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We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. Glad to be here. My name is Jerry Jones and I'm an alcoholic, >> sober by the grace of God.

because these steps work, this program works since January the 1st of 1973, for which I'm I'm very grateful. Any of you folks over here on the right that want to move or your left want can't see me or hear me, whatever, you're welcome to. I can see a couple of seats here, you can even set in the pink seats if you want to.

It' be all right with me. We got to turn it over a little more. Can you hear me?

>> Okay. Okay. We're going to talk about the uh the steps of alcoholic synonyms.

You just heard how it works red. And I don't think I can improve a heck of a lot on that, but I can give you some of my experience with this. People are always asking how does how does AA work?

And sometimes we have a difficult time answering that. Uh Ray V, who's a Baptist minister and a speaker in AA conferences like this, um tells a couple of stories that I I stole from him. uh uh and he's commented on that from time to time I understand but this is a story about the minister who went to meet to mis to visit the elderly ladies two elderly ladies and uh they u invited him into their home they were glad very glad to see him very hospitable and they said would you like some cake and he said well uh that'd be fine that'd be fine just have a seat here and we'll go we'll go fix some tea and some cake.

So, they scured off and uh and he sat there and they noticed there was a bowl of peanuts beside him and he just kind of reached over and began to eat the peanuts. And by the time they came back with the cake and tea, he had eaten all the peanuts. And he was a little embarrassed by that.

And he he apologized. He said, "I'm really I'm really sorry. I saw those peanuts and I just I guess I'm a peanut freak.

I just ate the whole damn thing, you And uh and they said, "Oh, don't worry." I said, "Since we've lost our teeth, all we can do is suck the chocolate off of them." Now, that's just kind of the warm-up of the story I really want to tell. While he sat there eating peanuts, he looked over and on the piano in the room was a condom in a glass of water. And he talked to the ladies for a while and but he couldn't get that out of his mind.

And finally he said, "I just I just have to ask about that glass on the piano." And one of the ladies said, "Oh, I'm glad you did." Said, 'We were in the park last year and we found that object right there and it was in a little little wrapper and it said to prevent disease, place on organ. and we didn't have an organ, so we just took it out and put it on the piano. And do you know we haven't had a cold since we did that?

Well, that's sort of like the mystery of Alcoholics Anonymous. Uh we always don't know exactly how it works, but we're blessed to be here and to know that it does work. Some of us are new here.

Some of us are just getting started. And the those of us that have been around for a while provide a little hope for those that that are coming along behind us. And that's the way the program really works.

I read recently that can you imagine a more powerful message to a person who's suffering from any disease than a person who's recovered standing in front of them telling me exactly how they recovered. And that's how our message is transmitted from one to the other and has been. If it hadn't worked that way, we'd all still be meeting in a gate house in Akran, Ohio, I guess, if there was anybody there.

Uh I read another art line the other day that I think is particularly uh apppropo here. It was written by a minister and he was talking about miracles and he said a miracle, one kind of miracle anyway is the replacement of an erroneous thought with the truth and that transforms your life and your perspective of life. And I think largely what the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous do is allow you and I to find the error in our thoughts and replace them with the truth and we see life in a totally different way.

I have a story about alcoholism that came out of my youth. I was raised out in West Texas. I was born out in West Texas and was raised there until I was about 21 up in the panhandle of Texas.

We have a panel to handle too. You all got one. We got one.

I was a little bigger than yours, but that's all right. Uh we uh I was raised on this farm up there and had a dog, a bulldog, English bulldog, mostly English bulldog. I wouldn't vouch for his lineage exactly.

But his name was Patches because he had little black spots on him, you know, and uh he uh was white with black spotes on him. And he was a uh a remarkable dog. Uh he was a hero in our community because he had engaged in a fight with a badger.

Badgers are bad news for dogs. But this badger had run across the wrong dog. Uh he weighed the badger weighed one pound more than patches.

We know because it took about two hours of fighting him, he finally killed that badger and we weighed them both and he outweighed patches by a pound. Everybody in the community knew about factors in his and his fight with the with the badger and and he was a hero hero in the community and he had he had no problems. He was well loved.

He was petted. He was fed. He was admired.

No pro had no competition whatsoever in the barnyard. He was just, you know, king of the walk. And this particular morning he was uh in the yard minding his own business.

And into our yard walked a big boar hog. Neighbor's hog. Ugly hog.

Long yellow tusk. Ambled into your yard. And patches had certain characteristics.

when he made decisions, he married them very firmly and he decided to get hold of the hog and he went sailing out there and got hold of the hog and the hog began to squeal and he was barking and growling. My dad came running out of the barn to see what was going on out there and he began to go out and kick hogs and dogs and cuss and I saw my dog was in a lot of trouble and I went sailing into the middle of that fry. My mother saw her little kid getting in the middle of this this chaos that was going on in the barnyard and she came running out to get into the deal.

Everybody in the barnyard had a problem. We all had a problem. There was a common solution.

Patches turned loose of the hog. Let him go. Well, patches didn't choose to do that.

And and the hog finally drug him alongside the barn and he had to turn loose. And when he did, my dad caught him. He grabbed him up and he was snapping and snarling and he was angry and he was he was wanting that hog.

He was wanting that hog and dad took him over to a water hydrant. The hog had slashed him on the side of his neck with one one of his tusk and he uh dad sent me to the barn to get some pine tar to put on there to stop the bleeding. And we stopped the bleeding and we ran cold water on him and we cooled him off and there was peace.

peace in the barnyard. And we turned patches loose and patches went right back and got hold of the hog again. And it was the same deal.

It was squealing and barking and kicking and cussing and mother ringing her hands and me trying to get my dog and chaos rained in the barnyard. And we dad caught him one more time, drugg him back there too. And this time we chained him.

We committed him. We chained him to the to the water hydrant. Dad got in the pickup and removed all temptation by driving the hog away.

I was given the job of being his counselor. I sat next to him and petted him and soothed him and asked him deep and penetrating questions like, "Patches, did you ever have a good day getting hold of hogs? Does your family object to your getting hold of hogs?

Do they taste good? Why would you want to attack something so much bigger than you are? And you know, in about two hours, I had cured him.

He was laying on the ground. He wasn't tugging at the chain anymore. His tongue was hanging out, you know, and he had that little smile on his face like bulldogs get when they get their tongue out.

And he was looking around. And uh so I went to see my dad and I said, "Dad, we can turn patches loose." uh he's cured. And dad said, "Well, I've had a little trouble with him this morning.

I'm going to check him out." So, Dad checked him out. And uh he said, "Yeah, yeah, I think he's okay." And so, we we turned him loose. He had to go two miles to find the hog, but he got him one more.

Now, some of you can identify with one of the more of the players in that. I guess I was the first hogenon in West Texas. I And it wasn't hogs at all.

It wasn't hogs at all cuz he switched to cattle trucks just a little while later and he just he just caught one of those. And we have a lot of people in this world who catch old cattle trucks. A lot of them are catching hold of hogs, but they move over to cattle trucks and they just don't get back.

And we don't have any solution whatsoever, none, to make it possible for us to catch old cattle trucks. We do not know how it's possible to allow us once we become alcoholics to drink again with any degree of safety whatsoever. We had a deal at my first AA group and uh our deal was if anybody went out and drank and found out how they could do it successfully, they had to come back and describe it, post it on the bulletin board so we could all do it if we wanted to.

Nobody posted anything on the bulletin board. Lots went out. Some came back, some never did.

So we have a really difficult kind of condition that we deal with. It's complicated by the way we It's complicated by the way the the sufferer reacts to his own disease. Everybody knows he's got the problem except him.

And he's blind to his own problem. He defends his illogical and erroneous actions. He lies about him.

I lied about him. I I was defiant. My deal was if you want to talk to me about the way I drank, you better be willing to discuss the worst thing I know about you, cuz we're going to get it all out on the table.

And I'm not going to change one damn bit. I'm going to drink just exactly what I want to drink when I wanted to drink it. Now, there were people like my boss or bosses when they talked to me about it.

I was a little more subtle in the way I dealt with things. I rationalized. Actually, if you had a wife like I had, you might take a drink, too.

Now, that was when my wife was on me, I would say to her, actually, if you had a job like mine and all the pressures I have, you drink, too. I rationalized. I justified.

I hid my problem from myself as long as I could. And we see that happening all the time. Now, we lived.

Why did we drink? Why was alcohol good for us? I don't know why you liked it, but to me, it kind of chemically altered reality.

I could have a bad day and have a few drinks and, you know, it wasn't so bad. What the hell? Let's have another drink.

And and another drink and another drink and after a while it wasn't bad at all. And then it got bad again. But by then I was I was through with the first problem and it but it was always back the next morning.

But that's why I think I don't know why I like to drink as well as I did. But I could I just loved it. I liked to be intoxicated.

I liked being irresponsible. I was responsible a lot, but then I could take little vacations from responsibility and be irresponsible. And I I really liked that very much.

But I hid behind my disease. And I I can look back on my life today and cannot imagine why in the world I couldn't realize and see I had a problem. I I drank mostly at home and and I drank in pretty good quantities toward the end.

I drank at least a quart of whiskey every day and I could I could get a few drinks at lunch or something like that. It kind of soothed me over. I did most of my drinking at night, which meant that my one of the main responsibilities my wife had was getting me to bed.

It was really important that I rest after I'd had a quart of whiskey and and she it was her job. It was her job to take me and put me to bed. I didn't always stay in bed.

Uh there were times when she put the there were actually times when she put me to bed without taking me to the bathroom. And then I would get up and wander around the house and and look for the bathroom. It's not always easy to find the bathroom.

Uh if you ever noticed how much closets look like bathrooms, you can make you can see how that easy to make a mistake being. Uh and I smoked. I was an automatic smoker.

I would u swing my feet over to the side of the bed. No matter whether I was drunk or sober, my cigarettes and my lighter were always at right there. I could just reach out and pick them up.

