got to tell my wife, by the way, you're going to see a $985 credit card charge

for the Everett Arena. And she goes, what did you do? I said I bought 70 hockey tickets for the guys. She goes You bought 70 hockey. You fronted 70 hockey tickets to Alcoholics

I

and you actually think you're going to get paid? I go. Yeah, I actually do. I got to tell you, we have done

in the last 6-7 years, we've probably done

60-70 group events and nobody's ever stiffed anybody. Everybody's always paid. And we've done everything we've done. We've gone to the circus, we've gone to car races. And more importantly, we've done stuff like we had a guy, this was great. We had a guy in our group, you know, when he was a, he was a, he was an actor, you know, he had a straight job and he loved, he loved theater and he loved drama. And he was part of this little, this little group. And he was going to be in this play and he came to this real sheepishly. And he goes, yeah, we're, it's just community theater.

It's not really good, you know, but it'd be nice if a couple of guys, you know, maybe came and supported me, man, 65 male Alcoholics went up there. And these guy, a lot of these guys, man, you know, trust me, they never been to a play. We just put it that way.

You could tell who we were when the play started. What did it? What did things like that, you know, and guys graduating from college and we all go to support the guy graduating from college

and somebody is having a baby and it's like how many uncles do you have? And we're all in the way room, you know? And,

and he sings only happen in a Home group.

Many years ago, before I moved to Bellingham, I sponsored a really sweet guy. His name was Carlos. And I love Carlos like a brother. And Carlos was a guy that had been sober for a long time in a / 10 years. And he had gone out and he had really torn himself up and torn his life up. But he was back in A and he put together about three or four years and I'd sponsored him for that time. And I just love the guy. But he had some physical ailments and every winter he would get these horrible respiratory infections. He'd have to be hospitalized. He'd be in the hospital for three or four days and then he'd get out. He'd make a recovery

like clockwork this one winter. You know, Carlos went into the hospital and, and I remember I visited him, the hospital, he could barely breathe. They got him on oxygen. And I just told him, all right, the nurses are your sponsor or I do what they tell you. And I kissed him on the forehead and I said, I'll call you tomorrow. And I left. And next day I called up to check on him. And they said, are you a relative? And I do you know what we're taught in this program? I lied and I said yes I am.

You say what they taught me.

They say he's been transferred to intensive care and they put me over to intensive care and they asked me the same question to my relative and I said yes, I am. They said, well, so sorry to tell you, but he expired during the evening

and I hung the phone up, you know, and I've had to pull my car over. I was just,

I was just crying. And my next thought was, was his mother, man,

because his mother didn't speak a word English. And I knew that she was going to find out. And I'd met her a few times. I had her number, you know, and by the time I called her, she relatives were over there and she was hysterical and they didn't know what they were going to do. And I'll tell you what, his a brothers in my Home group at the time, you know, three days later, there was a church and there was a beautiful, beautiful memorial for this guy. And there's 250 people in that church.

And his mother sat there and the saddest day of her life,

and she sat there with tears going down her face, but she kept looking out among you with a smile on her face as she cried. And she said to me in broken English, I had no idea how many people love my boy.

And I'm not saying that if we took away or lost, but Alcoholics Anonymous at home groups setting the thing we're able to do that we can't do alone

at the long form of the first tradition that I'm just a small part of a large hole. And I love that AA tells me in that tradition that I am going to have to make sure that you survive, if I have any shot at surviving at all, that we're going to have to hang together or surely all of us are going to hang alone. And so I continue to March in my Home group and we're big on the service structure in my Home group. We're not one of those home groups that keep newcomers away from it. We encourage people to participate. And what we start doing is what we've been taught in Alcoholics,

we invite, we invite, we invite. And that means that we take people to our committee meetings with us. I think one of the worst things about the service structures, a lot of people don't experience it until they actually have a job in it. And all of our service structure meetings, whether it's our district meeting, our area meetings, our committee meetings are open to any a, a member that wants to come. And so we start dragging our new guys along just to keep U.S. company and we invite them the same. We were invited. I could really use your help. You know

you always preach to the ego. It always seems to work well.

Our fifth tradition states that we have but one primary purpose, to carry the message to the alcoholic and still suffers. And that seems like a number brainer, doesn't it?

One of the things that I was taught and one of the things I try to practice in my life is realize that everything I see in Alcoholics Anonymous, whether I agree with it or disagree with it, whether I like it or don't like it, doesn't matter what my personal opinion on it. Behind that, there's only one thing

you see right now. I know something, and you all know it too. It may not be the top of your consciousness, but I know you know it too. You see, we're here this afternoon in Concord, CA and Saturday, and we're safe and we're sane and we're sober. But I know something as much as I'm standing here right now, at this very moment, not very far from here, maybe within earshot of this hotel,

there's a man or a woman physically dying from the disease of alcoholism.

