Prayed for Higher Power to Put Somebody Special in My Life and Got John — Guess I Should Have Been More Specific 🤦 – Steve F.

About This Speaker Tape

Steve F. tells his story from a 2012 Fort Lauderdale speaker meeting with 22 years of sobriety. A Navy fighter pilot, he got sober in June 1989 not because he wanted to but because the Navy threatened to ground him. After six weeks of inpatient rehab in Jacksonville, he returned to duty believing that not drinking and attending meetings would be enough. Instead, he spent the next seven years in a deteriorating spiral of mental obsession, geographic cures, divorce, bankruptcy, and compulsive sexual behavior — all while technically sober.

At six years sober, Steve contracted a serious virus and was told by doctors in 1995 that he would not live to see the year 2000. His reaction was not fear but relief — death looked like an escape from the misery of untreated alcoholism. His mother had to put her thirty-something sober son out of her house because he was draining her emotionally and financially, all without a drink in his hand.

Everything changed when Steve heard an old man named Tom speak at a meeting in Elkridge, Maryland. Tom talked about the Big Book like it had a spirit and laughed at his own story with genuine joy. Steve asked Tom for help, and Tom immediately put him to work helping others — not waiting for some future readiness. Tom taught him that his real problem was a spiritual malady, not just a drinking problem, and that the solution was God-dependence through service. The virus became undetectable once Steve threw himself into helping others.

Steve describes his journey from York, Pennsylvania, where he ran recovery houses largely alone and lost everything again, to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he and his sponsee Nick built a sober community together. He now cares for his elderly sponsor Tom and a mentally handicapped man named John, running multiple houses with young people in recovery. His central message is passionate and direct: if you are sober but not feeling joy, you are missing the entire point of the program, and the solution is laying down your life in service to others.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Steve introduces himself — Navy pilot forced into sobriety in June 1989 because the Navy did not like how he showed up to fly their airplanes
• 3:00 First AA meeting on a military base at noon in civilian clothes — thought the chairperson was the president of AA and the basket was her travel fund
• 8:00 Goes to rehab in Jacksonville, experiences DTs, realizes he is an alcoholic who cannot drink safely — but returns to Maine with only a dont-drink-go-to-meetings plan
• 14:00 Seven years of meeting attendance without working the steps — joins every therapy and twelve-step group, fills a shelf with self-help books he cannot comprehend
• 19:00 Geographic cures: Maine to Maryland to California and back, picking up a wife along the way — divorce, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and repo man follow
• 24:00 At six years sober, contracts a serious virus through compulsive sexual behavior — doctor tells him in 1995 he will not live to see the year 2000
• 30:00 Meets Tom at a meeting in Elkridge, Maryland — the old man who looked like Kris Kringle and talked about the Big Book like it had a spirit
• 37:00 Tom sends Steve to help Gary at the coffee pot — first sponsee experience and the story of Gary's dying mother who taught Steve to release his contempt for organized religion
• 47:00 The farmer and wheat seeds parable — you reap what you sow, sow seeds of love and you will never harvest fear
• 54:00 Recovery houses in York, then Amherst with Nick — caring for handicapped John and elderly sponsor Tom, building a sober community grounded in service