AA Speaker – Don M. – Moorhead, MN – 2019
AA speaker Don M. from Moorhead shares how letting go of control and working Steps 6 and 7 transformed his life after 38 years of sobriety and a near-fatal wreck.
Don M. from Moorhead, Minnesota got sober in April 1981 after a catastrophic car accident while practicing law in Louisville. In this AA speaker tape, he walks through hitting bottom—losing everything, spending time homeless, and cycling through psychiatric hospitals—and how working the steps, especially Steps 6 and 7, became the foundation of staying sober for 38 years. His story is about learning to stop trying to steer the log and letting a Higher Power do the driving.
Don M., an AA speaker, shares 38 years of continuous sobriety beginning in April 1981, detailing his journey from a successful but deeply alcoholic criminal defense lawyer in Louisville to hitting bottom through homelessness and psychiatric hospitalization. He emphasizes how the 12 Steps—particularly Steps 6 and 7—work like a prescription for alcoholism, requiring action regardless of thoughts, feelings, or beliefs, and how surrendering control to a Higher Power transformed his legal career, relationships, and spiritual life. Don M. discusses the critical shift from trying to change how he feels to accepting that behavior, not emotions, determines recovery, and how this principle has kept him sober through decades of service work, sponsoring men, and rebuilding his reputation in the Kentucky bar.
Episode Summary
Don M. walks into this talk with a simple but profound message: recovery isn’t about changing how you feel—it’s about changing what you do, regardless of how you feel. For his first 37 years, he was an evangelical agnostic, convinced that believers were weak-minded and that his intelligence and willpower could solve anything. When he finally got sober in April 1981, he had to learn that those exact tools—his brain and his will—were useless against alcoholism.
His drinking career spanned 25 years of deterioration. He was gifted academically, made it through law school while staying drunk most of the time, and built a successful criminal defense practice in Louisville. But the disease progressed. By the latter part of his law career, he was using alcohol and other drugs daily, practicing law while in blackout states, and living a double life. His description of his alcoholism is clinical: an ego disorder, obsessed with how he stacked up against others, using substances to fill a hole inside that running and stuffing things couldn’t permanently fill.
The turning point came on February 10, 1978, when he drove a Corvette off the road at 120 miles per hour while drunk on vodka. The wreck nearly killed him. He crushed both knees, tore an artery, spent months in hospitals, and was told he’d never walk without a brace or regain urinary function. Even lying flat on his back with that prognosis, friends brought him booze and pills in the hospital. He kept insisting he wasn’t weak—a man doesn’t whine about hitting a bump in the road. That wasn’t courage. That was unvarnished insanity: letting how he felt be more important than whether he lived.
After the wreck, he lost his law license, his money, his homes, his daughter (he didn’t see her for over three years), and eventually his address. He cycled through psychiatric hospitals 18 times in two and a half years. He was on the street, homeless, his teeth falling out, living in asylums. He got better gradually—not straight, but better—and started going to meetings at a Nashville clubhouse called the 202 Club in late 1980. An old-timer at the club told him something that stuck: “Don, I’m beginning to think you’re too intelligent for this program.” Don’s knee-jerk reaction was pride until the man finished: “That’s a shame, because we’ve never had anybody too dumb for this deal, and we bury you sons of bitches all the time.”
On April 9, 1981, the day after his final drunk, Don went back to the clubhouse expecting to be thrown out. Instead, they told him: “Come on in, Don. You’re keeping us sober.” They gave him simple directions: don’t drink, don’t take dope, go to meetings. He had no desire to be there. His brain was still insisting they were all religious fanatics and what he really needed was to get back to Louisville, make money, get a law license, and be somebody. But he was given what he calls a “gift”: the willingness to follow directions even though he didn’t understand them, didn’t agree with them, didn’t think they would work, and didn’t want to do them.
For the first 60 days, he went to over 150 meetings. He was so far gone that he couldn’t remember how to use a knife and fork. He sat under tables at restaurants mimicking how his friends ate so he could relearn the skill. But something shifted. When they told him the Big Book wasn’t philosophy—it was a manual for action—and that the 12 Steps were a prescription like penicillin, something landed. Penicillin doesn’t care if you believe in it, understand it, or want to take it. You take the pills as directed and you get well. The steps work the same way.
The most radical instruction came when they told him to get on his knees every morning and night and pray, even though he didn’t believe. He fought it hard—tears running down his face, insisting he couldn’t pray because he didn’t believe. They told him he had it backwards: “We’re not asking you to believe anything. You’re too ill to have any valid thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. What matters is what you do, not what’s going through your head.” To his own shock, in the latter part of April 1981, he found himself on his knees despite his brain’s loud veto, asking something he didn’t believe existed to do something he didn’t believe was possible. He’s missed those morning and evening prayers on his fingers over 38 years.
Working the steps with his first sponsor, he came to see them not as philosophy but as action. Step 3 wasn’t a magical moment—it was a decision to commit to the rest of the steps. Steps 4 and 5: inventory and admission. Steps 6 and 7: he thought they meant asking God to remove his defects. But that’s not what they mean. The prayer on page 76 of the Big Book doesn’t ask God to remove anything—it asks God to show him what his defects are and to remove only the ones that stand in the way of his usefulness to others. “How arrogant of me to think I would know what God wants me to be,” he says now.
This shift—accepting that God doesn’t use a floodlight but a pinlight, showing him one stitch at a time, one right action at a time—became the foundation of his recovery. By his ninth year sober, in May 1990, something clicked about Steps 6 and 7. From that day forward, for the last 29 and a half years, those steps have been the most important of his life.
The practical results speak for themselves. His law license was restored. He went back to practice and eventually rebuilt his reputation entirely. He reconnected with his daughter. He’s been married to his wife Sharon for 29 years without a single argument—not because they’re perfect, but because he finally stopped needing to be right. He stopped scripting conversations and trying to control outcomes. He sponsors men—some for decades—and has watched the same miracle happen in hundreds of lives. The bar association honored him with awards, put him on the Ethics Committee, made him a Master at Chancery. A man who spent 18 times in psychiatric hospitals is now advising lawyers and judges on ethics and judicial qualifications.
He’s clear about what made it work: not intellect, not willpower, not changing his beliefs first. It was action. Behavior. Doing the next right thing, one stitch at a time, without needing to understand the pattern or where God was leading. When he stopped trying to steer the log like an ant and just paid attention to what was right in front of him, the current carried him somewhere he never could have scripted or imagined.
