Service is what keeps me in the program. There is no “as if” in it; my life truly does depend on it. Doing service at the group, intergroup, and region levels gets me out of my own head. Doing service for others enables me to be useful, and that is a positive feeling. When I do service, I feel like I …

From the very beginning of my time in the OA rooms, I heard that service is a Tool. However, I never thought about it as a way to connect to my Higher Power and preserve my abstinence until recently. I tended to think of service as a Tradition. It was, in my mind, a practice that was important to preserve …

I confess that service was never the first option for me. I went to meetings to vent my sorrows and problems, to be heard in silence, to receive hugs, and to put the minimum in the bag—to stay lean, leave OA, and never ask for help again. When the leader asked if somebody could do a certain service, I didn’t …

I do not have an adequate vocabulary to describe Region Eight’s first international assembly and convention in South America where we met in Medellín, Colombia. Board members, region reps, and committee chairs began arriving on Wednesday, greeted at the airport by OA members with signs that read, “Bienvenidos, OA.” We were driven to the hotel, and as we arrived we …

My sponsor asked me if I was willing to stop throwing up. I said yes and made a commitment. I knew that if I wasn’t going to throw up anymore, then I needed to quit bingeing too. God gave me the willingness and ability to keep my commitment. He continued to do so every day for the past twenty-three and …

Whenever I went to my Tuesday night meeting, I noticed my sponsor talking with newcomers. He greeted them when they came in the door and sought their reactions after the meeting. I was amazed anyone could be so invested in helping others. I wanted the kind of recovery my sponsor had, so I also began to focus on newcomers. I …

I write this with mixed feelings because by the time this is published, I will have stepped down not only as chair but also from my intergroup. The reason is a positive one: I was elected to another service position as a general service trustee of the OA Board of Trustees. Because of this, I will be doing service at …

I’m sorry to say I’ve had many relapses during my twenty-two years in program. But the last five years have been much better: back-to-back abstinence based on putting together a program that uses all the OA elements. My program reminds me of my first relapse, how I got into it and how I got out. I had come into OA …

God has blessed me with more than twenty-five years of abstinence, and I am still grateful every day. The most important day for me to be abstinent is today. I was in OA seven years before I got abstinent, and I’ve been abstinent ever since, praise be to my HP. During those seven years, I experimented with abstinence and also …

As I sit here at day forty-five of my abstinence, I am amazed and grateful for what has turned out to be like a joyride! I’ve had a couple days of waking up crabby, but I told my sponsor, put it out on calls, surrendered it to God, and soon found myself back on my joyride again. When I think …