And when I was searching for the bathroom, that's the first thing I did was light up a cigarette. You could kind of see from the glow on your cigarettes what was out there, you know. And It wasn't a pretty picture.

I uh come back to the side of the bed and sometimes I wasn't through smoking and then you would sit on the side of the bed and smoke the rest of your cigarette. Well, sometimes you were tired. Often I was pretty tired and drinking made me tired, I guess.

And I would kind of lay back on the pillow and finish my bed. And one night, one night, I woke up and there was a pretty goodized fire going on my side of the bed. And we uh we got the fire put out.

The bed was pretty well ruined by the time we got the fire put out. It's very difficult to explain that. Uh the best explanation I've ever heard for that is just to tell them you think the damn thing was on fire when you got in there.

Uh, I uh I got up the next morning and uh I needed to go to work quickly. I needed to get the hell out of the house as quick as I could. I shaved, I showered, and got out of there.

And as I went out the door, I told my wife, "Buy any kind of bed you want. Buy any kind of bed you want. Don't worry about cost.

Just buy any kind of bed you want." And I went to work and I came back to have a few drinks and relax a little bit in the evening. And there was a letter from my wife to me. She was there, but she had written me a letter.

Seemed very strange to me, but I read the damn letter. And the letter said something like, "Jerry, I have been talking to you about your smoking and drinking for a long time now. You've got to do something about your smoking and drinking.

I can't go to bed at night without worrying about my life, the lives of our children, and even your life. You got to do something about this." And I did because I was responsible. Well, I told you that I was I quit smoking.

I just quit smoking. Never crossed my mind to moderate or change the way I drink. I went to a few months before I quit drinking.

I went to the doctor. My firm required me to go to have all the employees to have a a physical every year. And the year before the doctor had told me that my liver tests were not good.

That uh he said, "Do you drink?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "How much?" And I said, "Pretty good." And uh he said, "Well, you really need to moderate. Some people can drink, some people can't, and you've got a bad liver problem here." So I uh I didn't do anything about that, of course. I just drank like I always drank.

And I went to the doctor and uh the next year and he uh he looked at me and he ran the test again and he called me and he said, "See, I want to show you this test, this graph." He said, "You're test is off the chart. You're in serious trouble with your liver now. You got to do something about your liver.

Now, what I want you to do is not drink anything at all for 10 days and return and we'll repeat the test. Well, I left his office and had absolutely no intention whatsoever of ever going back. I wasn't going to quit drinking.

Why in the hell would if I quit drinking and went back and it was better, you know, he's not going to let me drink anymore. If it was worse, you have you ever heard of a doctor who had a patient that had bad liver problems, said, "Drink a quart of whiskey a day." Hell no. They're not going to tell you that.

That was a no- win situation for me. Why would I want to go back to that? Now, that's just kind of the insanity that lived in my life.

That's kind of the insanity that persisted in my life until I reached a place in my life where I couldn't go on. I reached the place that they talk about the dilemma of the alcoholic in the big book where I I had a choice. I could either go on trying to blot out my life which was unacceptable to me or I could try to do something about it.

And I decided to try to do something about it. I decided to try to quit drinking. Something I'd promised I would never do in my life.

But I decided I would try to quit. And I uh I tried two days. Two days I was without alcohol.

I don't know how you were when you quit drinking, but it surprised me. If you're doing something bad for yourself, you'd think you'd when you quit you'd start getting better. It didn't happen for me.

I I was unable to sleep. I don't know whether anybody else had that problem or not. Uh I was always in the wrong place.

If I was outside, ought to be inside. If I was inside, ought to be sitting down. If I was sitting down, ought to be laying down.

If I laying down, I ought to be up walking around outside. And I mean, I'm just moving and grooving quick. And uh it's driving me crazy.

I can't think about but one thing in the world. Alcohol. My body, all my body was sending messages to my brain and says, "We need a drink.

You've forgotten something today. Get it down here right now. We need it." And so I did something else I promised I'd never do.

I called Alcoholics Anonymous. And uh I reached a very unsympathetic woman on the other end of the line. I told her I was having a little problem quitting drinking and she said, "When do you drink?" I said, "Well, mostly in the evening.

and she said, 'Well, you need to go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous every night. I said, I I couldn't possibly do that. I uh I'm a busy, big- time lawyer, and I I just wouldn't have time for that.

And she said, "Didn't you say you'd been drinking every evening?" I said, "Yes." And she said, "Well, we're going to quit that, aren't we? So, you're going to have some free time." So, I said, "What do you got? What kind of So anyway, I got into Alcoholics and Arms.

Didn't understand a thing in the world about what you were doing here. Saw your funky little signs on the wall. I didn't have a Sunday school problem.

That's what you all were talking about. I had a serious problem. I wanted somebody to fix me.

And the problem is to work the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to recover from alcoholic the alcoholic condition, you have to be involved. There are no spectators who are alcoholics who ever recover. You're a player whether you like it or not.

And I had to begin to play. And they told me that alcohol send alcoholic my alcoholism centered in my mind. They told me that I had to learn to think and react to life in a new way.

And they told me the way I would do that is to take the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And so very reluctantly, knowing they wouldn't work, but having no other options, I started doing what the people of Alcoholics Anonymous, the book says suggested. They weren't suggesting these things to me.

They were telling me what I needed to do. And so I began to go down this road because they were obviously alcoholics. They talked about it.

I could understand it. We I could identify with them. And they had changed their life.

And they treated me differently than I had ever been treated in any group before. They never didn't ask me what my job was. They didn't seem to give a damn that I was a big- time lawyer.

They didn't ask me whether I had a swimming pool in my backyard, what kind of car I drove, how much money I made. None of the things that were important to me were discussed. They asked me what step I was on.

They asked me if I had a sponsor. They asked me all these questions and they did things, strange things. They stood up in meetings and did some of the strangest damn things I ever saw in my life.

They talked about the worst things in their life, the terrible things that they had done, things that had happened to them, and the audience would just laugh like hell every time they told one of them. The most inappropriate sense of humor that I had ever seen in my life. Well, I'd done a couple things I thought were kind of cute, so I thought, well, hell, I might tell them.

And so, I told them, and they they embraced me. And they said, "Look at here. Jerry is beginning to be himself." And that's what it's all about to be yourself.

You don't have you can't start from anywhere except where you are right now. What time is it now? Where are you here?

You don't start from being vice president of a company or being married or what you start with what you got today and you begin to work through that and that's where the program takes you. You start off it positions you exactly where you need to be with the first step says we were powerless over alcohol. Our lives were unmanageable.

Was I powerless over alcohol? My god. Yes.

Yes. I tried to drink three drinks a day for over a year and a half and never made it one day. I couldn't.

When I put something in, it kept going. And then they told me about the doctor's opinion about how the doctor had written this opinion and said that it was an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind. Well, I didn't break out in hives and I didn't have sneezing and that sort of thing when I drank.

That wasn't my idea of allergy, but they said, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Your body reacts differently to alcohol than most people.

You are mentally and bodily different from your fellows." Now, I didn't particularly like to hear that, but it's the truth. It's the truth. When I drink whiskey, I take a drink and it goes down, hits the bottom, boom.

It begins to kind of warm me up and then my body, my my stomach sends a message to the to my brain that says, "I think we'll have another one of those and another one and another one and another one until I've had too many." And then I sober up and the obsession of the mind kicks in. Do you know what an obsession is? An obsession is a great big thought.

It's so big when it gets in your head, it pushes all the other thoughts out. And my obsession was a drink would improve this situation. It didn't matter who what the situation was, a drink would improve this thing.

And so I'd have the drink and we'd go through the cycle again. And I could see that that was true in my life. That was reality.

The steps are really a road to reality. We think chemically we want to change reality, but what we really want to do is learn to live with reality. We never could change the bulldog.

He had to get hold of something. But if we could have reached him, if we could have given him a different view of life where he could live comfortably without without drinking, he would have been okay. And that's what happens to us.

We change the way we see and react to life. And the first step is very very important that we recognize that we we're powerless over the stuff. We can't use it.

The only thing the only choice we have at all is to leave it alone. And the other part is that our lives are unmanageable. We were trying to run things.

We were trying to make the world work in our way and that just doesn't work. If you think you can manage life, make a list of what's going to happen tomorrow. Have you ever done that?

I have. I was a lawyer and I had a list of things. But I got tomorrow I'm going to do A B CDE E and F and that's what I'm going to do tomorrow.

only I'd get one telephone call about A a between A and B and the rest of it just go off the wall and I'm doing X Y and Z down here. You can't manage life. Life comes to you in all different directions and all different kinds.

And we were people who we were people who insisted on it going a certain way and didn't even know we were doing that really. But we were reacting as though we had to control it and it we couldn't control it and we were unhappy with it and we couldn't accept the fact that it was really beyond our can to to do that. So you get a real grounding in where you are and and and what you are when you take step one.

We devote a lot of our book to that very thing to break through the rationalization, the justification, all the other things that we use to hide the the truth from ourselves and and and we have to get through those things and you have to get all your reservations. I never sponsored anybody in my life that I didn't and I was sponsored this way. They told me to mark down anything in the book Alcoholics Anonymous that I didn't believe applied to me, that I disagreed with because we were going to have to talk about any reservations I had because if I had reservations, sooner or later an event would come along and I would act out what I had the reservation against.

So, I had to break down my defense system so I could accept I am who I am. And that's the greatest freedom on earth to be who you are living inside your own values. Can't touch me with a 10-ft pole when I'm in that situation.

What are you going to do to me now? What are you going to do to me now? So, I began to do some other things.

Now, I had a real problem with step two. Step two has some concepts in it that are difficult for me. It said, "I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

Came to believe. Believe. I've been to a lot of churches.

I had been to a lot of churches. I had talked to a lot of ministers. I had read books.

I had been looking for God all my life. And the second day I was sober. I picked up a little 24-hour daybook to see what those A&A people were doing because I was very quick and having a hell of a lot of problems going on.

And I I needed some help. And it said I was going to give my drinking problem to God this year. I can't tell you how disappointed I was in that statement.