Notable Quotes
The gift that saved my life was that for the first time in my life I began to voluntarily follow some suggestions about how to run my life—even though I didn’t understand those directions, I didn’t agree with them, I didn’t think they would work, and I certainly did not want to do them.
Without divine intervention, I will always wind up letting how I feel be the most important thing in the world. Without divine intervention, I can give some lip service to something being more important than how I feel and I might be able to act it out for just a little while, but when the chips get down, I’ll go right back to my default position.
They said, ‘Don, you’ve got that backwards too. We have never suggested that you think, feel, or believe anything. In the first place, you are far too ill to have any valid thoughts, feelings, or beliefs. In the second place, the issue of whether you live or die is going to be determined solely by what you do.’
When I’m willing to truly let go and come like a little child to my God and say, ‘I don’t know where we are, how we got here, or where we’re supposed to go’—and I’m at least going to behave like a person would behave if it was their objective to do your will—where God leaves me is unbelievable.
I lived so much of my life being like an ant on a log thinking he’s steering the log. When if he’d just be still and pay attention to the little ant crap that’s right in front of him that he can do, the log’s going where it’s going anyway and they’d be a whole lot better off.
Surrender & Acceptance
Step 3 – Surrender
Hitting Bottom
Sponsorship
Topics Covered in This Transcript
- Steps 6 & 7 – Character Defects
- Surrender & Acceptance
- Step 3 – Surrender
- Hitting Bottom
- Sponsorship
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Full AA Speaker Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors. For the best experience, listen to the audio above.
welcome to sober Sunrise a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories of experience strength and Hope from around the world we bring you several new speakers weekly so be sure to subscribe whether you join us in the morning or at night there’s nothing better than a sober Sunrise we hope that you enjoy today’s speaker good evening everyone my name is Michael doy I’m an alcoholic Micha and uh just uh really um going to make this very brief but it is extremely heartfelt um gentlemen that I’m about to uh introduce as my sponsor um he has touched my heart and my life for many years um and uh over the last I don’t know two years we’ve gotten a lot closer I guess um I asked to be my sponsor um little about a year and a half ago I guess um and uh I am humbled that I get to learn from him and I feel very graced uh that God put us together I appreciate our friendship God bless you Don come on up thank you thank you Michael hi everybody my name is Don major and I’m an alcoholic and uh y’all been putting up with me all weekend but this is the last time we’ve needed some divine intervention ever since I got up here the first time but we’re really going to need some over the next little bit here um probably you all going to need it more than I do and the first place we’re going to need it is something that’s got to get me out of the way and it’s not going to get me be me um Master Brad dates April 9th of 1981 and I’m not a bit more capable of getting me out of the way tonight than I was in April 1981 it’s just way too big a job for me I’ve got to have what I call divine intervention um and I’ll probably mention divine intervention several times and if any of the newer folks or anything like I was when U I got here and are intellectually offended some old fool up here talking about divine intervention not only do I understand you in my old seat uh and I’ve got a suggestion for you when I talk about divine intervention just substitute the magic from the steps and it’ll get you to the same place and it won’t offend your sensitive intellect so terribly but uh at any rate we needed to get me out of the way and then we also need it because I’m going to try to follow directions and and believe me I’ve got a long and sad history of the with the directions uh they have never replied to me they’ve never meant what to say because with my U extraordinary understanding of things you see uh I’ve always understood who is in charge of the directions and it’s always just really conservative nerds just sare jobs anal retentiveness always been necessary I guess you’d say to extrapolate to figure out what the directions might really mean because they clearly don’t mean what they say and I assure you if I haven’t done the work I need to do today on Saturday because if I’ve learned anything in my time around here I’ve learned that I don’t get much divine intervention on Saturday based on what I did on Friday and if I haven’t done what I need to do today I’ll go back to my default position and and if for instance I were to see or hear some directions that say Do not exceed six in 24 hours my brain is very apt to really register that as meaning something like do not exceed 36 so I need to help with the directions and U I want to follow the simple directions that we hear every time we hear how it works a little bit about what I was like and what happened and what I’m like now and there’s another set of directions in the book that we don’t talk about nearly as much but it’s it’s just absolutely critical for me it says words to the effect that our personal stories tell in our own language and from our own point of view have we’ve been able to form a relationship with our creator and I really hope my story carries that because the first 37 years of my life uh I had no openness to God whatsoever um I grew up on a tobacco farm down in Southwestern Kentucky and um I remember at four years old sitting in a Baptist Church in the Baptist Church about a half mile or so down the road from the farm and it was Christmas time and I remember specifically still believing in Santa Claus and not buying one word that preacher was saying just not a word and I have no idea where that came from but I spent the first 37 years of my life as uh an Evangelical agnostic I guess you’d call me and uh it was clear to me that Believers were weak minded and weak willed and uh it was my mission to uh to dispel them of their Superstition and uh believe me that’s where I was coming from so up until I got sober at the age of 37 I had never asked a God for anything or even acknowledged a God that had anything to do with my life I mean I was okay with intellectual theories about a creative intelligence somewhere but certainly not with anything that had anything to do with my life and April of of 1981 a loving God that I had never acknowledged or asked for anything and I believe I think it was Michael that mentioned it today uh I believe it was prayers of others that caused this miracle to happen from for me uh that loving God gave me the most life-saving and lifechanging gift that I’ve ever had and that same gift saves and changes my life today and what it was it wasn’t a change of anything in my thoughts feelings or beliefs and I wasn’t aware that there was any change in anything I only recognize it in the rear view mirror and that’s true of the way life is uh MB Bob B says that life is lived forward but understood if at all backwards um and and what the gift is and was is that for the first time in my life I began to voluntarily follow some suggestions about how to run my life life even though I didn’t understand those directions I didn’t agree with them I didn’t think they would work and I certainly did not want to do them and folks that gift is the only reason on Earth that I’m here at this great great little Roundup that’s got such a neat spirit and personality to it and I hope it thrives and grows through the years the only reason I’m up here with you sweet folks tonight instead of having been rotting in a pulper grave for something over 38 years is that gift so I hope my story carries that my early life on that farm uh U probably the most informative thing I tell you is that it wasn’t a thing like I thought it was uh my uh my capacity for self- delusion is astounding and and if I haven’t done the work I need to do today to get my help it’s fully intact and up until I got sober I had the most interesting and romantic Saga it was way past the mirror story about my early struggles and my subsequent rise to power and of course it was all about how about my Aaron will and my Sterling intellect I had pulled myself up by the bootstraps to the step from the depths of poverty to these staggering Heights I’d reached in life and I believed that crap so sincerely I’d have us both cried before I got halfway done