Congratulations on nine months!  Keep fighting the good fight!

My sponsor pushed me out there at around 100 days because we had finished my steps and I had sponsored in my previous sobriety.  One thing that I have learned about sponsorship is that we can remain available but we can't do it for them.  I worked with a woman and I was willing to hire childcare to spend time with her but every time we got together, she had a thousand interruptions scheduled.  Phone calls, last minute crisis...ad nauseum.  One day I sent her a comprehensive step work assignment and she called to say she relapsed again.  This was something she was actually doing all of the time but chose to lie about which told me that although she needed the program, she was merely giving lip service to wanting it.  My approach was this, "While I can see that you need the program, I don't feel that you want it. I feel that you need a sponsor who has more of what you want in her program and in her character because I am clearly not meeting your needs.  I will always be here for you and will happily work with you when you are ready but I think, for now, you should find someone else."

I have had a few ladies ask me since that time, most of whom only wanted to be able to say that they had a sponsor.  And what I realize today is that I just can't do it for them. As willing as a woman shows me she is to work this program is as willing as I am to help her because it is better for me to practice these principles at home and give my toddler the best of what I have to offer first.  I am also learning that if I sponsor a woman who stays sober...fine.  If I sponsor a woman who does not stay sober, that is fine too.  Bill worked with ALOT of people and the one who stayed sober through all of them was him.  SO for me, sponsorship is really sobriety insurance.  

To keep it real, working the steps with others is one of my favorite things in life to do.  I love to be of service.  I love to watch others discover hope and discard the previous life that alcohol gave them.  Right now, I have an opportunity to begin serving at an AA meeting two blocks from my house.  The meeting is once a week.  The folks who started it seem to think that I can bring up the attendance and I think that if I dedicate myself to making this meeting a safe place to recover as well as a place where the principles ring true, it could just help me to work out my little service bug.  

I love AA.  I love the gifts of sobriety.  And I want when someone asks for help, for the hand of AA to always be there.  I am glad, my sister, that you are serving as the hand off AA wherever possible and I am confident that you will soon be working with others who want to work it.  God bless!