How you going to give something to somebody you can't find? And I asked ministers, bright men and women, how do you get this thing? And they said, you have faith.

You have faith. Did you ever try to have faith? I've sat in chairs and decided, I'm going to have faith.

Nothing happened. Same is true of belief. I can't give you my beliefs.

I can tell you what my beliefs are. They may or may not resonate with your own life, but you're going to have to have your own beliefs. That's why we come to believe.

I came to believe certain things in Alcoholics Anonymous. I came to believe them because I had experience, not because I had faith, not because I came with faith. I had some people may and it's wonderful if you can, but I didn't.

I was as nearly agnostic as you can get. And I came to believe certain things because I observed things happening in Alcoholics Anonymous and things were happening to me which made me believe I believe that, you know, faith without proof is gullibility. But I told them in the beginning, I don't believe all this stuff.

And they said, "We don't care. We don't care whether you believe it or not. We don't care whether you have faith or not.

What we're going to do for you is we're going to tell you to take certain actions. And if you take them with honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness, you will have your own personal experience, and you will believe. We don't know exactly what it'll look like.

We don't know exactly what it'll be, but it'll be better than anything you've ever had in your life. So, that started me on belief. I saw people in alcoholics get well that should not have been able to get well.

I uh they'd come in, you know, with a four day growth of beard on their face, dirty clothes, rusty zipper. You know why they got the rusty zipper? Uh, and they uh, somebody here knows I and you know that's this guy's not going to make it.

He's just not going to make it. He hasn't got enough left. He can't make a complete sentence.

He starts telling you about one thing and it drifts off and it's something else before he gets through with it. He's not going to make it. And he hangs around Alcoholics Anonymous for a while.

take gets a shave, a new pair of pants, some clean clothes, takes a bath, and emerges from that horrible state that he came in in as a as a decent, god-fearing human being. How'd that happen? How did that happen?

Something here is working. I sat in rooms like this and got caught up in what was going on. And I felt something.

There was a power working in rooms of alcoholics anonymous. And I had to had to do something with this God as I understand him. I I had always defined God as or thought of God as a big man somewhere sitting on a cloud wearing a long robe had lightning bolts on one side you know and a scorec card right up here and he kept score for me and pulled out a lightning bolt every once in a while knocked me on my can because I wasn't doing the right thing and I tried to avoid that.

I didn't believe that. I did not believe that. I'd driven a tractor a lot of days out there as a kid in West Texas and looked up at the clouds and never saw him sitting on the cloud one day.

Just couldn't. And I went to the preachers told them, "Okay, how do you know what God stand on when he made the earth? They haven't got any questions.

They haven't got any answers for questions like that, you know." And they had told me to have faith. And I had a trouble getting my head around God. Now, I have no problem whatsoever in understanding that there's something a lot bigger in this world than we are.

I read a couple articles one time a long time ago says talking about space. Sun's 93 million miles from Earth. If this distance was the thickness of that paper, it stack of paper would be 71 ft high to the nearest star and our galaxy would be 3 million a stack of paper 3 million ft high.

That's big. That's big. There the scientists talk about the big bang theory.

I got a question for the scientist. Who made the bang? Who made the material that sailed out and created the universe?

Where'd it come from? There's something bigger than we are. A whole lot bigger than we are.

But what I had real trouble with was that that could have anything to do with me. I was so small, so incon insignificant, and live such a short period of time on my life. You know time another factor about God and this universe and things is is time.

We manufactured time but Mitchner in his book uh the centennial book talks about the old Rockies. There were some ancient rocky mountains near the same place where the where the uh new ones are and they were 10,000 ft high according to the scientist and uh they just wore away and he says how does that happen? And said each million years they lost 250 ft.

Which meant that each thousand years they lost 3 in which meant each year you couldn't even measure the wear and tear on those mountains. So yeah. Yeah.

There's something bigger than I am. Yeah. There's a power greater than myself.

But could it have anything to do with me? But in Alcoholics Anonymous, I saw it having to do with people. I saw people getting well.

And so I defined God is whatever works in Alcoholics Anonymous. Whatever kind of power there is in Alcoholics Anonymous. And you know, I uh still c still think that that's the most direct experience I've had with the power.

I uh I don't I don't at all want to make light of anybody else's experience. I had no conversion experience in the sense that I went up to the front of the church. And they asked me after I'd gone to the front of the church cuz I thought that was where it was going to happen.

They asked me, Jerry, don't you feel different? And I said, "Yes, I did." I was more disappointed than ever because nothing had happened to me. Now, it happens to some people.

It happens to some people. I really believe that just didn't happen to me because I was demanding. I had set up standards that God had to meet.

It just doesn't work that way. It works only when we meet the standards the universe has set for us to meet. And that's where I missed the boat for so long.

It wasn't in sprinkling and dunking and things that they did. I done all all those things have been done to me more than once. Nothing ever happened until I got in a chair in the middle of a bunch of drunks and I saw some power working in their lives and felt it beginning to work in my own.

And then I came to believe and when you when you come to believe then you look back what all these other folks have been talking about all these years and you can say yeah that's right they're right. Bill says in the book, you know, how many people in this world are are helped by their religions? They go back to their religions.

They're involved in their religions and they're happy in their religions. I've never fit in a religion very well because I'm kind of a mongrel. I just don't quite find a spot for me.

Alcoholics Anonymous has been my spot. But it's not the only thing I've studied or read or done since I've been in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I've gone back over those same books and those same to the same ministers and I've talked to them.

I've talked to ministers who said, you know, I've been to some of those alcoholic anonymous meetings. My gosh, if we could get that going on in our church, it would be something great. We could reach a lot of people.

People really transform their lives in this. And the book talks about how we're reborn. I don't know how that word ever got left in the book with a bunch of agnostics and atheists like we have.

But somebody let it slip through. The preachers talk about reborn being reborn all the time. But we are we're changed at a depth foundations of our mind.

If we really involve ourselves, if we do the things, you know, we back on step one there, back on how it works. Do you ever go through that? We read that thing.

So many times y'all don't you you read an abbreviated version but we read it so often in my part of the country that we kind of get immune to hearing it. We don't really think about what it's saying. Think about what what they're asking us to do in there.

It requires thoroughess. It requires honesty. It requires willingness to go to any length to get sober.

It requires fearlessness. You know, you got to take a chance. What a chance are you taking?

Not much of one because you can have your misery back any day you want it. But you've got to be willing to risk a new idea. There's no easier, softer way.

We give up our old ideas. That's what a lot of our program is about is to finding out what First of all, you don't even know what they are. And then when you find them out, you hang on to them because they you think they've worked, but they haven't.

So you have to get a new frame of reference for this. Says half measures available nothing. Now that's a kicker right there.

If you do half of this thing, you ought to get 50%. Right? Not a deal.

Zero. Half measures get you zero. So it requires a real deep dedication to find your bottom, to find where you are, who you are, and to take a good look at your spiritual life.

And that's another thing we talk about this being a spiritual program. What is spiritual? What is spiritual?

Spiritual is never anything that you can see. Never anything you can see. It's love.

It's kindness. It's goodness. And it can be always discovered because the more you try, more you give away of it, the more you have of it.

If as opposed to material, I chase material things a long time. I was big on material stuff, but it has no lasting benefit to you. You just get it and it's gone away.

I remember when I first started practicing law, I I had to ride the bus to work. I did not like to ride the bus to work. And I knew just as soon as I could afford two cars, everything was going to be all right.

And I ultimately got enough money together to buy another car. And so I would take my car to work. You know, I hadn't had that second car a week until I came upon a great truth.

wrong kind of car. I needed a bigger car, a better car, a different kind of car. And then I got a bigger, better, different kind of car.

And that one lasted about two weeks. And I saw another one that I really thought maybe I should have got. And so you chase more, better, and different uh till you can't chase them anymore.

And you never get any fulfillment out of. But you get fulfillment out of spiritual life. You feel good about yourself.

You feel good about your fellow man. You feel good about life. You can always find something good going on.

And that's what the spiritual life is all about for us. We need to we need to engage in that spiritual conduct. We're having we're headed toward a spiritual awakening.

And these are just the first few steps that we take along the way. Well, we're going to stop here now and switch over to take a few minutes break and we're going to switch over and do 3, four, and five. So, I'll see you back here in about 20 minutes.

>> Okay. Well, as we finish the 12th step, uh the finish how it works, the part we usually read, it says we we're convinced a that we're alcoholics and b that uh no human power can help us and that God could and would if he were sought. And step three says, we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

This uh carries forward some of my reservations about uh God. As you can imagine, this sounded an awful lot like the altar call that I heard in a lot of churches. And it is uh the altar call that you hear often in churches.

I believe the churches didn't go much as far as teachings didn't go a lot beyond that. They left you to the Bible and your Sunday school classes and that sort of thing. And we're a little maybe a little more organized uh as how as to how you proceed, how you turn your will in your life over to the care of God than than perhaps they are.

At least it worked that way for me. Uh remarkable things happen at step step three. I uh there's a story about a little boy uh who had a tricycle.

He'd ride his tricycle up and down the front of the house. He lived next door to the preacher. I haven't got anything against preachers, by the way.

Just they they just happened to be handy for me to tell my story. And he'd ride him bike up and down the street. one day hit a little chug hole in the sidewalk, threw him off his tricycle, bent the wheel of his tricycle, skinned his knees, tore his pants.

He got up and he looked at that wreck and the preacher, he didn't see the preacher standing nearby, but he got up. He said, "Son of a bitch." Preacher stepped out from behind the bush and he said, "No, no, no, no, my son." to this is not the way we deal with adversity. When we encounter adversity, we say, "Praise God." The kid just looked at him and drugg his old bent tricycle off and he got the tricycle fixed and got a new pair of pants, his knee healed.

Same kid, same preacher, same sidewalk, same tricycle. riding down there licky split one day and he hits the same chug hole, throws him off, bends the wheel of his tricycle, skins his knees, tears his pants. He gets up and takes a deep breath and he looks at the wreck and he said, "God, the wheel on that tricycle just straightened up.