telling it and I honestly don’t think I was sober a week until I realized man what a load of baloney we weren’t even poor we weren’t anywhere close to poor we were middle class farming people that had everything we needed and most of the things we wanted in fact we were better off than anybody else in the whole farming community and those staggering Heights I thought I’d reached were a great deal more staggering than they were half uh and what was really going on the first 12 13 years of my life wasn’t any of that stuff at all what was really going on was the selfishness and self-centeredness that the big book tells us is at the root of our alcoholism and the way I’ve described that forever is that I’ve got an ego disorder had it all my life and that ego disorder has been front and center I mean right stuck to my nose every day of my life drunk and sober for 75 years and on account of that ego disorder without divine intervention I’m so obsessed with myself I’m so obsessed with how believe I stack up against other people in the world I’m so obsessed with how I feel that for many years I boiled the Bedrock of my alcoholism down to one sentence and I believe this is where it really starts for me I think the physical allergy and the mental Obsession kicked in much later but where it starts I believe is here without divine intervention I will always wind up letting how I feel be the most important thing in the world now without divine intervention I can give some lip service to something being more important than how I feel and I might be able to act out something for just a little while but when the chips get down if I haven’t done what I need to do today to maintain my spiritual condition and and get my daily reprieve I’ll go right back to my default position and my default position is to let how I feel be the most important thing and all that obsession with myself uh has always had the only results that I think they can really have on a human being it’s always created so much pain and and emptiness and apartness and difference down inside me that I’ve never been able to stand the way I feel inside without either just running as hard as I can Andor stuffing something in there try to make me feel good enough that I can stand it now thank my God for the last 38 years and some months it’s been the 12 steps that are the only program of Alcoholic Anonymous and you sweet folks who are The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous who fill up that hole who ease that pain who take away that apartness and that difference but I didn’t know there was anything to do it until I got drunk the first time when I was 12 or 13 uh and what was really going on for that first part of my life was a a totally self-obsessed kid desperately trying to stay a half a step ahead of a screaming fit and by the way I don’t know whether we’re born alcoholic or not and and I haven’t cared for decades because as long as I know what’s wrong with me and I know the solution uh I’m not all that interested in figuring out where it might have came from but uh something was wrong I already told you about sitting in the church when I was four the first day of the second grade I was 6 years old and started school when I was five I went into the office of the principal Miss Fanny Wallace and I said Miss fny I have been in a car wreck over the summer and have brain damage and I can’t be expected to do nearly as well this year as I did last year I knew I’d set the too high and I was trying to miss fny laughed about that the rest my of her life but looking back on it I’m not sure it was real funny for a kid that young to be thinking that way but but um at any rate that that obsession with myself makes me an egomaniac with an inferiority complex uh and what I mean by that is that without divine intervention I’m perfectly capable of feeling too good for something or somebody at the same instant knowing I’m not nearly good enough for that same person or that same thing all my life I’ve known that I could do anything at the same time I’ve known I couldn’t really do anything and that’s been bouncing around my head for all these years and you see without divine intervention or the things that I’ve tried to use I’ve never had any peers I can’t be on anybody’s level without the divine intervention I can be above you I can be below you and insanely I can be both at the same time but I cannot be a fellow among fellows unless I’ve done what the work I need to do to get my help and that’s the mess I brought to my first drunk um and that first drunk I got an awful lot trouble I puked I I blacked out and I passed out and I woke up next morning I had a terrible hangover and I swore all those Baptist around there were right about that one single thing booze and that I would never touch that crap again and Not only was I sincere it was actually fairly effective because it was nearly a week until I got drunk the second time and that was a near Miracle over the next 25 years for me to go a week without getting drunk and after that pain and misery I woke up that first morning with that horrible horrible hangover and and the terrible Four Horsemen already gathered around me every one of them um and I didn’t wake up and think wow that was great I can’t wait to do that again that was magic all I knew was that for a few minutes on my way to to all that puking and trouble I had passed through a right Pleasant neighborhood but since I’ve been sober I’ve known that what really happened was the magic happened for me because For the first time in my life when I got enough of that booze in me I was okay inside myself I felt good enough inside myself that I could stand the way I felt inside without running without trying to stuff anything in there I was a fellow among fellows I had loads of peers I had people that were that I was okay with and I was okay with me so what it did for the first time in my life I had found something that made me feel good enough inside that I could stand it so as far as I’m concerned there’s no mystery about why I got drunk that second time and there’s no mystery about why I got drunk the other thousands of times over the next quarter of a century after that but was because because of the magic that I didn’t recognize as magic because for the next 25 years I didn’t know there was anything other than the booze and in the latter years of my drinking the things like it that could do that trick for me so there’s no mystery to me about my powerlessness over alcohol and the things like it because since I didn’t know there was anything else that could make me feel the way I wanted to feel and the way I feel is the most important thing in the world the bottom line was really simple when I wanted to change the way I felt it didn’t matter what it cost and it didn’t matter who it cost you know and I said this at the core of my alcoholism and I may have mentioned this answering a question I don’t know but I’m absolutely convinced that after we know we are an alcoholic or an addict we know what we are and we put that first one in us I’m absolutely convinced that that is the most self-centered act on the face of this Earth short of suicide because what I’m doing when I do that I’m making a decision that the way I feel in this instant and my desire to change it is more important than my child it’s more important than my profession it’s more important than all of my respons responsibilities it’s more important than any relationship I might have with God that I’m making the How I Feel the most important thing in this universe but I didn’t know any of that um and had a drinking career 25 years that I’m not going to dwell on but I I’ll let you know enough to know that I didn’t come in here because it gave me the hiccups and I woke up one day and decided gee I’d like to get some spiritual enlightenment um I literally stumbled uphill for 20 years um I was born with uh a lot of academic gifts uh and a kid that drank and acted the way I did from the first time I got drunk in today’s world would find his young butt in an asylum before his 14th birthday but in the 1950s in trig County Kentucky if you were cute enough and smart enough and had the right last name you could practically get away with murder and I practically did I left there as an early because it was time for me to get out on account of my drinking I I left and came went 200 miles up to Louisville by myself on a gryan bus and I wound up taking a bunch of tests l in the University of Louisville as an early admission student I never graduated High School um with an academic scholarship and and my reaction to that was I stayed so drunk the first semester that I’d literally lost all concept of day and night it was just a matter of passing out