Perfect for Me
I
f I were to be really honest with myself, my idea of the perfect service position would look something like this. I would walk up to a bank of media reporters (imagine the White House press corps). Of course, someone else would do the work of bringing them there. I’d step up to the podium and talk eloquently about my favorite topic, myself. I’d share about my disease and my recovery. I’d say my actual full name; no anonymity, because I have to get credit, and I need for the booking agents to know where to find me. The fellowship would thank me for the hundreds of new members who would come flocking to Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA) thanks to my “service.” I would be invited to interview on podcasts as a celebrity. I’d love having a team of bookers and public relations folks who arrange my travel as the FA spokeswoman. Really, it’s about service, don’t you know? Fortunately for me, the FA Traditions, my sponsor, the tools, and weighing and measuring my food all keep me out of where I would like to go and instead, show me where I need to be. As a result, I recently volunteered for the simple service position of copying and pasting the meeting format in the chat box of my weekly zoom gathering. Did I want to volunteer to do this? Not re10
ally. Did I need to do this? Absolutely. After nine months of showing up weekly to this gathering that had greatly added to my recovery, it was time for me to give back in some way. I was not able to come early to set up chairs or put out literature, as I could at an inperson meeting, but I could come early to copy and paste the meeting format. As a sponsor once said to me, “Service keeps us out of disease. The more inconvenient the better.” I thought this would be super easy, and frankly, a little beneath me. Weren’t they lucky to have someone with a few years of abstinence willing to do this task? How hard could this be? Well, the first week I started copying and pasting the format, the Zoom platform suddenly kept making a sound as if to say, “Nope! Try again!” Nothing would show up in the chat box. The gathering was going on and I panicked. I was able to private chat the other fellow with the same service position to ask if she could step in because my computer wasn’t cooperating. She happily took over. I immediately thought of the promises of the program found in Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book), which talks about how we will inherently know how to do things that used to baffle us. In the past, I would have interrupted May 2022
