A happy coincidence?

My home group is looking for a new home.

The group has been meeting in a homeowners association building, but we started to get the idea they didn’t want us there.

It all started during football season. It’s a large group that meets twice a week, and our format has been to have the chairperson share then break up into three smaller groups.

The employee who works at the counter likes to watch football and, on Monday night, would turn the game on in one of the rooms we occupy. When our home team was playing, she declared that room off limits.

When another group had a function on one of our meeting nights, the association raided our meeting room chairs so that we didn’t have enough. That bothered me because we pay for the privilege of meeting there and we had been there for years. But I’m not the group representative, so I kept my mouth shut.

Then we got notice that the association wanted to start charging us for three rooms for both nights, and we simply couldn’t afford to pay that.

We took a group conscience, which is what we call a vote by show of hands, and found that our members would prefer to move rather than change our format to a tag meeting or ticket meeting and stay in one room.

So several of us volunteered to form a committee to find a new meeting place. Each volunteer was assigned to call a church in the area. At a business meeting, the group voted for the church I had been assigned. I was glad, because I really liked the woman I had been talking to. Other groups met at this church. AA two nights a week, NA one night a week. There was no rent. We could make a donation as our budget and group conscience saw fit.

After the meeting, the group representative and I made an appointment to visit the facility and iron out the final details. It was a beautiful campus, and the church seemed very glad to have us there.

The church representative, as it turned out, had studied to be a substance abuse counselor but never got certified. Now there is someone in her life whose drinking bothers her and she had just decided that she should go to Al-Anon when I called.

She plans to attend our meetings. A happy coincidence? I think not. I prefer to see it as God working in her life, and ours.