and coming to and of course I blew the scholarship and then for the next s and A2 years I worked full-time drank fulltime went to school fulltime and somehow got through undergraduate and law school with good grades and I have no idea how that happened when I look back on that whole eight years I don’t have a handful of clear memories that I could sit down with you and say let me tell you some details about what happened during that 8 years it’s just a a swirling gray mass of of alcoholic Insanity spring in 1968 uh I graduated from law school pass the bar that summer and my daughter Dana was born that spring um and Dana and when if you’re doing the math that makes Dana 51 and when your child is middle-aged you’re just old forget it you know you don’t have any excuses left uh but Dana was my only child for over 20 years I have a wonderful 30y old son now but Dana she was 21 or when Keat and my son was born um I practiced law for about 10 years in in Louisville Kentucky which is city of our metropolitan area is about a million um with a good deal of material success I’ve always been a criminal defense lawyer um from the time that I began practicing law I quit my job soon as I passed the bar and I I’ve never had a boss uh I’ve always been self-imposed private criminal defense lawyer um and things got worse over the next 10 years uh than they were the time preceding that I just told you how crazy that was um and I was pretty darn materially successful not nearly as much as I used to think I had been that’s a peculiarity about staying sober while as we get a better focus on the past you know they tell us out here in the world you can’t change the past don’t you believe that crap we do it in here every day um in several different ways and some of them positive uh but uh at any rate I I always had a knack for getting involved in some cases it had some money and publicity in them and and that’s what I’d stick in your face when you suggested that the way I was living was not just exactly right um during that 10 years the whole 25 years that I drank I know that sometime in at least 80% of the 25 uh 24h hour periods I was drunk I had no idea that I was drunk that often because the only standard I ever had for drunk was whether or not I blacked out if I remembered it that discussion was over I was not drunk and and during that 10 years of practicing first 10 years of practice in law my honest best estimate is at least a third of the nights uh uh I did not take take off my clothes like a normal human being and go to bed I either passed out in some other situation or I just changed the combination of what I was putting in my body and tried to fly on through the day uh and when you stuck that in my face I would uh I I would stick my material success back in yours uh things got worse because I no longer had a boss looking over my shoulder I had some money to escalate things with and alcoholism simply progresses in everybody that’s ever had it uh alcoholism is like being pregnant it does not stand still there’s nothing you can do to make it stand still you know you again with the with the pregnancy analogy you don’t look or feel the same way when you’re 20 minutes pregnant you do it 8 and 1/2 months but just hang on see what happens uh it’ll it’ll it’ll progress U and during the latter part of the that 10 years um by the way another analogy man which is even worse than that one but but but but it helped me so much to finally get sober when somebody told me that you know Don intelligence and willpower are really really good things and there are a lot of things in this world that intelligence and willpower do a really good job on but two things that they don’t have any impact on or alcoholism and diarrhea and and for some reason that caused a penny to drop in my head to realize that truly that my my brain and and and willpower was just as useless against alcoholism as as it was then but um at any rate during the latter part of that 10 years I used a world of things up other than the booze and I used the world of them but now before you get your singl of purpose nickers all in a knot let me explain that to you uh I’m going to take it out of my story as soon as they take it out of Bill and Bob’s just soon as they do I’m going to do that uh my story is just like Bill and Bob’s um I use different things and they did and certainly more of it I’m sure but it’s still the same story everything else that I used was a sideshow and the booze was the big tent everything else was something to somehow Chang the effect of the booze maybe increase it maybe decrease it maybe help me try to function on the hangovers but it always went back to the booze of the big tent February 10th of 1978 u i I had been protction law right at 10 years and I got full of U do vodka and four separate outside issues uh and and I drove Corvette off the road at over 120 M an hour and it did really horrible things to my body uh it uh crushed both knees it tore out a good deal of artery in the lower leg and they had to do a bypass in the upper leg take out a vein and and graft it in to replace that artery and just just informationally I’m supposed to be in the hospital right tonight having a vein pulled somewhere else out of my body to replace that 41y old graft but I talked my surgeon into letting me put that off till the first week in December uh and it uh it that re separated my pelvis and it pulled my internal Plumbing into so that I didn’t have a urinary function for over a year I had what they call a Supra pubic catheter which is simply a plastic tube with a flange on it where the bow hole in your abdomen pop it into your bladder to to carry your urine out to a bag I was in hospitals for more than 6 Months of the Year following that wreck and I I had a half dozen major surgeries the night of the wreck uh I was closer to Nashville Tennessee than I was to my home in Louisville so they took me to Vanderbilt probably took me an hour and a half to took him an hour and a half to get me from the scene of that wreck to Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville when I got there I still had a blood alcohol of over 40 with all the other things I had in my system and I woke up two or three times during the emergency surgery because they were terrified to give me enough anesthesia to keep my to to to to keep me under um I stayed there in Vanderbilt 7 or eight weeks uh but they didn’t know who I was there and didn’t treat me with nearly the appropriate difference and up as soon as I got out of the operating room the recovery room and intensive care long enough to get moved by ambulance because I wasn’t stood upright for the first time until almost 3 months after that wreck um I got moved against medical advice back to Louisville where folks knew who I was and uh once and the prognosis by the way was that I would never walk without at least a brace on one of my legs and that we had never find a surgeon who would even attempt to try to put my Plumbing back together so that I would ever have a urinary function uh the doctors were wrong and it had nothing to do as we know with me following directions it was purely grace of God I’ve been sober 38 years and I haven’t owned a brace for over 39 and about a year after that U reck uh the head of Urology at duuke University did put my Plumbing back together and restore my urinary function but I didn’t know that was going to happen after I got moved back to Louisville I laid in the hospitals in Louisville for months and after I got back there to the best of my recollection and the best recollection of the couple of uh friends who survive from that era there not many of them uh and those two of course are in recovery I’m one of their sponsors um every day that I was laying laying in that hospital with that prognosis flat on my back they would come in and bring me booze and more dope than the doctors were giving me and I would lie in that hospital bed and say really intelligent things I would say things like you know fellas anybody can stop drinking when the going gets a little tough but it takes a man to laying there with it when the bills start coming in and then I would explain to him that a man ought not be out there doing the crime if he’s not prepared to do the time so just because we’d hit a bump in the road they weren’t going to hear me whining give me another drink and let’s go on with it of course that’s Insanity that’s powerlessness and when you really think about it it’s letting the way I felt in that instant be more important than my child more important than my profession more important than where they ever walked more important than whether ever peed more important than whether I lived or died that the way I felt and my desire to change it