The pants were mended and the knee was healed. And the preacher having seen this happen said, "Son of a Our book says that to take this step, the first requirement is to be convinced that a life based on self-centeredness can hardly be successful. Well, did you have any trouble with self-centerness?

I didn't. I started reading the big book after maybe a week in Alcoholics Anonymous because people were always quoting it to me and I'm not going to be quoted to unless I know what the source is really saying about things. So I read the thing just to be sure that they were giving me straight scoop and they were.

But when I hit that page over there that said selfishness, self-centerness, that we think is the root of our troubles, I skipped the rest of that page and went on to the next page. Why should I read about your problems? I am neither selfish nor self-centered, and there's no need for me to pay attention to this kind of nonsense.

I'm I give money to the church. I support a family. Uh God knows I'm generous as a to a fault with my wife.

Uh I could not ever be considered selfish or self-centered. And so I had a little trouble with this concept. I didn't find self-centerness quickly.

I had to begin to see it in my own life as I heard it described in your lives in meetings. I uh I was sitting in a meeting one night. The funny thing about AA is you know you got all this wealth of experience.

Your database is your life. All the things that have happened to you. You've never learned the lessons in a lot of those things.

You've just lived through them. tried to discard them, did your best to forget them, and go on. And I uh I was no different.

And I was in a meeting one night and I heard a guy describing, he was a guy that he was a wonderful friend friend of mine, but he got fired from almost every job he ever had within two weeks. He just could not keep his mouth shut. He'd get there and find out where the restroom was and what time lunch it was off.

And then he started trying to run the place and they'd run him off. And I was sitting there and I I was thinking about him and uh and I uh I remember that's where I remembered the story about patches to begin to about that that old bulldog. Uh then I a little later I I remembered another thing that happened to me.

I I watched a lot of television while I was drinking. I uh my solution to getting drunk and getting in trouble was to not go where I got drunk and got in trouble anymore. And when you drank as long as I did in Dallas, there was a lot of places you couldn't go.

And I didn't want a DWI because I figured that would get me my law license lifted some way or other. and uh and that I have to explain that to those un well those nice people that I worked with downtown uh who probably wouldn't understand. Uh so I uh I I spent a lot of time at home and I got bored with television.

Drunk, you're bored with television. One day I was in a pet shop. I don't know why I was in the pet shop, but I saw an aquarium sort of like they have down here.

I could give a demonstration of this whole talk right here downstairs at that uh at that aquarium because I selected the size aquarium that I wanted. I put the aquarium between my chair and the wall. I put the kind of gravel the colors that I wanted in the bottom of it.

I put the kind of plants that I wanted in it. leafy, graceful plants that sort of reached up to the surface. I filled it with water and I put the kind of fish in there that I wanted.

And the kind of fish that I wanted were pretty slow swimming fish. I had a light on it. I could make it daylight or I could make it dark.

And I fed my fish. They were my fish. It was my aquarium.

I fed my fish if they were to be to be fed. Sometimes, sometimes it was a land of plenty and sometimes there was a famine upon the land. It was an idealic place.

I could sit there and look at those fish glide around that water and I just love watching them. It was a perfect world. Well, almost.

This one night I remembered there was always one fish, usually a bowl cleaner or some necessary fish that you had in there. And he would he would swim up to the generally one of the prettier fish and nip him on the tail which would cause the prettier fish to begin to swim faster to get away from him. He in turn would encounter other fish and the first thing you know the whole damn bowl was just going fish everywhere.

just drove me crazy. And I'd slap the side of that tank, let them know there's somebody, some power out there greater than they were that was not happy. I gave him three chances, three claps of thunder and I realized there were some people that some fish that were unfortunate.

They seem to have been born that way. They needed a little hands on experience with the power. So, I bought me a little dip net and I would catch the bad fish and I take him out and put my hand on top of the dip net, hold him on my lap and have a drink.

When they get still, I would flip them back in the tank. If they float, you've kept them out too long. So, I would give them three claps of thunder, three hands-on experiences with the power.

Now, you know, any self-respecting, intelligent fish would catch on after that kind of treatment, but there are still such unfortunates. They're hopeless, helpless, and I would the fourth time I put the dip net on them, I would just carry them carefully into the commode and flush them. Nobody, nobody in the world knew I was playing that game.

My son, one night I was doing a 12step call and he was in the program. He invited me to come to a hospital. he's a doctor and talked to a young woman who was having a lot of trouble with her kidneys and her and her uh liver and he wanted her to cheer it up a little bit.

And so I was talking to her and I told her about my fish and when I got to the part where I said I took them in and flushed them down the toilet, he was supposed to his deal was that he was going to be able to stand in the back of the room. He wasn't going to say a word while this is going on. But from the back of the room, I heard he said, "My god, I wonder where all those fish went.

Well, this night I remembered what I remembered my fish and I remembered what I did with them in this little game I was playing. And it suddenly occurred to me, you know, I've been thinking that my life is not unmanageable. Hell, I can't even run a fishbowl.

And interestingly, I wonder how many 41-year-old men get upset by what fish are doing in a fishbowl. That might be self-centeredness. And then it began to open up to me.

And I began to discover self-centeredness everywhere I went on the freeway. Do you have a lane of traffic on a freeway? I do.

It's called It's called my lane. What goes on in my lane is my business. We travel at my speed in my lane.

And there are people who actually interfere with you in your lane. And somebody has to punish them. And conveniently, I can change lanes and the next lane becomes my lane right away.

and I speed up and I can run off the road because it's my lane or if I go to a stop sign and I'm in the right lane or want to turn right and some fools in front of me who just sits there just sits there doesn't go doesn't turn right what he could then just drives why wasn't he in the left lane so that so that I could turn right where I wanted to turn and I took things very seriously I didn't realize how many hours a day I spent in my head with this self-centered concept. It's incredible self-centeredness. I believe my wife one time said this.

It was her original thought and I it may be right. She said, "I believe that insanity is total self-centeredness. We uh we're born and we get started in life looking for things.

We want food and we have to announce that we're taking care of ourselves as infants and we have certain dual urges. I heard an old man call him one time, an old spiritual teacher. He said we uh we want to have pleasure and avoid pain.

We want to have acceptance and avoid rejection. We want to be important and we want to not be ignored at all. And you you think about that and and what we did when we had all those things going on for us or trying to get to those deals, trying to get one thing and avoid the other is we get totally wrapped up in ourselves.

And the first thing we did as little babies is we cried and that got people to come to us and take care of us. So we kept crying until people got tired of us crying and they started leaving us alone. Then we discovered something else.

We'd be cute. We'd gurgle and coup and they'd pick us up and do what we wanted us to do. But now we're gurgling and cooing when we don't really feel like it.

So we've got an internal conflict. It's like coming up on the street sign. It says one way.

It's got an arrow pointing way. Which which way we going to go? One way.

So we're caught with this internal struggle and we're trying to please people at the same time get what we want. and we we try to do what other people want us to do and that gets us some good for a while. But we're doing a lot of things we don't want to do.

We try to follow the rules, but we don't always like to follow the rules. So, we're constantly struggling with this internal focus that we have. We have this strange mind that or strange phenomena in our mind that we have an observer.

If you really think about it, it knows what we're doing. It can look and see why and what we're doing. And this observer is a bigger mind than the little mind that is demanding what it wants.

We focus on things. You know, you and I could walk out and go down the street and at the end of the street and we'd say somebody say, "What was the what was the most attractive thing you saw on the street?" You'd see one thing and I'd see another. We focus.

We have a screen in our minds. The things that we don't think are important just pass right on through. We don't even notice them.

But we pick up everything that that we think is important. And when we're self-centered, we pick up everything that affects us that can impact me in any way. And we try to control or force that to happen.

So we are trying to control our lives with our will. Bill and in in the there's a solution. The paper he wrote before the big book and which included in the big book uh says that our common sense becomes uncommonly good sense when we focus it in the right direction.

But we're we're focused on this trying to take care of me and what I need and what I want, where I'm going to go and what's going to happen to me. And who did that? You know, you can walk into the room and if I don't know you or know you very little and not speak to me and I'm not offended by that, but let somebody come in that I like and admire that doesn't speak to me and I think, well, what's wrong with that some What did I do to him?

And I begin to I begin to internalize what's going on there. And I live my life that way, reacting with knee-jerk reactions to all kinds of stimuli that's going on around me. And I don't ever seem to catch on at all that I am self-centered.

That's what self-centered is. The focus on things that have to do with self, self-involvement, self-centerness, self-criticism. We can't live in that arena with any kind of comfort.

I can't. And the book says you can't either. I uh when you say your your will, what is your will?

That's your want to. You're here this morning because unless the judge sent you, you want to be here. And if you're here because the judge sent you, you're here because you don't want to go to jail where he's going to send you if you don't come here.

We're act we're acting on our will and we need to learn to devote our will to the right goals. And Bill in the book says that our we devote our wills to God's will. That's the proper use of the wills to try to determine what God would have us be.

God God would want us to be our lives. What are our lives? Well, our lives are what's going on around us.

That's that thing you can't control. That's a bad fish nipping you on the tail. That's a guy dipping you out of the water at the dip net.

That's all of those things are what's going on in life and you can't control them at all. But we react as though we react as though they can be controlled. We make demands on ourselves on and on others that that are impossible to be to be achieved.

So what we're trying to do in step three is get into the world of reality. We want to to focus our minds on that which is positive for us. The early AAS had the four absolutes.

absolute unselfishness, honesty, purity, and love. Bill didn't include him in the book because he said he thought drunks would go crazy trying to be absolute anything. And he's probably right.

But there's a great old man named he's deceased now, wonderful OA named Paul Keebler from St. Louis, Missouri. And Paul was a big four, he was a big talker about the four absolutes.

