I'm comfortable in my skin and I'm comfortable in my environment. And that's been as big a blessing to me as almost anything I can think of in Alcoholics Anonymous.

We need to find new ways to have balanced relationships. We don't want to be dominant or submissive. We want to be mutually sharing and respectful of one another. We want it to be free and easy. I took a lot of prisoners. People that worked for me were my prisoners. They had to get along with me. I had some people that I mistreated because I treated them badly.

We used to have telephone operators. Telephone operators heard a lot from me when they gave me the wrong number or were too long getting it done. I don't even know who they are, but I know I gave them some bad days. Sales clerks. Sales clerks are people that I liked to discuss the policy of the store with. They didn't have a damn thing to do with the policy of the store. They're working there trying to make a living. And I'm standing there telling them, "This is a hell of a way to run an organization. Let me tell you how we ought to do this." It always was going to go my way.

We're blind to our own faults and we see others. We judge ourselves by our own motives. We judge other people by their actions. You did that, therefore I know you had bad motive for that. You didn't speak to me. You must be mad at me. But I didn't speak to you because I didn't see you.

I want to be good to everybody. I want to be well liked. So you've got this "gotness" going on. So you make this list. You go back through your life and you look for the people you've harmed. What kind of harm? Any kind. Economic, spiritual, emotional, just any kind of harm that you can feel, they can feel. And you make this list and you become willing to make amends to them all.

It sounds like a major undertaking when you've lived the kind of riotous life we lived. It sounds like a major job. It's really not too hard. Most of the time we don't even—I've tried to make amends to people who didn't even know I thought they were offended. You know why? I'm kind of embarrassed when that happens because you certainly wouldn't want to tell anybody you did something wrong when they don't know it. But that's not the deal.

We're trying to clean our side of the street. When you come to Alcoholics Anonymous and you have bad relationships, you either owe those people an amend or forgiveness or both. That's what the deal is.

You need to discuss these things with your sponsor. Most of us don't have the objectivity to know what to do in these situations. We may make the situation worse if we don't discuss them and play these things out with our sponsors where it's safe.

An amend is more than saying I'm sorry. An amend is to right a wrong, to correct a wrong. And you really can't push off on your sponsor or anyone else what that is. You're trying to free yourself, so you need to do what you think is right. But you've got to be very careful because you don't want to harm anybody else. We have no right to get well at anybody else's expense. So we have to deal with these relationships in a very careful manner.

The ninth step talks about willingness. Some people you can't make amends to. There's some things you can't do. But if you become willing to make the amend from a spiritual standpoint, it will heal you. The ninth step says, "We made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others."

You're not there to impress anybody when you go to see them. You're not there to please them or to seek their sympathy. I don't think you're even there to obtain their forgiveness. I think that's sort of their business whether they want to forgive you or not. Or maybe it's God's business. I don't know.

There's a great deal of similarity between forgiveness and surrender. It seems to me, and both of those, I think, are gifts from a power greater than myself. So what you're going to try to do is clean up your side of the street. You're trying to stand tall. This is something a lot of people never do. This is a standup kind of activity where you can have some pride in doing the right thing and feeling good about yourself for having tried to do the right thing, whether you please anybody else or not.

Let me tell you about a few of mine.

I had a son. I have a son, and he was about sixteen years old when I got sober. He had a good life. He was on the football team, the basketball team, and the baseball team. He was president of the student body. He had girls running after him. It was a good life. He was popular. My life was not very good, and I stayed close to my son because I liked living my life through him. I helped him all I could. I went to football practices. I talked to coaches. I critiqued umpires on a fairly regular basis.

I was the guy at the baseball diamond hanging on the screen wire behind the catcher, talking to the man in the blue suit about his mother and father, trying to get him to call strikes instead of balls while my son was pitching. Doesn't work very good. I was a pain in the—you know what? I'm the only fan I've ever known to get a technical foul in a basketball game. They stopped the game and gave the other team a free throw because of what I said about the umpire. I told the truth about that guy, but that didn't matter.

I was the guy who picked his son up after practice and drove him all the way home, giving him helpful hints on how he could improve for the next day. Same thing through with ball games. I was wrapped up totally in him.

I was sitting in a meeting one night and some little lady said, "You have to love your children and hold them in an open hand so they can go if they need to go and come if they need to come. You need to give them roots and then you need to give them wings."

I thought she was talking to me, and she was. I thought about that for a day or two, and I went home and saw my son and I said, "Mike, I've been sitting on top of your life and I'm going to give you some room. I'm going to give you some slack. I'm not going to any more football practices. I'm not ever going to talk to another umpire. I'm not ever going to tell the coaches what plays they ought to run or how they ought to play you or anybody else on the football team. I'm going to go to your games. I'm going to enjoy them. I'm going to support you every way I can, but that's all I'm going to do."

