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                    Our Home Group 

Home - the very word can lift our spirits. 

And while not all of us have nice memories of our lives at home in childhood (and beyond), many of us do. 

Those who don't often adopt an idealized image of home from movies, old TV sitcoms, and even greeting card commercials, especially those aired during the winter holidays.

One way or another, our thoughts of home can become a mishmash of real or imagined memories evoking sunshine days, laughter, family and friends, home cooking, flowers from the garden, tea and conversation, and magical holiday moments. 

Our idealized home often becomes a safe location in our minds; a place filled with joy and peace.

The great news is that membership in an AA Home Group offers many of those same sterling home-made qualities, especially those of laughter, friendships, tea and coffee conversations, and many magical moments we will experience there that we will never forget. 

Our Home Group can become our safest place, a "home" filled with joy, peace, and - best of all - people who think and act like us. 

We will have found our herd - and it is there we will find some herd immunity from our deadly disease.

Alcoholics with good recovery go to a lot of different meetings. Zoom meetings, bless them,  have flung open the door to meetings 24/7 all over the world. Taking advantage of that opportunity is awesome! 

But after all our world traveling adventures, it's good to be home again. To walk in the door (even the Zoom door) and see those familiar faces, the people who know our whole story, our struggles, our triumphs, our faces and, as that old TV barroom song goes, "the place where everybody knows your name."

It's the people in our Home Group who will worry when we don't show up after a couple of meetings. They are the ones who will call or text us with those words we sometimes really, really need to hear:  "Are you OK?" 

Our Home Group members will celebrate our sober successes, be it getting that new job, graduating from college, getting a pulled license back, an engagement, a new baby, another AA chip or "birthday" - all the good stuff of life that can show up in the lives of recovering people!

And they are the same people who will be there when we're in the hospital, when a loved one dies, when we don't get that job we'd hoped for (or when we lose the one we had), when he/she leaves us for another, when we don't think we can make it through another day ...

Many of us with disinterested or judgmental family members form a "family" group within AA, where Home Group members become the "family" we've always needed. A "family" we can rely upon.

"My family doesn't understand my alcoholism, but you do. You get me," are statements often heard in AA.

Our Home Group offers us the chance to grow and change in a safe environment. Most of us will chair our first meeting there, make our first share there, and do our first AA service job(s) there. 

And it is inside our Home Group where we will learn how best to carry the message of recovery to other alcoholics.  

After all, every AA group has but one reason for being - to carry the message to the still-suffering alcoholic, inside and outside of AA." 

AA groups exist to help alcoholics achieve sobriety. Large or small, well-established or brand-new, the various groups use discussion, book studies or speaker meetings having that primary goal. 

 Groups exist so alcoholics like us can find a new way of life, a life rich in happiness, joy, and a daily freedom from our chronic, terminal, fatal, physical, mental and spiritual illness.

 Our Home Group does that force ten for most of us. It offers us powerful support from our own little band of recovering people. Together we share our ongoing experiences, our strength and our hopes on how we stay sober, one day at a time. 

"But wait" (as is said in so many TV commercials) - "there's more!" 

When we join a group we make a commitment to everyone there and to our own sobriety. It's an important and powerful decision that puts us right in the heart of everything AA has to offer. 

 We all need a home and there's a home in AA just for us. If you haven't done so already, find it. Then put down a taproot there, one that will hold you in place if, or when, future life storms arrive.

Find yourself that place where your own laughter blends in perfect harmony with those already there. They need you there, you know.

 And you need them.