be the most important thing in this universe I wound up not practicing law for um a total of 5 years after that wreck um I lost literally everything I’d had a young lady with me when I had that wreck uh who was not my daughter’s mother and at the time of the wreck I was remarried to my daughter’s mother and I’m not proud of any of the pain that I caused people in that area of my life I’ve had to do a lot of amends and I I live a lot of amends on it today but I’m not going to fail to laugh at myself where I’ve been ridiculous uh and I’ll share one sociological observation please feel free to ignore it it’s not in the big book uh but uh over the last 38 years I’ve just kind of looked around and observed and I’ve come to the conclusion that the fact that I was remarried to the same woman probably establishes my alcoholism without further authentication I just don’t believe an Nory would do it I think it even crossed their mind to jump right back in a frying pan they just got out of they had tear the door off an Asylum getting in try to protect themselves but we do it just willy-nilly drunk and sober you know Joe and Sue divorced but they had ate and they’ll probably get back together and it works for us sometimes it’s not necessarily bad it’s just really different from ordinary folks but uh obviously I got a brand new divorce right after that wreck and and I wound up um pretty quickly married to the young lady who had been with me she had on a seat belt of all things so she was hurt terribly but not nearly as badly as I was um and during the ensuing period of time she had to leave me on account of my insanity and she was staying with some girlfriends and and died in an accident um I was in what I call asylums about half of them were psychiatric hospitals about half of them were Jitter joints or Treatment Centers of some kind the kind the head back then but Bill used the word Asylum and my my mama used that word well when I was a kid people didn’t have substance abuse and alcohol problems and go to treatment nor did they have emotional problems and go to the hospital they went crazy and were put in asylums and that’s a whole lot more descriptive of what kept happening to me I’ll assure you so I was in them 18 times in 2 and A2 years I last laid eyes on my only child Dana in January of 1980 I didn’t see or have any contact with her for until Jan until February of 1983 over over three years um my partners and I had built an office building in Downtown Louisville little law firm of nine or 10 lawyers had built up around this other guy and myself and the internal revenue took my portion of that and a couple of other things and the uh mortgage companies took the homes the Ex-Wives were in the guys had to kick me out of the law firm I’d found it on account of the social and legal pressure that my behavior was bringing on them and I’m really grateful for that because uh I don’t know that I would ever have hit bottom had it not been for that and for anybody that’s new or struggling in any way if I had my choice of only one thing out of my talk that you could remember I believe I would ask that it’d be this please don’t wait for bottom to happen to you I’ve seen hundreds of people die waiting for bottom to happen to them I don’t believe bottom happens to us I believe Bottom’s a decision over which we have a great deal of control and I wasn’t going to make that decision as long as I had a time x watch I certainly wasn’t going to do it as long as I had a law firm right after the guys kicked me out of the firm the state of Kentucky jerk my law license U for almost a year I lived without an address on what I call the street and an expired Blue Cross Blue Shield card um I did not sleep under the bridge but the only reason on Earth I didn’t was I could always get somebody to take me in and it was frequently strangers um I had no home I had no car I had no clothes my teeth were riding out of my head fall of 1980 um I wound up U Back in Nashville Tennessee at Asylum number 17 um the next to last one so far uh and uh they kept me in there a little over a month and it was time to boot me out and I had no place to go no way to get there I wouldn’t have gone back to Louisville if you give me the choice between chopping off my right arm or or not going back to Louisville I would let you chop off my right arm because of the terror of going back there I wouldn’t have opened a a box of mail from Louisville and I’ve been destitute for couple years and I wouldn’t have opened the box of mayo from Louisville for $50,000 just because of the terror and uh I’ll tell you that from this stage of sobriety I still don’t believe there was any paranoia in that I believe the crap I had done in human terms I had no business ever showing my face back there I believe a loving God poured all on the troubled waters of my past to keep the worst of my chickens from coming home to roost on me but at anyway I had a roommate in that U Asylum number 17 and he was a young guy course I was ancient I would have been 36 at that time uh but Matt was 21 and his sweet family lived there in Nashville and they felt sorry for me and said Don why don’t you come stay with us a few days and let’s try to figure out what to do with you well I wouldn’t live with him a year uh and the first 6 months I didn’t stay straight but I got better and I had to get better before I could grasp recovery or anything else uh just as an example and I was ashamed to tell this for the first 30 years I was giv talks when I was 60 days sober I had still not regained the ability to use a knife and fork on food not just properly effectively and I was just embarrassed to ask anybody would you give me a few hints on on how to use the these things I I seem to have lost it somewhere so we’d go to meetings at a clubhouse in Nashville that we call the 202 Club and after the meeting we’d go down to a Shy’s restaurant down the street and I would sit there with my knife and fork under the table trying to mimic what my friends were doing so I could regain the skill of of using a knife and fork so I had to get better and I did get better during that 6 months from the getting out of that Asylum and in the fall of 80 and getting sober in April of 81 um I went to a world of AA meetings almost all of them at that 202 Club during that 6 months I got to where sometimes I could go up to two and I think one time even 3 weeks without getting ripped and that was a world record for me uh since the first time I ever got drunk and how I really know I got better is they only put me back in an asylum one single time in that entire 6mon period and the I’d been going twice a year in the Asylum look like the picture of mental health well late March of 81 I got on my most recent drunk and it was another one of my pop off vodka SL listerin drunks and I have honestly drunk buckets of both those things and this is not a joke I have better memories of the Listerine I can stand to smell lisine today but I can’t stand to smell that old hot cheek vodka but on this most recent drunk I was drinking and taking everything I could get my hands on by the time April 8th of 81 rolled around most recent day that I that I drank um I’d been drunk 10 days of two weeks and I was sitting on the edge of a bed in the motel in Nashville and I know now that my loving God started giving me that beautiful gift that I that I’ve talked about I certainly didn’t know I had any gift then I still had the same insane combination of of U of insane ego and pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization for a couple of three years being intensely exposed to AA and all these treatment centers and asylums uh one second one of you folks would tell me how AA has saved your life and changed your life and my brain would go yeah know I know it works for you but you don’t really understand the width and depth of my intellect and my specialty and my U uniqueness uh and I was apt to get tead that it would work for the simple-minded U but alas I was just my soul was too big for my body and I I was wounded by my own understanding so it couldn’t possibly work for me and here’s the nightmare the very next instant one of you would tell me the same thing how AA had saved your life and changed your life and that same brain would go yeah I know it works for you guys and I’m glad it does but you don’t know how bad I am you don’t know about the parts of me that are just missing and always happen you don’t know that I’ve never really been able to be consistently responsible about one single thing in my life anything in my life that looked like it was even okay much less good is some kind of pack of lies in a house of cards and you guys don’t know what I’ve done that first 10 years I practiced law I