When the first nine Steps are completed and the daily yet lifetime job of practising Steps Ten through Twelve is embarked upon consistently, this is, as it were, the correct implementation of the sequence of moves required to open the safe.
Once the safe is open, you're into the vault, and the real work begins.
Until the safe is open, nothing can be achieved ('We are there to sweep off our side of the street, realizing that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished until we do so,' Alcoholics Anonymous).
It does not matter how long someone has been sober, how long they have been fiddling with the mechanism on the safe: if any one element is not completed, the safe will not open at all ('Half measures availed us nothing,' Alcoholics Anonymous).
'My friend promised when these things were done I would enter upon a new relationship with my Creator' ... 'we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start' ... 'If we are painstaking about this phase of our development,' (Alcoholics Anonymous).
This line:
'No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.' (Alcoholics Anonymous)
... is not a get-out clause in terms of action; it does not licence prevarication or sloppiness.
What does it instruct? Two things:
- The actions might not all be taken immediately and with maximum expertise, but they are taken with reasonable alacrity.
- The results in terms of our character, the material outcomes in our lives, our mental and emotional condition, will be less than perfect but better than they were.
If someone has not completed the work of the first nine Steps, they are still at entry level. They're still outside the Kingdom. They're still fiddling with the mechanism on the safe.