There's probably more than one of them.

There's probably a lot of them,

and what they don't know yet, and we do, is that they're coming to Alcoholics Anonymous. They're just finishing up their story.

They're running out of whatever little bit of self will and whatever self generated hope that tells them that maybe they can handle it themselves one more day. They're starting to run out of that and they're going to arrive an Alcoholics Anonymous. I know this, and they're going to come here like we came here. They're not going to come here necessarily looking for us. They won't know what they're looking for

because they'll be out of hope and they'll be out of answers and they'll be out of chances and they're just going to come in like desperate people do, looking for something, clinging for something. Please, maybe there's an answer here. And the question we have to ask ourselves as members of Alcoholics Anonymous in the Home group setting is where will we be when they arrive? And more importantly than where will we be is how will we be?

I think this tradition speaks to so much more than what I think a as job is.

I think it speaks to what I think my job is as an individual, a member.

What am I willing to leave outside the door because I've been here a long time. I have a friends in the room on any given night that they're like brothers to me.

I love these guys. I want to talk to them. I want to tell them what's going on in my life. I want to hear what's going on with theirs. And we do that in Alcoholics Anonymous because we love each other. We become a family. But I can never take my eyes off the door and I can never take my eyes off the room. And I can never forget why I'm really in that room.

Many years ago, I had a fantastic experience. I hope I never forget it. I was sitting in a clubhouse in Los Angeles. And I, that's about 10 years sober. And I'm sitting with one of my best friends at the break of the meeting. And I hadn't seen him in a couple of weeks, which is like a, you know, it's a lifetime when you're a drunk. It's like 2 weeks. Oh, my God. And we're sitting there together. We're like a couple of old hens catching up. You know, we're just like, staring deeply into each other's eyes and laughing and talking about what's been going on and completely oblivious to anybody in the room, including anyone that might be new.

This old timer named Jim slid up behind us like those old timers do, and I didn't even see him come in. And he dropped his head between us and put his arms around his shoulders and said, that's OK, boys, We'll bring the newcomers to you.

So when I'm in a room of Alcoholics Anonymous and we talk about it a lot, what's a business meeting for?

Well, that's where the GSR comes and gives a report, no.

Well, that's where we find out about corrections and treatment now, which we find out about the hot new liturgy. No, all that stuff happens. It's going to happen at every minute. It's not why we have the business meeting. We have the business meeting to promote our primary purpose. So on a monthly basis we can take our pulse, we can take our temperature and see how are we doing and fulfilling the requirement, the obligation, the sacred

chance to carry the message of the alcoholic who still suffers. How are we doing and fulfilling that?

How are guys doing when we have our yearly group inventory? You know who we want to talk to? We want to talk to all the new guys in the group, nobody else.

We sit there and we go, OK, you tell us how we doing. I don't know. Well, tell me what your experience was when you got here. We want to know, did you feel welcome? Were you brought into the middle? Were you given a job? Were you shown how to do it? Were you invited or told to do something? Were you invited to do something with somebody else? We want to know how we're doing and fulfilling that. We had that monthly business meeting so we can see how we're doing so we don't lose track of our primary purpose because without that we will lose track of it.

We will get distracted by the all the gifts that we have in our life.

And that's what I love so much about the long form of the 12th tradition that says that we believe anonymity has an immense spiritual principle, that we are to practice a genuine humility. This to the end that our great blessings never spoil us and we live in thankful contemplation of Him who presides over us. I had these great blessings in my life. I had this great life. I live in a wonderful house in a beautiful part of the country with a great woman with a terrific dog. The dog's so cool. He's called the Wonder Dog, you know what I mean?

It's a beautiful place and I had these great blessings, but I can forget what my primary purpose is. I can be distracted. I can be spoiled by my great blessings, and I don't want to do that. I do want to live in thankful contemplation. Thank you, God, let me think about what you've done for me

and let me think about the work you have for me. So when we have that monthly business meeting, it's not about business, it's about the man or woman that hasn't arrived yet. And will we be prepared? You see, I go to my meeting every Wednesday night at 7:00. That's my Home group meeting. And for me, it's just Wednesday night.

But there have been many nights where I know a man walked in just like I did on September 16, 1991. And it wasn't Wednesday night for him. For him, it was seconds and inches. That might be his last opportunity, the window of opportunity to allow him to get into Alcoholics Anonymous, the window that opens and closes right behind you. And he may never make it to another meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I have to ask myself, what am I going to be like when he gets there and how am I going to be?

I want to talk about the 11th tradition and I want to talk about, and Debbie did such a great job talking about attraction.

Attraction is so much more than because everybody's attracted to different things. But I know universally you know what everybody's attracted to. You know who you know who I like? I like people that like me.