“Abandon yourself to God as you understand God. Admit your faults to Him and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find and join us.” — Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) · Chapter 11 · A Vision For You
The final charge of the 1939 book — the closing lines of its last chapter.
Four imperatives, one sentence each: abandon, admit, clear away, give freely. The whole program compressed into a send-off. Notice the order ends in giving — the book’s last instruction isn’t about staying sober, it’s about handing the thing on, because the founders knew those were the same act. Wherever you are in the sequence today, the door is the same one. “Join us” was never past tense.
Step 12 · The whole program