[freya]

I find the 9th Step promises, despite -- or maybe even because of the grammar issues LOL! -- to be just plain beautiful...and so, I appreciate them at that level.

Next, for me, I really first "noticed" them shortly after I had started attending AA meetings and I "coincidentally" met this guy from one of the meetings outside my son's bank one day. This guy is very quiet but, when he says something, it's always worth paying attention to. So anyway, we got to talking and he ended up talking about how the promises have come true in his life, and how and why, and how much he loves them. Anyway, that conversation was really the first time that I "got" the importance and the beauty and the passion of working a program with the urgency described in "How It Works"...and after talking to him I went downtown that same afternoon to the Intergroup office and bought my first Big Book. So, that conversation and The 9th Step Promises just, for me, hold a very important place in the history of my own recovery.

Also, I really don't see anything at all "wrong" or "misleading" about sharing with newcomers -- or anyone else -- everything that working a strong program can and has done for me or for others. I mean, really, are we supposed to like be keeping this a secret or something???? What would be at all attractive about that????.....either in the "attraction rather than promotion" sense or even in a more general sense??? And the Third Step Prayer does read in part: "Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of Life." (emphasis added) Methinks it might be kinda hard for our lives to bear witness to God's work in them if we don't let anybody know what great works God has accomplished in them!

Happiness, freedom and joy are attractive -- curmudgeonly asceticism, not so much!

And finally, I personally don't really care one way or the other if someone's motives for starting to work a program are -- in part or in whole -- selfish.....Actually, I very seriously doubt that even 1% of the people who walk through the doors of any 12 Step Program initially show up there for purely altruistic reasons.......In fact, The 9th Step Promises themselves indicate that "losing interest in selfish things" and gaining "interest in our fellows" is one of the gifts that comes with working The Steps. (.......but if people never start because many of the gifts of working the program are hidden from them, then the altruism can never come at all.)

freya