And I said, "Well, what about Bill? And Bill said think that was just a little too strenuous for us alcoholism. And he said, "Oh Christ." He said, "That ain't got anything to do with it." He said, "Those are just goals." He said, "You get ready to make a decision.

You get ready to live your life on something. You say, "What am I going to do today? Is it pretty?

That's love. Do something beautiful and kind. Is it unselfish?

What's it going to do to the other guy? Is it the right thing to do? That's purity.

That's purity. And last of all is am I telling myself the truth? That's honesty.

So if it passes all those tests, do it. If it turns out it was wrong, you've got a 10th step. You can clean it up tomorrow.

That's what we're looking at. Another great old AA Earl H says, "Stop doing what you know is wrong and start doing what you know is right. Your life will improve." And that's kind of where we're going with this step.

When I got here, this step bothered me a lot because I, you know, you can you can see it turned my wheel. I thought I was going to have to go to China and be a missionary or some damn thing. You know, I didn't want to do this.

This didn't look like my kind of deal. I'd already thought about this, but so far I haven't had to go to China. Uh, and what I decided this meant to me, what this step meant to me was I believe that God's will for me is to live my life the way the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous dictate.

to process what happens in my life through those steps to have the goals and the values that the steps give me. Those are the things that I believe are for me. And so when I made that decision that that's what I'm going to do, I believe that's when I took the third step.

And I have tried with varying degrees of success to process my life through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I forget it from time to time like all of us do. I go back and you know I'm running the show again.

But it never has worked and even when it seems to work often times there's a terrible price to pay to in what you do to other people. So, as long as we're practicing the four absolutes, as long as we're trying to move for what we think God would have us be, life seems to go along pretty good. Pretty good.

We are we're dealing with spiritual values here. We're not we're letting the material take care of itself. And it seems to do that.

At least it has in my life. Uh, I think that's what I want to move into step four with when you make that kind of decision. step four which says that we uh made a fearless and uh searching a fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

The leadin to that step in the book says that though our decision step three was a vital one was a vital and crucial step, it could have little permanent effect unless at once followed by a strenuous effort to face and be rid of the things in ourselves which have been blocking us. We had to get down to causes and conditions. blocking us from what?

Three times I believe in that chapter it refers to not being able to contact a power greater than ourselves. I think self-centeredness blocks us from God. I think it's like CS Lewis said, there are two kinds of men.

They're the kind that say to God, "Thy will be done." And there's the kind that God says to them, "Thy will be done." And I'm a lot better off if I'm trying to do God's will than I am trying to do for him to tell me to try to work it on my own without his help. He's a perfect gentleman. And I'm using he in a generic s, not in a generic sense, but in a expansive sense.

I don't think don't know whether God's man, woman, or both. That that hadn't become real important to me so far. Uh and if it is to you, I apologize and I I'll try not to do that anymore.

Uh here's what we get. Here's where we find our old ideas. First thing I they told me about this step was I didn't I didn't need it.

I didn't need to do this. Uh, I'd sent my wife to a psychiatrist because she was obviously kind of hyper uh critical of drinking. Uh, he had wanted to talk to me and so I reluctantly discussed football and things like that with him.

uh we didn't get too deep about that deep and uh I just really couldn't see any value to rehashing all this old crap that had gone on. Um I didn't all I really wanted to do is quit drinking. I didn't want to change my life a lot.

Uh my sponsor didn't do one for quite a while. Another guy in my group hadn't done one for 19 years. That gave me a lot of sauce.

He later on said that was the longest 19 years of his life. I uh I tried to suppress all these things. I had things going on in my head that I'd try to suppress.

I had favorite resentments. It was like I could sit in my green chair and get my bottle of whiskey and I could go to my mind and there was a whole rack of videos that I would play and I'd plug them in and I'd play this one and then I would get to that point where I was offended or harmed in some way and then I would take over and I would finish the show about what was going to happen next time. I was going to get him next time and how I was going to get him.

If there had been a black button that I could have pressed and gotten rid of all the Alanons, there would have been no Alanons before about 1974, about a year after I'd been sober. I had all these things going on in my head and never ever thought about them at all as being negative. You know, did you ever have a good day thinking about a resentment?

I didn't I I really never did, but I spent a hell of a lot of my life dwelling on it. I could switch. I could I could work on Allenon for a while and I'd set it aside and I'd think of somebody else and I'd play that how I was going to kill that guy or what I was going to do to him or they'd beg for mercy and if I had enough crowd around me I'd probably give him mercy and they'd think what a what a wonderful man I was.

You know, Socrates says that a a life without self-examination is not worth living. And Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote this little thing I want to read you here now that I think is just really pretty special. says, "There's a time in the education of every man when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion, that though the universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his own toil bestowed on the plot lot of ground which he was given to till.

You're going to have to accept who you are and recognize that's just exactly what you were supposed to have and do your best in that in that plot of ground and forget all this other stuff. There's another story. This is written by O'Henry, I believe.

I'm not absolutely sure of this, but it was about the old man who was the janitor at the mill. This old fella worked at the mill for many years and then one day the mill was sold. And we know how that happened is I guess it was some s some kind of consolidation or something taking place, but the mill was sold and the new management came in and said, "No one will work here who does not have the ability to read and write." The old man couldn't read or write.

So they put him out on the street. He had no way to make a living. So he he started he had a little bit of money and he started going down to the train station.

The train station ran through this little town. And he would buy a a carton of cigarettes and his people were trying to get on the train to go somewhere in a hurry and wouldn't have time to buy their own cigarettes. He'd sell them a pack of cigarettes in a little profit.

First thing you know, he had a little box that he was carrying all kinds of brands in. First thing you know, he had a little stand. First thing you know, he opened up a stand down at the next station and a friend of his complimenting him on his success.

He was doing very well. He said, "Uh, what are you doing with all your money?" He said, "Oh, I put it in a box under my bed." He said, "You can't do that. You can't leave your money in your box under your bed.

You somebody steal it." He said, "What should I do with it?" He said, "Put it in a bank." He said, "How would I do that?" He said, "I'll show you." So the man took his box of money and went with his friend down to the banker and the banker was real glad to see anybody with a box of money said uh have a seat and he counted the money and filled out a a deposit slip and got the signature cards out and handed it to the old man said now if you just give us your signature right there we'll be all through and you'll have an account with this bank. And the old man said I can't read or write. The bank said, "You mean to tell me you've made all this money and you can't read or write?" My gosh.

He said, "Think of how much think how well you offer you'd be if you if you could read or write." He said, "Oh, if I could read it right, I'd still be a janitor over here at the mill. So, we don't know how good we are. We don't know what we got.

So, we got to look at this thing. We got to process this data that all these lessons we haven't learned. And what we're going to look for is three things.

We're going to look at the three most common forms of self-centeredness. And they will encompass almost every negative event in our lives. And they will have a lesson.

Each one of those negative events will have a lesson for us that will keep us from having to repeat that experience again somewhere down the line if we pay attention. We're going to look for resentments. We're going to look for fear.

and we're going to look at our relationships. And we start off with the columns. Now, when I started off, I couldn't possibly understand the big book.

It talked about those four columns. I didn't know Miss Smith. I didn't know Miss Brown.

I mean, this was way too complicated for me. And I started trying to I started collecting fourstep guides. I had a stack of them, you know, that and it was just almost impossible for me to get my head around this chore that I had.

I wrote it I wrote 40 pages in a spiral notebook uh and left it in the airport in Indianapolis, Indiana one time. I you know and I don't think I some guy thinks I some really strange guy passed through Indianapolis. I'm sure that I well I had trouble deciding what kind of paper to use too.

You know, you can't just write this on anything. Uh loose leaf. No, yellow pad that you tear the pages out easy.

I spiral notebooks. That's what I got a spiral notebook. And then you got I haven't even talked about what you're going to write it with.

What kind of pencil or pen you you know that's finally I had to do what one of the gals in my group used to say. Take pen in hand, put ass in chair and write. And I did it the way the book said.

The first thing it tells us to do is make a grudge list. Is there anything anybody that came to Alcoholics Anonymous that didn't have some grudges? >> And is there anybody I could write pages on who what what was wrong with the world and then they make us take off one of those people institutions or principles and put it in column one.

And then we go to column two and we describe exactly the event that caused the the bad feeling. You know, you don't learn a damn thing if you hear. Who you resent?

My wife. What'd she do? She doesn't understand me.

Did you learn anything? No, you didn't. But if I go further and say, "Well, I wanted to play poker with the boys and in front of all of them, she told me I couldn't play poker.

It embarrassed the hell out of me." Well, now you've learned a little something. And so have I. Move over to the third column.

They say, What did what what what why did that bother you? And they give you four choices. Ambition, self-esteem, security, or relationships.

My wife damaged my self-esteem because she exposed me in front of my client, showed I was hpeed, a wimp, involved that involved my relationships as well. So, I write those two words down and I got column three. And I keep doing that and I go along and every step of this way is each one of these names, each one of these principles, each one of these institutions, I make those same deals.

Maybe with my wife, it was probably more than one event and possibly and I make those make a list and write them all down and I write down the how does that affect me in that third column. And I reach a point down there where I I recognize, you know, these people have been controlling my life. My reaction to these folks have been dominating my whole life.

And it gives me a prayer to say and I say a prayer. And then I move over to column number four. a column which most of us have never certainly me had never really looked at.

That is where was I at fault. Now I understand that you can be just as self-centered feeling like everything is your fault and your name ought might ought to be on that that inventory list as as you can if you think you're a total victim and everybody else is at fault. But most of us never got beyond blame.

We didn't get any further over than blame. And you don't learn a damn thing from life until you get past blame. When you get past blame and you get in that fourth column and you begin to understand what I what I contributed to this situation, then your education truly begins and you begin to understand.

I began to understand what what my life was being dominated by. I finish that and I go to fear. I wasn't afraid.

I'm from West Texas. I'm a man. M.

West Texas men know no fear. Did you ever see a John Wayne movie where John Wayne said, "I feel a little insecure today." Hell no. But they told me, they told me I had to do this damn inventory.