I’ve represented some genuinely multi-state wide bad and successful people uh and U the things that I done when I got so bad uh I really believed and I think again I don’t think it was fairo you that if I did manage to not drink for a while it might be just be blown into by Assa off shotgun or maybe spend the rest of my life locked up somewhere I didn’t want to be locked up so it wouldn’t work for me because I’m so terrible and then the very next instant it’ be back telling me it wouldn’t work for me because I’m so special and great and intelligent you see my alcoholism is the perfect social p it has no reason for existing except to get itself that next strength and it has absolutely no compunction about who it damages or kills me or you or both of us in order to get me to take that next string it’ll tell me totally inconsistent lies you know inconsistent with one another back to back just slams it all up against the wall and hopes some of you stick and the rest of the nightmare is that don’t account of the disorder of my perception without divine intervention on some day or the other I’ll believe one of those lines and I’ll pick up that first drink and I’ll trigger that God awful physical allergy and I’ll feel that phenomenon of craving again and the last two or three years I drank that phen withdrawal from ethyl alcohol each one of the last couple hundred times I had to do it was more painful than any of the 14 or 15 major surgeries I’ve had in my life most horrible experience I’ve ever gone through it reached the point where once I got physical alcohol in my body I just had physically lost the ability to stop the need was so bad and the physical addiction was so bad something had to intervene and prize me loose from it and when it did that it took three or four days for me to be physically able to do something like set up in a chair well I didn’t know why I was doing it but I shook out that most recent drunk and when I was able to stumble I was still badly crippled from the wreck when I got sober had had races on both my legs uh I uh I made my way back to the 202 Club and I didn’t think they would let me in and again today they they would not have because I had passed out in their AA meetings and had to be bodily carried out they had caught me in their men’s rooms with illegal outside issues uh and they had warned the people they sponsored to stay away from me that I was a loser and I was going to die about two months before I got sober I was walking through that Clubhouse a big old boy who’s been dead many years Joe wall and Joe was taller than Mike or anybody here if Joe was about 6’5 and he walked up looked way down at me and said Don I’m beginning to think you really are too intelligent for this program and I thought he was giving me a compliment my knee-jerk reaction was thank God they finally figured out who they’re dealing with but Joe went on and it may have saved my life and he said that’s a shame Don because we’ve never had any body too dumb for this deal and we bury you butth holes all the time and that felt like an icy hand closing over something inside me and thank God that icy hand is never completely gone away you let me get a couple of stitches off the pattern on my recovery and so far when I feel the tips of those fingers it jerked me right back onto the path and I I hope those fingers never go away they did let me in I remember what was said and who said said it they said come on in Don you are keeping us sober and I said will you tell me one more time what I need to do if I want to live and they said sure don’t drink don’t take dope go to meetings by the grace of God the first 60 days and went to over 150 meetings I had no idea why I was doing it to the best of my recollection I did not want to go to one of them or I expect after I got the feeling better I was hoping I’d run back into some woman or something but as far as going to any of them for a legitimate reason I I didn’t go to one of them for a legitimate reason it was still perfectly clear to me that you all were religious Fanatics and my my brain was still assuring me what we need to do is get our head out of the scan quit fooding with this cop out with little thing of this myth of higher power and head in the sand group therapy get my butt back to Louisville get some money get a law license back a good-look woman a big car be somebody for God’s sake but I’ve been given this beautiful gift I didn’t know I had of turning around in my brain and saying yeah no you’re right but we out options we’re just out of options so even though these silly meetings can’t possibly solve our terrible and unique problems we’re just going to keep going because there’s nothing else to do see i’ been given that gift of following the directions even though I didn’t understand it didn’t agree with it didn’t think it worked didn’t want to do it and thank God I had the same thing backwards about that that without divine intervention I’ve had backwards every day of my life I make it all about what I think feel and believe that’s the Ultimate Reality you see in nature if I don’t feel like doing the right thing it doesn’t occur to me to go ahead and do the right thing I want to get me fixed so I feel like doing right so I can do the right thing you see all my my life I was absolutely convinced I mean so convinced I didn’t even think about it that the difference between good people and me was they felt like doing right and if we could just get me fixed so I felt like doing right I Could Be Good People Too Well I’ve known for several decades now those good people and they were good people they may have been resentful as heck about what they were doing they may have been cussing under their breath they may have had less than Stellar motives what they doing but they did right and that made them good people and despite all my rationalizations and my grand intentions I did not do right and that made me bad people see I we were asking a question about turning point the other night and there’s no turning point in my life bigger than this one was understanding that all those thoughts feelings and beliefs that I think are the center of the universe have never one time left a footprint on reality not once now if I abdicate my behavior to them and say yeah you know I’m going to behave however you tell me to behave that behavior leaves a great big bootprint on reality but the thoughts feelings beliefs are really just a will of the whisp in my head they have had never had any impact on reality you see I thought in order for AA to work that first I had to believe it would work and then I thought it had to feel like it was working while it was working and I think I also thought that I had to be able to see the causal relationship of a causing B turned out none of that had anything to do with it at that time I just needed to get my raggedy butt to meeting after meeting and let my old sick brain and soul get Dragged In there kicking and screaming behind the Raggedy butt and then they told me if want to live I was going to have to read the big book and I mentioned that I’d read it a few times and they said that they knew that that I had been quoting it to them while I had been dag they said the first thing I needed to get straight is that that book is not a philosophy book that there’s nothing in there that I can learn that’s going to keep me sober for a heartbeat in fact they s said Don you better get this silly notion about recovery being a learning process out of your brain they said you got to learn about that much and they said in your case Don you’ve had enough information about AA and recovery for over two years to stay sober a day at a time the rest of your life without learning one single new piece of information they said what’s killing you dummy isn’t what you know and don’t know it’s what you’re doing and not doing and they said what this book is is a simple instruction manual for your actions and they said if you want to live you better say that set aside prayer and try to set aside everything you think you know about yourself about your alcoholism about recovery about the big book about God or in your case your belief of the lack of one and start at the front cover of that book and go through it land for land reading only the black part not interpreting uh distinguishing or arguing with or memorizing anything not looking for anything to learn but looking for what it says do and then they said if you want to live you better do it it was about then that they explained to me that the 12 steps are the prescription for alcoholism they work on alcoholism exactly like penicillin works on an infection if I’ve got an infection that’s going to kill me if it’s not treated but but will respond to penicillin