Mike told me later, "I felt like you were rejecting me." But in a very short period of time, he recognized that he had been given a great deal of freedom, and he began to enjoy that.

Now, I found out recently that my son still has some carryover feelings about those days when I was trying to run his life. I'm sorry about that, and I'm going to do all I can to straighten that out. But you never know how long these amends will take or what they will require of you. I know that I have some more work to do there.

On the other hand, my daughter was about four years younger. I didn't really have much time for her. I was busy. I was practicing law and running football and doing all this kind of stuff. She didn't have much attention from me. She had a bunch of little girls around her all the time, and I never was able to—I never have understood little girls.

When she let me ride on her, she'd ride my shoulders and play horsey and that kind of stuff. I did fine. I had no problem at all. But then she got a little older and they began to hang around together and they giggled a lot and they whispered all the time. They were whispering and giggling, and they would never tell me what they were whispering and giggling about. I could never get in the game.

Because I was not paying a lot of attention to her, she really kind of got along fine without me. She made her own life and was moving right ahead. When I got around making amends, I recognized I probably owed her some too. I said to my wife, Billy, one night, "I can't seem to get anything going with Karen. I'm trying to get a friendship going with her, trying to get something happening, and I can't seem to get it going. I don't know what to do."

She said, "Why don't you take her to dinner?"

I said, "Take her to dinner?"

She said, "Yeah."

I said, "Would you go?"

She said, "I don't know. Ask her."

So I went in and said, "Karen, would you go to dinner with me?"

She said, "Why?"

I said, "Well, because I'd like to spend some time with you. I'd like to know what you're doing in your life."

"Where would we go?"

"Anywhere you want to go."

"When?"

"Whenever you will go."

"Okay."

So we started going to dinner. We go to dinner once a week. Now, after about a month or six weeks of this, I quit asking because I didn't want to do the same thing I was doing with my son. I didn't want to force myself on her.

The first week, nothing happened. The second week, I don't remember. The second or third week, she came in and said, "Daddy, aren't we going to go to dinner anymore?"

And I said, "Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Ever have."

She brings her kids to me. She puts them on my lap. She wants them to know me. She brought him to a talk that I was giving recently. The whole family came. Her sixteen or fourteen-year-old daughter came first and she liked it. So she brought her two boys and they liked it. The youngest one's five. He calls me "pop." After the talk, he said, "Pop, I'm not going to drinking that alcohol. Get you in trouble."

So you do the opposite. You stop hurting people. That's first. And then you try to restore that which you've taken away or that which you've damaged. And people respond to that. People respond to that.

Not always. Some people have resentments of their own. They've got a spiritual sickness. Our fourth step talks about those folks who are spiritually ill, and we have to pray for them.

Some people you don't even know whether you've harmed them or not. There was one guy. He was a man I went to work for. He was one of the best lawyers in Dallas. He was president of the state bar of Texas. He'd been president of the Dallas Bar Association. He was enormously well regarded and respected. Clients loved him. I got to go to work for him. I carried his briefcase. I briefed his cases. I prepared his bills. I wrote his letters for him. I did everything. He told me many times that he didn't think he could practice law without me.

And then one day he called me into his office and said, "Jerry, I'm leaving this law firm. Several of us who have been practicing here are forming a new law firm."

He didn't ask me to go. I was offended as I looked at it. I really didn't want to go. I didn't like a couple of people he was going with, but by God, I deserve to be asked. So all the clients that we were working on cases together hired me to continue to work with him after he left.

It was a miserable year or two because I couldn't see his correspondence. I didn't know what people were writing him letters for. I didn't know whether he was billing or not. I was just scratching around on the outside. Finally, we got all that laid to rest.

I got to this part of the program. His name did not make the list. I did not owe him an amend. And then about a year and a half after I'd finished my first round of amends, I was in Lovejoy, Texas, where we had been one time, and I was going into a restaurant, the Hickory Steakhouse. I thought, you know, the last time I was here, I was with this other lawyer.

And then I remembered the whole thing. We'd been out there trying a lawsuit. At the end of the day, the lawyers on the other side said, "Come down to the bar and have a drink. Let's talk about settlement." We went down, had a bunch of drinks, didn't talk about settlement at all.