They told me these are the Everybody has these three things. Resentments, fear, and relationships. and yours are messed up somewhere in there.

So I thought, well, you know, probably when I was a little kid, I knew some fear. I'll start back there. Snakes.

Do you like snakes? We may have some people here like them. I was taught not to like snakes because we had rattlesnakes, which are bad snakes, and we had other kind of snakes, which are good snakes.

But a three-year-old kid can't tell the difference between a rattlesnake and a good snake. So I was told, you know, you see that thing on the ground there? That's a snake.

He can hurt you. He can hurt you real bad. So you want to stay away from him.

Then I was told to go outside and play. Did you ever notice snakes are hard to see in the grass? >> They blend right in.

They don't move until you almost step on them. You're barefooted now. You're going to walk through that tall grass barefooted.

There's snakes. Maybe snakes in there. Could hurt you.

Can't see them. You have a feeling in the pit of your stomach. That's fear.

That's fear. Oh. Oh, I had that at other places.

>> Oh, yeah. I've had that feeling before. And you begin to write the things you fear.

People finding out who you are. People talking about you. Afraid you will lose rather than win.

Afraid afraid that what you have will be taken away from you. afraid that people won't like you, afraid you've said the wrong thing someplace, and you I found my life was shot full of fear. And I wrote about my fears.

I didn't realize how much I was dominated by that which I could not control, that which I could not see until it was too late and I had to encounter it. It all worked just exactly like it did with that snake. And I uh I'm still afraid of snakes, but my grandson had a bullsnake, and he was kind enough to let me hold him recently.

Now I've got to either be a wimp or hold the damn snake. I held the damn snake. That's what I did.

He didn't hurt me. Funny how smooth and slick he was. different than anything I'd ever thought.

But it's I had to find out about that. Now, I didn't find it necessary to write about my sex relationships. At least initially, I didn't find it necessary.

I was married, had two kids, so I knew something about what was going on there. And uh wasn't messing around any. So, I didn't uh I didn't have any doing any point in writing about some of that old stuff.

Uh so, I didn't write about it. Now, I'm going to skip over to the fifth step where it says that we admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. I had a sponsor.

I did the four step because I was involved with a bunch of people who were pretty obsessed with this AA program. You know, you could have a hangail. They'd say, "You got a hangail?" "Yeah." "You done a forep." Now, that wasn't inappropriate because I was the kind of guy that could have a hangail and I'd look at it and think, you know, that's been there for three days.

That could be cancer. Then I'm standing in the doctor's office and say, "See how red it is? Is there a cancer that of the cancer of the cuticle that I could could be having?" So I did the fourth step, but didn't really want to do a fifth step.

Reason I was reluctant to do the fourth step was because I could read the fifth step. So I went to my sponsor one day, very unusual thing for me to do. and asked him, I said, "Did you uh did you find it necessary to do a fourth step?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "Did you find it necessary to do a fifth step?" He said, "Of course I found it necessary to do a fifth step." I said, "Tell me about that.

I'd like to know about doing fifth steps." He said, "Well, I did it with my sponsor." Said, "Didn't really amount to a lot." said he I went to see him. We had an appointment and he had my little book that I'd written it all down in and I gave him my little book and he thumbmed it around in a little while. I looked at it a little bit and he said, "Did you write it all down?" I said, "Yep, there's I could." And he said, "Well, okay." He said, "Threw it in the trash can." He said, "That's your past.

That's all gone. We're going to talk about going forward from here." as a fista. I've got one of these analytical minds.

I thought, you know, if he did that with his sponsor that way, probably the same thing would do he'd do the same thing with me if I asked him to do my my fifth step. >> So I said, "Would you do a fifth step with me?" And he said, "Yeah." So I took my two/3s of my fifth step and I went over and he said is uh he saw me carry my little book. It was a red book.

I I got my red book cuz I was hot hot item and I I said yes sir. This is my fourstep. And he said can I see it?

And I said oh yes sir. And I handed it to him and I began to look over his desk and see where the trash can was cuz we're going to need one in just a minute. And he said, "Well, Jerry," he said, "do you want to read this to me or do you want me to read it to you?" I was just like old Job in the Bible.

That which I feared had come upon me. So I said, "You read it." And then for the next period of time, I stood up on the other side of the desk and would point out, now this is a little overstated right here. We got through with that humiliating experience.

And he walked around the desk and put his arms around me and said, "Uh, I'm glad you did that. I'm glad you shared that with me. I think you did the best you could." He didn't even say you left out a third.

He just left it with that. And when I went to my next meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, I walked in the door and looked around and thought, "You have paid your dues, cowboy. You belong here." And I started searching out people who had problems.

And I asked them, "Have you done your fourth step?" I started a fourstep meeting within a month after I had uh done that. We we talked it over. And then the damn fools in that meeting began to ask me, "What did you write about sex relations?" And I said, "Not much." And it was eating me up.

So I wrote it in code. It was really a hot item, let me tell you. But you know, there's no area of our life that's more self-centered than our sexuality.

We have messed up our sexuality about as much as any species could possibly do it. We've spent days and weeks and years worrying about how we did it, when we did it, how often we did it, who we did it with. Did we have the right equipment?

Did we have enough of the right equipment? We told people. We didn't tell people.

We hid it. We bragged about it. We did all these things and wondered, did we cause any harm doing that?

And our book gives us a series of questions to ask about that. Where have you aroused jealousy? They're in the book.

Where have you harmed others with this thing? What should you have done instead? The book recognizes that our sexuality and our is a necessary part of our human existence and that it's a natural instinct and we're going to have to deal with it.

But the thing we want to do is shape a sane and sober idea for how we're doing how we're going to do this. And if we mess up somewhere along the line, we don't get drunk over it. We go back and we start over and we we finish it up.

Now, I had a third of an inventory that I hadn't taken. And here I am conducting a four-step class. Who would you suppose I could ask to do my fifth step?

My sponsor had moved off to Jonesboro, Arkansas about that time. And I was in deep trouble. I didn't know who I was going to do it.

And then some damn fool walked up one day to me and said, "Would you be my sponsor?" I said, "I'll have to call my sponsor." That's twice I've called him now. You notice that? So I called him and I said, "You think I could you think I could sponsor somebody?" And he said, "Oh, hell yeah.

Sure. You can give away what you've been given." >> Uhoh. So, uh, so Tommy and I began to go down the road and he was a, you know, I don't know where he came from.

He came came from Canada is where he came from. And we have some Canadians here and they must be wound pretty tight up in Canada because he just started going through those damn steps. I mean, it was every every day he had moved through to to a new place in the book and he was going pretty fast and he got through the fourth step and he said, "Will you do a fifth step with me?" I said, "I don't know.

I'll call my sponsor." So, I called my sponsor. My sponsor said, "Yeah, go ahead." So, we sat down and I learned I learned the fifth step prayer. Do you know what it is?

If you've done more than one fifth step, you know what it is. Dear God, please let there be something new. >> Because we've all done the same damn things and think we invented sin.

We think we invented sex. We f, you know, and and they're boring a lot of times. Just really boring.

He kind of doze off, you know, and my sponsor my sponsor was doing his fifth step with a guy one time and and the fella had some kind of uh gastric attack or something and he had to quit doing the fifth step and rush off to the hospital to get some relief. And my sponsor said, you know, he said, I for a long time I was afraid I was going to kill somebody with my fourth step. So Tommy did his step with me.

Took a lot of time. I I had read I looked around at the literature to find out is there any any appropriate way to take a fifth step. I'll save you some time.

You just listen. You share when you can and you listen. I didn't know about sharing that time though in the first step.

The first time I did it and Tommy got through with this this step and we went we went off different directions and I gave him a hug and told him I was proud of him and glad what he did. And so I called him a day or two later and said, "How you feel?" And he said, "Feel fine." Said, "Uh, kind of feel like a blog to Alcoholics Anonymous now." I I said, "I feel pretty good." I said, "Well, you sound a little little not as enthusiastic as I'd like here. What uh what's going on?" He said, "Well," he said, "To tell the truth, I feel like you know every damn thing in the world about me, and I don't know that much about you.

And what I'd really like is if if you do your fourth step with me. I've never been able to command any real respect from people that I sponsor. They just they just don't recognize that I'm the guru and but I had that third that I hadn't done.

So I went back and did the whole thing with him the next weekend. And Tommy and I have formed a bond over the years that's unlike was the first one that not unlike some I've had since, but it was the first one of the first really close bonds I had ever had with him, another man. Uh, always there'd been the macho part interfering with the friendship and here we were.

We both knew each other totally. And uh I'm a skeptic and a cynic by nature. And I tell this because I feel obligated to do so because I've been a skeptic and a cynic to many people when they talk about what their spiritual events are.

Tommy moved back to Canada after two years. And uh one day, I don't know why, I just felt the need that I needed to call him. I had his telephone number.

So I called and I got no answer. I got a busy signal all day long. And I had his sister's telephone number and I called her and I said, "I can't get hold of Tommy.

Is everything all right up there?" And she said, "Well, matter of fact, his house just burned to the ground yesterday. lost everything. A little later, I had a ruptured appendix and they rushed me to the hospital and had to do an emergency surgery on me.

Tommy called me that day. Tommy called me that day. We're very close.

We can sit down in the room and in a matter of 10 minutes, we're right back where we right back where we started. That's occurred to me over not in the same degree but that feeling of knowing people sharing your life with people having no having nothing standing between you and them is a wonderful thing. It's a great feeling.

It's a freeing feeling to be who you are. And you know one thing about that fifth step is when you've told everybody about your deal I really think you you got to be careful who you select. You should not select a Chinese-speaking taxi driver at the airport.

You should talk to someone who knows exactly what you're doing, someone you admire and respect and tell them about yourself. That's really, I think, very very important. uh you you just it gives such a a great freedom to have somebody know who you are.

And when you're in a meeting, it's your sponsor and it comes around and they say, "Have you ever experienced fear? You can't bluff anymore. It's like playing poker, you know, when somebody knows what your whole card is.