I don’t need to understand the origin and the nature of my infection and I don’t need to aggravate the people around me in the medical profession whining about that the truth is I could learn every piece of information there is to know about that infection and if I don’t take the stupid pills I’m dead meat what difference it make what I know about it I don’t need to understand a single thing about how penicillin works in the human body I don’t need to believe that that little bottle of pills will take care of all these terrible things wrong with wonderful me and probably the most important one they told me to me is I don’t need to want to take the pills whether or not I want to take the pills couldn’t be more irrelevant if I take the pills as directed I’ll get just fine thank you and they promised me that if I would take the action that is the first nine steps of AA as set out in the big book to reach a state of recovery and then immediately begin doing the action a day at a time that it steps 10 11 and 12 in order to maintain my spiritual condition and get my daily reprieve that that action would work on my alcoholism exactly like penicillin works on an infection and the fact that I’m here instead in that Popper’s grave is testimony that they were right and I’ve been so blessed and seeing that same Miracle happen in hundreds of other lives over the years then you told me if want to live I was going to have to get on my knees every morning and every night and ask and think of power greater than myself well the little part of me that wanted to live there wasn’t a big one but there was a little part that wanted to live had known for the a couple of years that the only outside chance I had of living was to somehow try to get this thing that you had and I believe with all my heart that in order to get it I had to somehow make myself start thinking feeling and believing more like it looked like to me you thought felt and believed and I had tried every way I could in the condition I was in and I hadn’t been able to change a thing not a hair so I remember sitting there in that Clubhouse the tears running down my cheeks looking up at the steps on the wall and explaining to them that I couldn’t do the praying because of because of that and I finally heard them when they said oh Don you’ve got that backwards too we have never suggested that you think F will believe anything and my mouth probably fell open because as far as I was concerned that was the center of the whole ball game and they said well no said we wouldn’t do that said in the in the first place you are far too ill to have any valid thoughts feelings or beliefs they said in the second place the issue of whether you live or die is going to be determined solely by what you do what’s going through the old crazy picture showing the back of your head won’t have anything to do with it so they said if you want to live regardless of what’s going through your head you get down on your knees and start saying those words and I tearfully nodded at him and thought to myself in a pig’s eyes craziest thing I’ve ever heard I won’t do any such a thing in the latter part of that month April of 81 to my great surprise over my brains loud veto I found myself getting down on my knees every morning and every night and as far embarrassed even though I was by myself and as far as I was concerned talking to the B asking something I didn’t believe was there to do something I didn’t believe could be done and I kept on doing it kept on doing it and I could count the mornings or nights that I’ve missed since then on my fingers and I don’t know any other way to stay sober other than getting on my knees every morning and every night now I’m not a dictatorial sponsor as I think Michael can tell you but I told him like I’ve told everybody ever sponsored uh the book doesn’t say you got to get on your knees and I’m not telling you to but I am telling you this don’t ask me for any hints on how to stay sober without getting on your knees every morning and every night because I have no experience with it I’ve been unable to stay sober other than getting on my knees every morning and every night and the twin Miracles the Second Step happened I think I mention that and asket basket question the first one was when I became when I began behaving like a person who believed I began getting all the benefits of being a Believer and the second part of that twin miracle was that by taking the action consistent with belief and faith I came to believe and I developed faith if I had kept insisting that my thoughts feelings and beliefs get changed before I took the action cuz God knows I didn’t want to be a hypocrite uh if ID kept insisting on that I’d have been in that poer grade but at any rate um they led me through the first nine steps in Nashville I lived there 21 months so after I got sober unemployed unemployable happy than I’d ever been in my life uh they find my original sponsor Cherry Carpenter finally convinced me that the third step is is not a great process and it not a process at all it’s the first action step and the book tells me exactly how to do it since they’re understanding people everywhere for us today I’ve either gone in a room with an understanding person and intended for that to be the watershed moment where I commit to do the rest of the steps and try to do that next right thing when what my brain wants to do conflicts with it or haven’t and if I haven’t done that I haven’t done the third step they got it through my head that third step in desent does turn a thing over to God it’s not supposed to it’s simply a decision to get on a track that will turn my will in life over to God they led me through four and five and I formed a picture of what a spiritual d ought to look like and I went back to my attic i’ moved out from the folks I was living with had my very own attic uh I followed directions exactly except the book says take the book down from the shelf and spend an hour going over the first five steps and I didn’t have a shelf so I laid it up on the bed and pulled it back down off the bed and I looked at my time x and gotten me a time x by then and uh and I timed it for an hour I reviewed steps 125 looks like I done all right so the big book gives us less than half a page on steps six and seven the top 40% of page 85 7 76 what’s wrong with me um look like to me i’ done okay you know good enough on steps 1 through five I got on my kn said the seventh step prayer and believe that was where with God’s help I went to work on me to make me into what I decided spiritual Dawn ought to be and I proceeded in good faith on that till I was nine years sober um when I was 21 months sober well my my law license had gotten put back in order when I was a year and a half sober as a total byproduct of steps 8 and N I’m convinced if it had been my objective to get a la license back which I really didn’t want because I didn’t think I could stay sober with the law license I would never have gotten it back but when I really and truly became willing to behave like a person would behave if they were really just trying to set the P straight without looking for any benefit out of it as a byproduct it was put back in order January of 83 21 months sober I went back to Louisville because I could not get a minimum boy each job in Nashville I told you about my Terror of going back if I could have found a job at the 7-Eleven I would not have gone back to Lille to practice law but all sorts of Miracles started happening the second month I was in town February of 83 they stck me up in front of 2,000 people to tell my story and I thought it was terrible as my judgment of events in my life usually is I had it 180 degrees off it wound up being the beginning of the rest of my life that was about 36 and 1/2 years ago and in the last 36 and A2 years I’ve spent considerably more time on AA traveling speaking and more important than anything sitting down one onone with individuals and looking them in the eye and going through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous with them everybody who asked me to be their sponsor whether they’ve been so so 24 hours or whether they’ve been sober 40 years um and I’ve got them in both categories um I suggest let’s take a trip through those steps together let’s go through there and every time we go through it I get to see the light light up a lot of times in the other people’s eyes but a light lights up in me too we were talking about that today on the uh altruism the there’s nothing like nothing like sharing the magic and the joy of this program with somebody and and showing them what we did in order to get out of the humanly hopeless dilemma that they are in and that we were in we share that with