Recovery Reflections: July 26
“Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.” –Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, p. 160
When I go shopping I look at the prices and if I need what I see, I buy it and pay. Now that I am supposed to be in rehabilitation, I have to straighten out my life. When I go to a meeting, I take a coffee with sugar and milk, sometimes more than one. But at the collection time, I am either too busy to take money out of my purse, or I do not have enough, but I am there because I need this meeting. I heard someone suggest dropping the price of a beer into the basket, and I thought, that’s too much! I almost never give one dollar. Like many others, I rely on the more generous members to finance the Fellowship. I forget that it takes money to rent the meeting room, buy my milk, sugar and cups. I will pay, without hesitation, ninety cents for a cup of coffee at a restaurant after the meeting; I always have money for that. So how much are my sobriety and my inner peace worth?
The Cost of Addiction
“When I was out there drinking, getting high, my habit was probably $100 a day for years. You better believe I did, whatever I had to, to make sure that I had that money, and that meant doing some pretty terrible things,” Josh said.
When suffering from the disease of addiction, your mind is cloudy and polluted. There is nothing that is worth more, in your eyes than getting drunk or getting high. You would do anything to regain that experience that you believe you hold so dear, and so the cost of it, the substance and the experience of it, is all worth it.
The monetary price will not matter at that time, because, as the disease wants you to believe, you need it. But the cost of your addiction is not just in terms of money.
“The fact that I’ve thought that I can’t put a single dollar into the basket – at every meeting that I go to– is ridiculous,” Josh said.
Recovery is priceless, it means more to those in the rooms than they could possibly put a monetary price on. Sometimes priorities get jumbled and people forget that without donations meetings can’t run.
Giving what you can is the fundamental understanding of knowing the worth of something.
“I wouldn’t value anything, so there was no value on anything,” Megan said.
She explains that in active addiction there was no real worth to anything except getting to her next high or her next drink. People and things were only had value if they helped her get to that.
“The worth of sobriety, you can’t put a number on that. You can’t say that a dollar suffixes … as a habit I usually keep some singles in [my big book] because I go to a lot of meeting and I know that while I’m at those meetings I want to contribute. Because I can today,” she said.
Not everyone can contribute every time, but Megan feels like since she in the position where she can, she needs to. Before she could contribute monetarily, she would contribute by doing service work to give back.
“I give what I can,” she said.
Brandon said it’s easy to see the worth in the meetings and recovery programs because they worked for them, and they can see through their experience in it.
“We’ve seen that those who came before us were the ones who were contributing because when I first came in I don’t have a dollar to my name … Today because of the life AA has given me, I can afford to throw a few dollars into the basket.”
They all agree that is someone didn’t put a few dollars into the basket when they couldn’t – they probably wouldn’t be here or found the joy and the peace of recovery.
If you are ready to start making your wrongs right, you should seek a treatment facility that encompasses the 12-step program. If you don’t know where to start, we are here to help in whatever way we possibly can. Give us a call at any time and we can work out a treatment plan together. Never lose hope, recovery is possible. Our number is: (866) 578-7471
We would like to thank Stone Valley Recovery for allowing us to use their beautiful facilities.
