Get Together

I had a wonderful experience with some fellow OA members recently. We showed up at our meeting place and could not get in. The door had a timer lock with no key, and it did not open. How is this wonderful? I’m getting to that.

We waited ten minutes after the meeting start time, then decided to head to a local restaurant. The restaurant we chose looked open, but the doors were locked, so we headed across the street to a different restaurant. One member commented that the forces of evil were working to keep us from having a meeting.

We picked a booth in the back. Amazingly, the whole time we were there, no one else came to our corner. Obviously, this was where we were meant to have our meeting.

We prayed the Serenity Prayer. Someone read aloud about keeping abstinent over the holidays. Then each of us shared. It was very informal—more a conversation than a meeting—but we all agreed we felt something special.

This was the experience we had been craving from our meetings that seemed to be eluding us lately. We wanted a better connection with other OA members and with HP. We wanted a group that honestly desired recovery, one that was committed to abstinence and working the program and the Steps. We wanted to feel some thing more, and we felt it on that day! One member was so encouraged that she proposed we get together this way outside the meetings at least once a month.

Is this what Tradition One means? When we have unity, we will recover. We can disagree when it comes to food plans but agree that working the Steps leads to a better spiritual condition. We can agree that a better relationship with HP is what helps us be sane with food. Committing to being together, united against the disease, will bring us serenity.

This experience was to show us a better way to hang onto and share our recovery; let’s try it and hope it spreads throughout the Fellowship. We want and need the OA organization to stay alive and keep growing. There are so many people who need our program. If we can find ways to make our meetings more connected and intimate, more folks will stay and recover.

Let’s hope that this day HP was giving us the answer to our prayers.

—Edited and reprinted from Common Bond newsletter, Western Michigan Intergroup, January/February 2015