Hospital Call

RECENTLY I had a most dramatic experience and one that I shall never forget. I visited two men in the hospital. One of them had been sober eighteen years in our Fellowship and the other sixteen years. Although I knew them both, they had not known each other before this hospitalization because their group affiliations and activities had been in widely separated suburban areas of this metropolitan city. Both were contrite and desolate. Both were trying painfully to analyze the reasons why they had this fall from grace. Neither of them said that God was a sham or that AA was a hoax. Nor did either of them suggest that the Third Step was a joke, that the Eleventh Step should be torn up, or that they resented their inventories or Twelfth Step work. Both of them seemed to think that in spite of everything they had not done their best, and that probably after so many years they had become complacent about their sobriety. In any event when they fell on their faces, both of them turned instinctively and immediately to the Fellowship and the Higher Power which had saved them before, and both of them are now starting from scratch with a lot of love and understanding and tolerance from their brothers in AA.