On the length of clean/sober time thing, here is what my sponsor said to me when he received his thirty year A.A. token at my Friday meeting:
"You want one of these? OK, here is what you do. Don't drink and don't die."
More frequently, he is heard to say:
"Keep coming back and we'll teach you a better way to live."
Geez, I was not fond of that the first times I heard him say it. After all, I was there to get sober not remake my entire life to match someone else's expectations. I have come to see that for me the better way to live starts with sobriety and branches out in all directions. The people in the programs (I am a member of both A.A. and N.A.) who have what I want spend no time playing "my God can beat up your God" or trying to bring others to see things exactly their way through intimidation or brow beating. Not that I haven't encountered a few of those types, it's just that they don't have what I want, so I don't do what they do.