FROM JIM JOY 7/5/96 <jjoy@bga.com>
Hi all.
Well, I've been reading the stuff on sponsorship and feel I need to add my two centavos.
I'm a third generation AA - i.e. my sponsor's sponsor was one of the original 100 and I met him about 17-18 years ago. Sponsorship has been here from the beginning of the program. First the definition of sponsorship from the conference-approved pamphlet from GSO. A sponsor is someone who helps you work the steps as they are set forth in the BIG BOOK and 12X12. IF SOMEONE TRIES TO RUN YOUR LIFE THEY ARE NOT SPONSOR MATERIAL! Get away from them as fast as you can. That person is no a personal power trip and is carrying their ego instead of the message.
Sponsorship is to teach you how to work the steps so you don't need a sponsor any more. You are going to have to live life sometime and someone isn't going to be there to hold your hand. My sponsor "fired" me after three years although we remained good friends. I had learned how to do it and could do it on my own (tenth step and spiritual direction excluded). Eddie had other people to help, and I was ready to do the steps on my own.
Sponsorship isn't something you can get "from just your friends." There is a law of economics called Gresham's Law. It says that bad money drives out the good. Not even all the people who have 20 years of sobriety have good sobriety. They manage to stay sober but they white knuckle it. There was a group of these men in Houston where I sobered up called the "Investors Group", a bunch of old, rich farts, with a lot of sobriety time but very little quality to their sobriety. THEY WERE NOT HAPPY.
The only way to learn the program is to learn from those who have done it from the book with the aid of a teacher who has done it from the book with their sponsor. If you do it any other way "the bad sobriety drives out the good." And this is why the ability of newcomers to stay sober has been dropping for the last several years. There are too many people who think they know better than the Book or the people who started this program. After all the Big Book does say in he original intro that this book is meant to pass on "exactly how we recovered."
So much for my soap box tonight.
I love you all.
Jim