To
“Of Titles and Politics,”
January
1999 NA Way
In her article, Mindy A asked,
“Is the importance of service based on the number or nature of positions
an individual holds, or is it based on the internal changes an individual
experiences while doing any type of service?”
I inferred that this was
actually a rhetorical question, and that the author believed the second
half of the question held the correct answer.
This perspective reflects
an extremely common attitude held by many members of the fellowship.
It is indicative of the philosophy that we perform service because it is
good for our recovery.
I have heard more times than
I can count that the benefit of service work is an unparalleled level of
personal growth. This is almost always the reason given to persuade
members to join in the work of providing meetings, literature, understanding,
and access to the NA message.
After only a short time of
serving on my local area service committee, I came to the conclusion that
we do not perform service work to help our own recovery; we perform service
work to help other people’s recovery.
I started out in service
work for a variety of reasons. Admittedly, one of the big reasons
was that I thought it would make me seem important to my peers. I
also thought it was important for my recovery—that it would make me grow
as a person.
What I have come to understand
is that service is not so important for what it does for me, but what it
does for others. Although it is true that I have learned valuable
lessons about patience, faith, unity, group conscience, negotiation, compromise,
public speaking, typing, and record-keeping, the truth is that, by its
very nature, service work cannot be something that is self-serving.
If we look at it from another
perspective—that of our primary purpose—it becomes clear that our own spiritual
growth is secondary to the fellowship of NA.
We must distinguish between
the fellowship of NA and the program of NA.
It is the purpose of the
Twelve Steps (the program) to lay out a spiritual way of living that can
transform any willing person’s lifestyle from selfish and egocentric to
selfless and giving.
It is the purpose of our
members (the fellowship) to tell others that they, too, can undergo this
transformation and to teach them how. Our own personal recovery is
based on what we do when we’re not at meetings. Meetings are places
where we can help facilitate other people’s recovery and help NA as a whole
grow.
We are, however, interconnected
in such a way that we need to ensure NA’s survival in order to ensure our
own. In this sense, we do perform service work for ourselves, but
the spiritual awakening that we experience as a result of the program opens
our eyes to the world and the people around us.
We are not the self-important,
over-bloated people we once were; instead, we are loving and compassionate
beings working as a team to provide a means of relieving the pain and misery
of addiction.
Onion P,
North Carolina
It’s a matter
of
life and death
Serious
about service
“Why should I care about
our primary purpose? Service usually isn’t much fun, so why should
I do it? If it isn’t about me feeling good, I don’t want anything
to do with it.”
Nobody would go to a meeting
and say any of these things, but how often does our behavior proclaim these
very attitudes? Pretty often, I think.
Every time we decide to skip
a committee meeting because we found something “better” to do, every time
we fail to make the phone calls we promised to make, every time we “forget”
we were supposed to be somewhere and do something, we are letting someone
down—and it’s not who you think!
We don’t do service for the
addicts who are already clean. We do service for the mothers who
bathe their babies in the same bathtub that’s used to cook up a batch of
crystal meth. We do service for the people whose bodies are ravaged
with sores and whose teeth are rotting away. We do service for the
teenager who may be infected with HIV when she has sex for a fix.
We do service for the father who waits for the connection in a bar while
his family worries about what he’ll be like when he gets home. We
do service so that an addict might hear about this program before he injects
hepatitis into his veins. We do service for the addict who doesn’t
have to die tonight.
I, for one, thank God and
the NA Fellowship for those addicts who cared enough to show up and do
the work that carried the message to me. I am grateful that there
were recovering addicts who loved me and cared for me before they even
knew I existed. May God have mercy on my miserable soul if I ever
forget the gift I’ve been given or ignore the suffering addict in favor
of my own self-centered pleasure-seeking.
For the lonely, hopeless,
dying addict, please keep coming back, and give back just a little of what
you were so freely given.
Joe C, Missouri
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