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March 1989

Last night at one of my favorite meetings, a friend pulled me aside to ask for some help with a newcomer she was sponsoring. She needed to talk, and I needed to hear myself say, “What do you or I or anyone know about sponsorship anyway?” even though I have spent hours, days, months, and years working with newcomers in the Fellowship.

Sponsorship and service are without a doubt the foundation of my sobriety and my happiness. In service work I am profoundly aware that the more I learn the more there is to learn. But until a few months ago, I thought I had a lot of good ideas—certainly a lot of opinions—about sponsorship. After all, I spend a couple of hours every day being a sponsor to various women, and since some success had attended these efforts, I felt I knew something. In my better moments, I saw working with newcomers as simply the work I did for the God of my understanding on a daily basis. Since I had never yet asked, “Will you be my pigeon?” I assumed the people put in my life were the ones God meant me to work with, to help as best I could, with the tremendous support of the Fellowship. Since I turned my pigeons over to him on a daily basis, I simply tried to serve in any way possible, whether on the phone, at a meeting, for lunch or for coffee. The single most important thing I did as a sponsor was to show up and then let go and let God.

But I felt that some relationships were smoother—better, easier, more gratifying for me. Consequently, I assumed that these better relationships were the ones in which I most successfully did God’s work. If I ever had to get rid of a few pigeons, these easy relationships would be the ones that I would keep. Because the others, on occasion, drove me wild.

That was a few months ago. Then, as the “Twelve and Twelve” says, life has a way of handing us a few lumps. Returning from my honeymoon, I received a call that one of my most beloved pigeons had committed suicide. I cannot even write these words without crying; at many moments the pain and the loss are still greater than the acceptance. I have asked myself repeatedly: “Why? Why didn’t I give her my out-of-town phone number? Why didn’t I have one more conversation with her?” My last vision of her is at the wedding, happy, laughing, and smiling. Sponsoring her had been pure joy; there was never a harsh word between us. She ended every conversation by telling me she loved me; I never doubted that she did. She was one of the easiest people to love unconditionally I have ever known.

You don’t take credit for your successes and you don’t take credit for your failures, old-time wisdom tells us. I believe that, and yet I felt that I had failed her, failed the Fellowship, and failed the God of my understanding. But how limited is my own wisdom?

Yesterday, another one of my pigeons was on the phone. I had just given her a three-year medallion the night before. She casually said, “You know, I think we have had the perfect sponsor and pigeon relationship.” From my point of view the statement was shocking. We had argued frequently, she had rebelled against all the suggestions of the program, had refused to go to meetings, and in my opinion had been on a dry drunk for months at a time. It was certainly true that in the past few months she was beginning to work at the Steps and was starting to take some responsibility for her actions and her sobriety. Maybe it was the ideal relationship because she and I are still sober and because I didn’t quit, as I often wanted to do, and tell God this was work I wouldn’t do. All I could do, it seemed to me, was to hang in a day at a time.

I am at one of those points where there are more questions than answers. I still believe that when I watch the newcomers I sponsor get active, go to meetings, work with a group, reach out to others in the Fellowship, attend Step meetings, and begin to get their foundation in the program, I am more or less doing what I am supposed to do as a sponsor. I also know that there are moments when a pigeon calls to tell me she is a sponsor for the first time—when she becomes my peer in the Fellowship, doing the work of AA—that make me happy. When a pigeon stands at the podium and talks about how glad she was to get her first year so that she could give service to the Fellowship I feel I am on the right path. But those are things I value. What does God want?

No doubt I have complicated sponsorship. Whatever happens to those I sponsor, working with them has kept me sober and for that I am profoundly grateful. I know that as long as God keeps putting people in my life, I will keep on being a sponsor. Whether that is for a day or for years is simply God’s will and not mine. Like all my gifts in this life, these pigeons are simply on loan from God and can be called back by him, or to him, at any time.

A. S.

Dorchester, Massachusetts