September 8, 2006
Stops
My friend with the drinking problem and who doesn’t hear all that well called to say he’d finally worked the Program and now what should he do. I wondered. I hadn’t seen him at any meetings, but then he could have been attending across town. After all, he hadn’t asked me to be his sponsor, so I just asked him how he was feeling and what would he like to do now that he was abstinent.
He said, well, he wasn’t exactly abstinent right now, but that he had been a number of times, and, for that matter, it didn’t seem all that difficult or different. So I asked how long those times were. Not very long, he said, but long enough that he didn’t see much to it all or why everybody raved so about sobriety. So I asked him how many times had he stopped. And he said exactly the number of times the Big Book required. I told him I was pleased he had read the Big Book. He said he hadn’t exactly read it, but had been told pretty much what it said. So I asked again how many times he had stopped.
Exactly the number required, he said, like I am supposed to. And then he said he’d started again, but where could he go now? It’s a Twelve Stop program, didn’t you say?