And then a remarkable thing happened. A lady came out from the back of the room. She was the first go-go dancer I had ever seen. She had an interesting costume, what there was of it. She danced and moved around under black lights, and it was pretty exciting. As she took certain steps, I had an awakening. When the dance was over, she came over to our table and sat down. She knew one of the guys there. Then they got to partying pretty high, and I was just kind of watching this thing going on.

She turned around to me and said, "Would you like to dance?"

I was ready. So we danced a while. She knew some very interesting jokes. Not jokes she would tell in polite company, but she told lots of jokes. She had a rather loud voice. As we danced, she said she was hungry. I said, "Well, I'll tell you what. I'll get my partner here and we'll go get something to eat."

We also had our client's representative, who was one of the major players in Dallas and owned an interest in the Dallas Cowboys at that time. So I took the two of them and the go-go dancer to this restaurant for dinner. She continued to tell jokes.

I remembered all that as I walked in that night, and I thought, you know, that might have been a little embarrassing to the man who was president of the State Bar of Texas at that particular time. He may not have been real comfortable in that relationship. He may have even thought I drank a little too much on that occasion.

And then it came back like a flood. I would no more have asked me to go with me to form a new law firm. I wouldn't ask a young lawyer that would drink like I did. Why would you want to start a new business with a problem like that?

So I knew I owed him an amend. I went to him, and he didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to hear it. And I said, you know, I just got to tell you this thing. He said, "You know, it's okay. It's okay. You made partner in the law firm when I left. You've had a good career. I'm happy. You're happy. Let it go."

But I had carried that around. I'd said some pretty caustic things about him in the interim. I needed to straighten that up. I'll tell you this: he's a good lawyer. I've told lots and lots of people that he's a good lawyer. If they need a good lawyer, they could not go wrong if they hired him. That's about as much as I could do. It's been enough to free me from all of those ill and bad feelings and to allow me to talk there.

To set your mind at ease, the lady went home after dinner. She got her free meal. That's all she was really looking for.

The amend step—there are a lot of people that you've offended that you can't identify who they are. There are people who have died that you can't make amends to. It's really important to make these amends as soon as you and your sponsor believe the time is right because you don't want to have to try to clean up after they're gone.

The first amend I ever made was to my mother and father. They didn't raise a kid to act like I was acting, to drink like I was drinking. And they both were courageous enough to tell me from time to time that I was ruining myself and ruining my family with the way I was drinking. I just had to tell them at the time, "You know, I'm a big boy now and I'm going to have to live my life the way I'm going to have to live it."

They had a sad look on their face and went home.

When I got in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I'd been there about a month. I mailed them a copy of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. They lived about five hundred miles away. I said, "I've thought it over and this is the way I'm going to try to live the rest of my life."

And that was good enough for them. They thought Alcoholics Anonymous was the best thing since sliced bread. My God. My dad, every time they'd pass a meeting, he'd go to AA meetings with me. Every time they'd pass, he'd go for his wallet. I'd say, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. We're self-supporting through our own contributions."

He'd say, "Damn it, Jerry. It ain't right. A man ought to be able to give money to something like this place."

It didn't matter. My relationship was right with both of them. They supported me always. When I got through with my amends and was living a decent life, they flowered in that relationship.

My dad could never say I love you. He just couldn't say it. Mom died first, and he got in a lot of trouble with depression and one thing and another after she died. I went up to West Texas and got him and brought him back to Dallas. He wouldn't live with us. He wanted to have an apartment of his own.

I'd go by there and see him every day or so. He gave me all of his money. He said, "I don't want to keep up with it anymore. You just give me what I need."

I got a call one morning at six o'clock. He said, "Are you up yet?"

I said, "Yes, sir, I'm up."

He said, "I need you to come get me."

I said, "What's wrong?"

He said, "I don't know. I have a lot of pain in my chest."

I said, "I'll be right over there."

I got in the car and went right over there. I said, "When did it start?"

He said, "Oh, about three thirty or four o'clock."

I said, "Why in the world didn't you call me?"

He said, "Hell, you never did like to get up early."

I said, "Well, let's get you to the hospital."

I got him to the hospital. He had a ruptured aorta, the big vessel coming out of the heart. He died in about a day.

Just before he died, I'd been talking to the doctors. One doctor wanted to crack his chest open and try to repair it. I said, "Well, this old boy's been making his decisions for a long time. He's going to be involved in this one."

I went in and told him what the doctor said. One of my guys that I sponsor was a doctor, and he said, "I think this is idiocy to try to operate on him in this condition."

Another doctor said it was a heroic surgery, but he didn't think that we should be trying to be heroic here. One doctor wanted to do it.

So I told Dad the whole story. He said, "Hell, I'm not going to do that. I won't make it to the operating table."

