Don M. opens with one of recovery’s most humorous contradictions: a man who spent years in institutions, terrified of legal authority, eventually became that authority. The call came while he was sitting in a barber chair—the president of the state bar offering him a seat on the ethics committee. For someone who’d feared the ethics committee, the IRS, and the FBI more than almost anything on earth, it was the kind of irony only God could orchestrate.

What makes Don M.’s story so striking isn’t just the career turnaround. It’s what it represents: a living example of Step 3 in action. He didn’t engineer this outcome through networking, ambition, or willpower. He simply stopped trying to steer the log.

Don M. uses a deceptively simple image—an ant on a log in a river, convinced it’s controlling where the log goes. The ant works itself into a frenzy, convinced that its frantic effort determines the current. Don M. spent most of his life as that ant. He describes living by the exhausting logic of self-will: *I’ve got to steer this, or it’s going the wrong way. This can’t work without me driving it.* That mentality is the disease wearing a different mask. Not drinking, but still trying to orchestrate reality through sheer force and anxiety.

The turning point wasn’t a dramatic moment of enlightenment. It was simpler: he started paying attention to “the little ant crap that’s right in front of him that he can do.” In other words, he stopped obsessing about the destination and started handling what was in front of him—his own actions, his own integrity, one day at a time.

What follows from that surrender is what Don M. calls the “forgiveness of non-alcoholics.” Non-alcoholics don’t easily forgive. They expect consequences. Yet when someone in recovery genuinely starts doing the right thing, the world responds with a grace that seems disproportionate. The ethics committee vacancy came because he’d become trustworthy. People noticed. Trust was rebuilt, not through grand gestures or amends that couldn’t undo the past, but through consistent right action and humility.

The deeper message is theological: there is no human explanation for how someone goes from institutionalized to ethics advisor. That’s not a career trajectory anyone plans. It’s what happens when ego steps aside and something larger takes over—when the ant stops trying to steer and just pays attention to what’s right in front of it.

Don M.’s humor throughout keeps the talk grounded. He’s not preaching; he’s marveling at the absurdity of it. That’s the real power here—not inspiration, but clarity. God’s sense of humor isn’t gentle irony. It’s the kind of practical joke that only works if you actually surrender the steering wheel.