them that we were in a humanly hopeless dilemma that could only be alleviated by by high power um but uh at any rate um that same month I saw my daughter Dana for the first time in over three years and uh two months later she moved in with me and lived with me throughout her high school years and we are dear friends today um she’s been in alanon 34 years now and uh occasionally she’s the alanon speaker at a conference where I’m the an AA speaker and it’s just it’s just marvelous and we text every day um all those things were going great but the first nine years I was so relationships with ladies and financial chaos like to kill me and something happened in May of 1990 to caus me to look back at six and seven a different way and for every day of my sobriety since then for the last 29 and a half years uh six and seven have been the most important steps in my life I told you what I thought they were and it turned out that what they are is nothing like that the seven their prayer doesn’t ask God to remove all my defects of character and it certainly doesn’t ask God to remove the ones that I think need to be gone to make me spiritual how arrogant of me to think that I would know what God wants me to be you know my God does shine a light on my path but my God doesn’t use a flood light my God uses a pin light and just lights it one step or one stitch at a time and you know we get all confused about what’s God’s will truth is I’m never going to get a glimpse of God’s will except in the right now for my own next action and when I accept that and accept that the only Power I’m ever going to have in this world is over that next action there’s usually not any confusion about what the next right thing is I get confused if I want to jump half dozen or 220 steps down the road but if I’ll come into the only reality and that’s the right now that spark of the Divine is always there and shows me where to take the next Stitch um and I’ve been stumbling that way since then um and real quickly I will tell you that the Miracles that have happened are unbelievable if ID made a list of the best that I thought I could have in May of 1990 when I was 9 years sober and I’d been speaking all over the country for years and was sponsoring somewhere between 50 and 100 men and my law practice was going really really well and if I made a list of of U the best I thought I could have in every area of my life spiritual material in AA my law practice with my children with my relationship house I live in car drive and God had given me that I would have short changed myself in every single area when I’m willing to truly let go and come like a little child to my God and say Mom Dad I don’t know where we are how we got here or where we supposed to go and I can’t begin to understand how to untangle this thing or understand the patterns of my life but I’m at least going to behave like because I can’t control this brain but I can control my behavior and I’m going to at least behave like a person would behave if it was their objective to do your will by taking one stitch at a time as directed by you and when I do that where God leaves me is unbelievable um my sweet Sharon and I have been married it’ll be 29 years in December and we’ve never argued not once and uh I I sponsored some guys who are counselors and some a couple of psychologist and they tell me that’s not healthy and I tell them they’re welcome to my healthy their healthy relationships thank you that uh I’m going to wall in my illness on that one and and also if you caught me arguing in the last 30 years somebody was paying me I will not argue with you for nothing because God has Believe me of that awful need to be right who cares who’s right it’s always subjetive anyway and it changes with the wind and what’s right for you is not right for me and I have enough trouble knowing what’s right for me how will I ever know what’s right for you one of the handiest phrases in the world is Gee you might be right and just let it go with that and that’s from a guy when I was drinking one night I drove 200 miles in the middle of the night to prove that a room was green instead of flu so it’s a great change and uh in my professional life and my life in AA in the last since May of 1990 the bar association uh has honored me until it’s truly embarrassing um remember here’s a guy that had been in the Asylum 18 times and when I lost my license it wasn’t whatever happened to Don major it was on the front page of the Louisville paper and I brought the bar into terrible disrepute the vote of letting me back in with the Board of Governors was by by one vote but the miracle of it was that the way it shook out when I borrowed my back dues from my lifelong best friend they reinstated me retroactively so if you check my record with State Bar Kentucky I’ve been about member for 51 years with no disciplinary action against me I like starve to death when uh without a law license but God healed the record for me but at any rate they have called me and said we want you to U come down and be on this committee that uh interviews people that wants to be judges and passes on whether they’re qualified and then they said down few years later we want you to be chair of that committee we want to put your name in the CH paper is the guy that’s that’s running in this passing on judicial qualifications and uh then they come and said Don we want you to be a master at in of Court just the most important lawyers and judges in Kentucky and one little tongue chewing drunken criminal defense lawyer that’s been in the Asylum 18 times um and then they call me and they said be sure to the come to the bar dinner we’re giving you the pro bono lawyer of the Year award Lord that’s doing good for nothing the first 10 years I practiced nobody thought about me and that in the same breath then they called me and said come back to the bar den of this year because we given you the most coveted award at the bar we’re giving you the award for professionality and Civility and God God has got such a sense of humor when I was about uh or it’s about 14 15 years ago I was sitting in the barber chair and my cell phone rung it was the president of the State Bar and he said Don we’ve got a vacancy on the Ethics Committee the first 10 years I practiced law the only people on earth I was more afraid of than the Ethics Committee were the IRS and the FBI uh and they put me on the Ethics Hotline so if a lawyer in Kentucky has an had an ethical dilemma they could call me and ask me what to do and if they did what I told them to do they were 100% insulated from disciplinary action even if I was dead wrong that’s a lot of trust to put in a guy that’s spend the Asylum 18 times the point I’m getting in is two points number one the Forgiveness of non-alcoholics for us when we finally try to do the right thing passes all understanding and the other thing is there’s no human way to get from where I was in April of 1981 to what I just described it’s just humanly impossible but when we start trying to do the right thing and we quit trying to live our lives by being an ant floating down the river on a log thinking he’s steering the log and I live so much my life being exactly that going just like an ant little a driving himself crazy I got to steer this log man this log’s not going the right place I got to steer it when if he’ just be still and pay attention to the little ant crap that’s right in front of him that he can do the log’s going where he going anyway and they Ain be a whole lot better off and when I’m willing to accept that I don’t want to be the an on the log and I can’t figure out the patterns in my life and that I can’t do this for me what I’ve got to do is let God take care of me and I’ve got to love comfort and understand and take care of my fellows I’ve got to try to help God’s kids as Chuck C said do what they need to have done and when I do that God’s so much better lawyer than I God’s so much better sponsor than I God’s so much better husband father friend everything than when I try to script my conversations figure out what I want to say and by the way scripting conversations would be good if the other people ever got their lines right but they never do but at any rate thank you all for letting me go five minutes over here and I love you all thank you Nolan and Ryan and and Kelvin and everyone of you and thank you Terry for those wonderful brownies and uh and thank you Michael it’s been such a joy to do it with you and and Derek and and Kelvin and uh all everybody involved it’s just been a great weekend I love you and good night thank you for listening to sober Sunrise if you enjoyed today’s episode please give it a thumbs up as it will help share the message until next time have a great day