You have you it forces you to be yourself around other people which is really what we're trying to do. We're getting into reality who we really are what we really think what we've really experienced and our lives improve dramatically when we go through that. And we have we have some promises with the fifth step.

if I could find them in about 20 minutes. They're followed just after the u the step. They're not quoted often, but I want to point them out to you.

By the way, there is a prayer for fear that's given to us. It's just ask God what he would have us be. What would you have us be?

And if you be what what you think he would want you to be, you'll know. Most of the time when we talk about God's will and we ask ourselves what it what is God's will, we got a pretty good idea of what the right thing is to do. Um once we have taken this step, step five, withholding nothing, we are delighted.

We can look the world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears fall from us.

We begin to feel the nearness of our creator. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we've begun to have a spiritual experience. That feeling of drink, the drink problem has disappeared, will often come strongly.

We feel we are on the broad highway walking hand in hand with the spirit of the universe. The book advises us to go home, look over our fourth and fifth step work because this is the ark we're going to walk through to freedom knowing who we are, what we are, and what's motivated us in our lives. We have a good idea of what the causes and conditions of our failures were when we get through with this part the step.

And that's where we need to be when we begin with step six, which we'll do at what time, Lee? 1:00 today. >> 1:30.

>> 1:30 today. Thank you for your attention. You'll have a nice quiet place here.

I'll turn the mic down a little bit so you can sleep without being interrupted and we'll go forward from here. We're uh at an interesting point in the steps. From my observation, many many people come into Alcoholics Anonymous and stall out at various spots.

Step three is one of those spots. A lot of people die on step three because they never get beyond never get into the action. And then people do step four and five and are greatly relieved at the what they've found.

They go back and read their book and say, "I've covered everything." They say their little prayer and we're going to make amends one of these days. We are. We really are.

We're going to straighten this thing out. And then they get to helping other people a little bit. And you can literally you can stay sober in Alcoholics Anonymous at that point.

I think a lot of people I think do but I think there's a deer level that you can go to if you're willing to continue the work and the work's just as hard from this point forward as it was from the beginning. This is the fulcrum. This is the place where the steps move from me to those around me.

I uh I didn't think I hurt anyone with what I did. That was one of my things. If I'm hurting anybody, I'm hurting myself.

Just by God, leave me alone. And uh my wife heard that song over and over and over again. You know, it's like a country western almost.

Uh but of course we did. We hurt people. And so when you finished up those steps and you understand something about what's gone wrong, what your part was in this process, that's the best place you'll ever be in your life to recognize what you've done to other people and why other people have acted the way they have and how you are going to have to deal with those kind of issues as you go forward.

The step six says we were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. And the next step, you know, talks about humbly asking him to take away our shortcomings. And that's two paragraphs in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And we slide right through those like nothing happened. Uh but I think there's a little little more to that. We've come a long way.

You know you we on this road this road to reality we've recognized first of all where we were. We are we're step back to step one. We were powerless.

Alcohol was our big problem. We begin to recognize in the unmanageability that we were not uh capable of running life to suit ourselves. We if we're observant we come to believe that there's some power working in Alcoholics Anonymous.

God as you understand him and that it will restore you to sanity. And the sanity, I didn't mention this this morning, but I really believe that sanity that as Bill talks about it, and you'll find it in the 10 over near the 10th step in the big book, is the insanity of taking the first drink. It's not that we were crazy.

I was put off by that for a while because I could add two and two. I knew I had added two and two, so I wasn't crazy. So, I could uh couldn't handle that.

But I found that I read very carefully and found out where I couldn't very well explain why I drank in the face of what I had done before. So that was the issue of sanity which I had to deal with. Another awakening if you will.

I made a commitment. I made a commitment to try to live my life to some values other than what I want. to try to live my life committed to what I thought a power greater than myself would have me be.

What Alcoholics Anonymous gave me the opportunity and uh duty to pass on what I had been given and I began to feel good better about myself. Uh, it's hard, you know, it's hard to when you know you're an alcoholic and you know at the end of the day you haven't had a drink and you know that you're trying to turn your life around and you know that you have tried to help somebody that day. It's hard to feel bad about yourself.

You just go to bed and you feel a little better about yourself and you begin to lighten up. You get on the pink cloud as they talk about and you can live on the pink cloud if you want to. It's okay.

uh we shared our findings with somebody else about ourselves and that gave us a a great freedom. We don't have to hide anything anymore. We're okay the way we were.

Warts and all as the Alanon program is going to talk about. And now we're ready to have these defect defects of character removed. Wouldn't you like to have them gone?

Well, maybe so. Maybe. Maybe.

Uh entirely ready. Do you realize how much ready that is? It's about all the ready there is.

You know, I have promised myself for many, many years that I wouldn't do what I'm about to do right now. I'm powerless over this. I have a story that has to do with entirely ready that I've I should quit telling, but I I just like I say, I'm got a little I'm powerless over this thing.

It's about a man who was about I don't know he's 50 years old I guess had his own business doing well in life uh had everything seemed like and he uh but there was a lady who worked in his office an extremely attractive lady. He was drawn to her. He was ready to have a closer relationship with her.

But in biblical terms of him, she would have none. Uh so on his 50th birthday, he walked into his office and here she comes right over to him, has a flower in her hand, pins the flower in his lapel, gives him a little kiss on the cheek and a little hug and said, "Happy birthday, boss." And he said, "Well, thank you. Thank you." And she said, 'You know, I've known for some time that you wanted a a little closer relationship with me.

He said, 'Well, yes, yes. And she said, and I've been kind of standoffish. And he said, well, it's, you know, it's okay.

It's okay. She said, but would you like to come over to my apartment this afternoon after work and let us get a little better acquainted? And he was ready.

He said, "Yes, yes." So, he said, "When should I come?" And she said, "Well, let's make it at 5:30." And he said, "Let's synchronize our watches." So, he got at 5:30. He pushed the doorbell. She came to the door, invited him in, took his coat, said, "Would you like to have a drink?" And gave him a drink and set him down on the couch and talked to him a little bit.

And she said, "Would you mind terribly if I slipped into something a little more comfortable? And he said, "Oh, oh, no, no, please go right ahead." He was ready for her to do that. So, she went into her she went into her bedroom to slip into something more comfortable.

And he decided that he needed to get ready. Suddenly, his neck swole up big, his chest expanded. He ripped off his tie, took off his shoes cuz he was kind of cramping his feet.

Then his shirt got to be too tight. He ripped off his shirt. He called out and said, "Are you ready?" And she said, "Not quite.

In a minute." And he got a little more ready. He took off his trousers. He called out again, "Are you ready?" And she said, "I'm ready.

Come on in. And when he walked through the bedroom door, he was entirely ready. And his whole office staff said, "Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you." And then he knew And then he knew humility like they're talking about in some other steps we've got there. I wasn't uh you know you got to be you got to pay attention to these things the defects of character that you find the arrogance the the things that we do. Some of these things we we really kind of like.

I had a bad temper. I was I could go off like that. And I used that temper.

I I didn't really try to control that temper because I used it to to uh keep people away from me if they got close and I didn't want them close. I uh I used it to create fear and I knew what I was doing at times when I did that. And this was not an attractive thing to me, but it was a useful tool for me.

I was a trial lawyer and I was a, you know, I was told somebody here today, they affectionately called me the alligator gar in my uh in my law office because I was, man, I went after people. And when I got sober, uh, I began to realize that that wasn't going to work for me. I was not going to be able to practice humility.

I was not going to be able to practice kindness and tolerance and consideration for people and be that kind of person. I thought maybe I got to give up being a trial lawyer. But I decided before I did that, I'd start trying to give up some of these things.

And what I found in my case, the first time I did the sixth step, I went home and said, "I am entirely ready to give up these defects of character that I found in the in the fourth and fifth step." But I wasn't dealing with anything specific. I was dealing with the generality. And not too surprisingly, not much happened because I had a temper again in a little while.

and I had this kind of problem and this kind of problem and uh some of these things were useful to me. You know, gossip gossip's a just my concern for others. Uh besides, it kind of makes me feel like I'm one of the bunch, you know?

I'm kind of I know. Nobody else knows, but I know. And if you if I tell you, you'll probably tell me something.

You know that. And I get into I can get caught up in all that kind of stuff. And some of these things I had the alligator shoe syndrome I call it.

I began to notice that the quality of newcomers coming to my group were not quite as good as when I came in. Uh we have some undesirabs in Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you know that none of these things are really very useful to you in the long haul?

Anything that's harmful to another human being is what we've got to get rid of. And almost any kind of self-centerness that we have is going to fall within that category. I believe I uh I think that you have to watch your thoughts.

You have to be aware of what they are. Watch your thoughts because they become your actions. Watch your actions because they become your habits.

Watch your habits because they become your character. And your character becomes your destiny. So we have to pay close attention to what's going on up here.

No one can weed your garden, your mental garden, except yourself. No one knows what's up there except you except you. So you're you're charged.

We're charged with that that job. And resentments, you know, they're bitter, angry thoughts. All of these things center in the mind.

Have you ever noticed how much of this has to do with your thoughts? What's a resentment? It's a thought about something what that happened in the past.

It's not happening now. It's a judgment that you're exercising in your mind about an event as you observed it that occurred in the past. and we dredge it up again and again and again.

We have fear. That's something that generally hasn't happened. It's something we anticipate may happen.

We project it may happen and it's going to be bad. It's going to be even worse than that. You can't imagine how bad it's going to be.

You know, it's like my my cuticle cancer looks bad. I believe it's redder today than it was yesterday. I'll probably lose that thumb.

Sure as I will. I need that thumb. How can I hold a golf club if I don't have that thumb?

And we just roll it out with projection. Guilt. What I did.

What I did. You got to give it up. We got a step over here that's going to deal with what you can do about it.

All you can do about it. But it's self-centered. It's judgment of yourself.

It has to do with your thoughts, your memories. Again, we talk about uh greed. What I need, what I want, what I got to have.

