Wayne B. grew up as what he calls a “little Christian boy,” raised in an alcoholic home and attending church every Sunday. By his own account, he was nicknamed “Lil Wayne” long before the rapper made the name famous—a detail that gets a laugh as he reflects on the timing. But beneath the humor is a serious story about how one chapter nearly cost him his sobriety.

When his sponsor—who, as Wayne notes with dry wit, “appointed himself” to the role—asked him to read the Big Book, Wayne encountered “We Agnostics,” the fourth chapter. His immediate reaction was dismissal. *I’m not agnostic,* he thought. *I’m a Christian. This chapter isn’t for me.* So he skipped it and moved on to chapter five.

The problem with that half-measure became clear only later. By convincing himself that he didn’t need to read or internalize “We Agnostics,” Wayne had already planted a seed of doubt about the entire program. If he could skip a chapter, what else could he skip? If he wasn’t convinced by the book’s case for alcoholism, how deep would his commitment really go?

Wayne’s struggle to accept his own alcoholism ran deeper than chapter selection. Diagnosed with psychiatric conditions starting at age nine, he’d spent his childhood in an alcoholic environment—which Bill W. himself acknowledged in AA literature: any child raised in such a home is “bound to turn out to be more or less neurotic.” Wayne places himself firmly on the “more” side. And that neurosis, he realized, had become a way of explaining away his drinking. Maybe it wasn’t alcoholism—maybe it was just his nerves, his condition, his upbringing.

The turning point came when his sponsor circled back to “We Agnostics” and explained it differently. *He doesn’t mean you’re agnostic,* the sponsor said. *He means you feel and think like that while you believe in God.* The chapter, in other words, wasn’t about literal atheism. It was about the mental patterns that keep people locked in denial—the way people can *believe* in God intellectually while still acting as though they’re in charge, still thinking they can manage their drinking through willpower or understanding.

That reframing stunned Wayne. It wasn’t a trick or a gotcha. It was the actual message of the chapter, and once he understood it, he could no longer skip over it. The chapter applied directly to him: a person who believed in God but felt and thought like someone who didn’t trust that belief enough to surrender.

This is a talk about how easily we can rationalize our way out of the program—and how a sponsor who knows the literature can bring us back. It’s also about the specific challenge of recovery for people raised in alcoholic homes, where neurosis and the disease can become so tangled that it’s hard to know which is which.