I was in a situation yesterday where someone had to be attended by paramedics from the St John Ambulance, who are volunteers. They investigated the person in distress and took them to hospital. There, I had a brief word with one of them. He was the pastoral head of sixth form at a school, and taught a couple of subjects, too. That was his full-time job. In his free time, he volunteers for the St John Ambulance. During the earlier part of the pandemic, he volunteered for several months straight over the summer holidays from school.
'All of us spend much of our spare time in the sort of effort which we are going to describe.'
Spending much of our free time in a worthwhile endeavour is not limited to AA. There are many people outside AA who choose to do the same. There are people whose purpose is to maximise pleasure or comfort. The morality of that is not our concern. Rather, we're concerned with what works for people in recovery.
The core of recovery is dependence on God:
'Some of us have taken very hard knocks to learn this truth: Job or no job—wife or no wife—we simply do not stop drinking so long as we place dependence upon other people ahead of dependence on God.'
That dependence is not a woolly, cosy relationship of Warm Embraces, Special Insights, and Divination. It's a relationship of actual devotion of time to serve God. The other aspects are in the service of service. Without service, there is no relationship, only wishful thinking.