I'd be happy if I had it. But it's again, it's me, me, me, me. Self-centerness.

I uh I think that all of these things that we have rolling around in our head are or simulate are or come from all self-centerness comes from self-centered thought from thoughts. Fear is going to be tomorrow. It's not not happening today.

Resentment was yesterday. We we judge quickly and often in our minds. So, we have to be very careful about what we think about what's going on up there because we are the only ones who can really do anything about that.

I uh got a little problem here though. This is like alcoholism. Only God can do anything about those thoughts.

They all feed each other. Do you ever notice that? I've had a bad day at work.

It's been a bad day. They haven't appreciated what I do for that bunch down there. I feel sorry for myself.

I'm really kind of victimized by this whole damn process. You know, if you're a victim, you that's a big business all by itself. Some people make an entire life of it.

You got to work at it. You got to recognize that you're ruined forever. It can't get any better.

you're you're ruined from the word go. It's not going to get any better. You got to be able to hold on to that resentment.

You cannot give it up. You got to hang on to that resentment. And you got to live it every day.

Can't have a hell of a lot of fun because victims don't have much fun. So, we feel sorry for each other. Poor little me.

Poor little old me. Plum. And we uh these things move around.

I I have a bad day at work. can feel portal me. They didn't appreciate me.

Get on the freeway. Get in my lane. Some damn fool gets in there with me.

And I He offends me. So I get after him. I have a resentment.

I'm angry. I get off the freeway. I go to the house.

I walk in. My wife hasn't done a damn thing wrong. But I don't I see some I pick out something I don't like.

I've raised an issue that happened two weeks ago about how she did my laundry or something and I throw it up, you know, and she doesn't react as she should. Uh, so I storm out of the kitchen and go back to the bedroom to take off my suit, my armor, you know, my suitclo and uh and I think, you know, God, I've overreacted here. I shouldn't have said those things to her.

She's uh she might divorce me if I keep acting like this. You matter of fact, if she divorces me, she'd probably get half of at least half of everything I own. Now fear is running through my body like you can't believe.

You know, it all just moves around in me. The self-center just moves from one place to the other. And and all of them works that way.

Depression. Do you ever start off a day with depression and see anything good that happened that day? No.

We collect evidence all day. Of course I feel bad about myself. Look at all this stuff that's happening to me.

Fear. Of course I'm afraid. Anybody would be afraid in my circumstance.

Anger. Of course I'm angry. Damn right.

Look what you've done to me. Look what you're going to do to me next. And we go on and on this and we feed these things and we live these lives and they're pitiful lives.

My life was pitiful. I I loaded myself up with all this self-centered stuff. I hadn't been practicing law a month and I began to have a big rash on my shoulder and I didn't have time to go get it looked at by the doctor because I was working.

I had to work and finally I scratched it enough my wife said, "You got to go to the doctor." So, one of my one of my young associates uh wives worked in a doctor's office. And she she said, "Well, if you come in Saturday morning, I'll get the doctor to see. He's going to be here this Saturday morning.

I'll get him to look at you this Saturday morning." So, I went in to see him. I found an hour I could rush into the didn't have to wait. He looked at my shoulder and he said, "That is neurodermatitis." I said, "Really?

Is that bad? >> He said, "That's caused from living in a squirrel cage. You're going someplace as fast as you can go, but you're not moving anywhere." And he said, "I'm going to prescribe something for you." And I thought, "This is good.

You know, what kind of happy pill are you going to give me for this thing?" You know, and he wrote on a piece of prescription pad there. He said, "It's the name of a book. How to live 365 days a year was the name of this book.

It was all designed around living in the reality of today in the now, appreciating what's happening, stopping to smell the roses, all the good things that we we know are good and none of the bad things that we we prosecute. So, what I found in my own experience is I have to I have to u I have to deal with my defects of character as they crop up. We've got some old old ruts that run through our mind.

So, we can fall back in those ruts very, very easily. And we only get out of those ruts when it's absolutely necessary. Uh the story about the little turtle that was in the rut in the road and it's calling out, "Help!

I can't get out." He tried everything. He couldn't get out of the rut. and a rabbit came along and the rabbit said, "Can I help you?" And he said, "Uh, help me.

Help me. I can't get out of the rut." Rabbit said, "Well, I can't get you out of that. I'll go see if I can find a stick and maybe we can let you crawl up the stick or something." He said, "Good, good.

Please help me." The rabbit came back in a few minutes and the turtle's walking down the road. He's out of the rut. He said, "What happened?

What happened? I didn't think you'd get out of the rut." And he said, "Oh, I heard a wagon coming." And so the when he said knew the wagon was in the rut, he's out of it. You know, that's what we do.

And I have to I find that I have to I have to monitor these things as they occur. In the last two years, I've had two kinds of cancer come up. Every time that's happened to me, I've gone right back into the old ruts, doubting the existence of God, worrying about myself, fearful, angry, all of those things.

And it takes me a little while to apply this program to get out of those ruts till you can walk along and recognize, you know, what the hell what what good is this going to do me? I might as well have a good day. I might as well enjoy myself.

I might as well not ruin this day worrying about what's going to happen on the next day. Let's just take them one at a time. And as a friend of mine used to tell me when I was worrying about my lawsuits, some I couldn't win, some I couldn't.

He said, 'Well, he had he stuttered. He said, "Well, Jerry said, there's some something you could got to know." He said, "There's some little lawsuits that you just got to put your feet up on the table and let the good times roll." And that's what you got to do is put your feet up on the table and let the good times roll. He was a good spirit, good good influence on my life.

A great guy. He couldn't be a trial lawyer, but he he he loved it and he helped me be one. So, we see these things moving around us and we and we deal with them as they come up, the specifics.

Uh the other thing that's really a friend of mine pointed out to me a guy named great AA named Bob White said there's a implied blessing in this step. It says that we couldn't it says that we have to have God's help to remove these defects of character which meant that we couldn't do much about them in the first place. They came to us through life and we have to discharge them and get rid of them and we can't do it all by oursel.

So we have to have God's help to do that. And the same power that helped me with drinking, helped me stop drinking, helped me attain the sobriety is available to me on if it worked on the biggest problem I ever had, why wouldn't it work on one of these? And it does work on one of these.

It'll work on this one and any other one you have. There's nothing come down the pike in the years that I've been sober that God and I couldn't handle on a one-day basis. I haven't always enjoyed those days and certainly there have been days when I've lost the track, but it's uh it's there for me.

Uh so you can cut yourself a little slack that you didn't you couldn't do any better than you were doing. You were doing the best you could with the light you had and and so is the guy on the other side of the street. He's doing the best he can with the light he's got.

And that makes life a little easier also. Step seven says we humbly ask God to remove these our shortcomings. Humility.

Did you ever know a humble trial lawyer? I could just see myself standing in front of the judge or the jury with my head down and scuffing my shoes and saying, "Golly, I I sure sure do hope you all will be nice to my clients. It would help me and my family, too.

Uh I know I'm not much. Uh but uh the uh the fact is that's not humility. That's not humility.

That's that's not that that's that's that is the kind of humility that I humble being humiliated that I was talking about in that joke I told uh the we use the word in he comes from humble origin I didn't want to come from humble origins I was that meant you were poor I was but I didn't want to talk about it with anybody uh he ate humble pie that means somebody's got the better of you, so they they put you down good, you know, and I didn't like that either. But there's a book that was written by a man named Dimmit Fox. It's called The Sermon on the Mount.

The early members of Alcoholics Anonymous used this as sort of a big book for part of their early experience before while the book was being written and they were having the experiences necessary for that. And in that book, EMTT Fox is describing the biatitudes. And one that he describes that I think is particularly appropriate here is, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." I think that may be humble.

Here's what he says about it. One who is powerless. One who has no desire to exercise self-will or control.

One who set aside all sets aside all old opinions on a wholehearted desire to express God's will. One who is willing to set aside old habits of thought, views, prejudice and in his entire way of life. who is willing to jettison anything and everything that stands in the way of his finding a higher power.

Does that sound to you like the first six steps of Alcoholics Anonymous? That's where we are when we are practicing when we've dealt with a problem. We've focused on it and we're we know where we are.

We know what we're doing. We put the principles of the first steps of alcoholics anonymous into play and then we humbly ask God for his will in that circumstance and I think that is the seventh step. Think that works for me.

So then we move on to our my favorite steps which are step eight and nine. We all just love these steps. there uh made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

Damned if I would. Maybe one or two who that I owed money or something that I could say I'm sorry about but you know doesn't talk about much about saying you're sorry. Uh the list the book says came from the fourth step and most of mine probably did.

I don't think I accumulated them at that particular time and and my sponsor wasn't one of those people who wrote them down, but lots of sponsors do help you find what your uh what your amends are, who they ought to be given to. The purpose is to find our faults, to decide on the amends that we're to make, and to pro improve our relationships with all men. That's what Bill says in the 12 steps and 12 traditions that no field of invest in investigation could yield more satisfying results.

What were your relationships like when you came to Alcoholics Anonymous? Mine were not too slick. I was either looking up to somebody currying their favor or I was looking down on somebody critical of their life.

There was not much equality and mutuality in in my relationships. And so I had to I had to get overcome some old ideas. The one I told you about earlier, I only hurt myself by my conduct.

Another is that they hurt me, therefore I'm entitled to hurt them or they hurt me more than I hurt them. Uh, I will if they will. There's not much you can read in the steps that say anything about any of those things I've just recited.

Doesn't It's not a quantitative thing. My old buddy Bob White used to say, "If you were 1% at fault, you owe an amend." Didn't make a damn if the other guys 99% at fault. Your job, Mr.

Jones is to clean your side of the street. You want to be able to walk into any room in the world and sit down next to any other human being and feel perfectly comfortable and at ease. Doesn't mean you got to like them.

Doesn't mean you got to admire them. But it's okay to sit there because you have done your part to clean up what's going on with you. Thank you for listening to Sober Sunrise.

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