But he said, "I'm not sure how long I'm going to live. How long am I going to live?"

I said, "Well, Dad, I don't have any idea how long you're going to live. You may—hell, you might even get well—but they don't think you are."

He took me and he stuck out his hand and said, "Well, Jerry, it's been pretty good. Been pretty good."

And he died.

That was good enough. That was good enough. It's a wonderful, freeing step.

The promises come here. Before you're halfway through, the promises come to you. You'll know a new freedom and a new happiness. You'll not want to shut the door on the past, and you'll see how your experiences can benefit others.

Can you imagine a greater miracle than your worst assets, your worst liabilities—the moment you accept them, they become your greatest assets. You can use them all your life to help people and add fulfillment to your life.

All of the promises come to you. Not all at once, not every day, but they're there. And that's the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. We'll do the rest of the steps in about thirty minutes.

—

Here's are we ready to go?

You all just about had about a full load of me, I think. So I need to get through before everybody leaves.

Step 10. Step 10 in our program—as we've cleaned up our relationships with others, we reach a point in the program where some people call the last three steps maintenance steps. I happen to believe that they're growth steps. I think this is the place where we move forward and grow in understanding and depth as we work with other people and in usefulness as we try to be a force for good in our community.

The tenth step says we continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, we promptly admitted it.

When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, there were a lot of old-timers around who would say that you only do one fourth step. Only do one fourth step, and then you do tenth step. I can't tell the difference between the two except perhaps in the area of how frequently you do them. We're referred right back to the other nine in the tenth step.

The book says, "We have entered the world of the spirit. Our next function is to grow in understanding and effectiveness. We have ceased fighting anything or anyone, even alcohol. By this time, sanity will have returned."

That's where I got the idea that step two is talking about the first drink. We will see that our attitude toward liquor has been given to us without any thought or effort on our part. It just happens. It just comes. That is the miracle of it. We're not fighting it. Neither are we avoiding it. That's what the steps do.

I told you I had a bad temper. I was in Colorado about five years sober, and I was in a tackle shop buying some flies for fly fishing. I looked across the room, and there stood a friend of mine that I'd been on a church board with. He was a veterinarian and took care of my dogs. I knew him well. I'd been deer hunting with him.

I saw him and said, "Hi, Bill."

He looked at me kind of funny and he started walking towards me and said, "Are you Jerry Jones?"

I said, "Yes, I'm Jerry Jones."

He said, "What happened to you?"

I said, "Well, I got a few more nicks and a couple of bangs, but you know, I'm just aging and moving along."

He said, "Oh, no, no. You're not angry anymore. What happened?"

I said, "Well, you know, I've just had to change some of the ways of my life a little bit."

He said, "Come on. I want to go out and sit out on the curb here and talk for a minute. Tell me what happened."

People stopped me in the first year of my sobriety as I begin to let go of some of my old ideas and said, "We don't know what you're doing, but whatever it is, please keep doing it."

The steps change us just that way. They change the way we think. They change the way we approach life. We're moved into a life of reality. We're not living on chemicals. We're not living on anything. We're living on just life. Just life.

So we have to continue to practice this and continue to work on it.

When I first came to Alcoholics Anonymous, the serenity prayer was very important to me. I didn't know there was a third part of the serenity prayer for a long time. I prayed a lot for serenity for the things I couldn't change. Which I couldn't change. I was an alcoholic. I couldn't change. I wanted to drink. Couldn't change. Couldn't change.

And the courage to change the things I can. I found out I could change some things. Could change some things. But it took me a while to recognize that there's a third part.

This is a whole ball of wax here. First of all, you're asked to deal with whatever problems are in front of you. Then you say, "If I can't do anything about this thing, give me the serenity to accept it. If I can, give me the courage to do it. And give me the wisdom to know whether I could change it or whether I can't."

That last part is where we really grow a lot in maturity—to find out and gain wisdom. You can't transfer wisdom. We've been on this globe for no telling how many generations of people, and there have been some very wise men. They write books. They record things today. All sorts of things. But you can't transfer that from one person to another. Each generation, each person in each generation has to grow their own wisdom.

And this is where we grow our own wisdom. We continue to take inventory, looking for the same things—exactly the same things we look for back in step four. Self-centeredness. We're looking for resentments. We're looking for fear. We're looking for problems with our relationships, both sexual and otherwise. The same questions apply to your nonsexual relations as apply to your sexual relations and your dealings with people.

So you need to keep looking at those things. You grow. You try to establish sane and sober ideas. When you fall off the wagon and miss it, you go back and straighten it out and try to correct it and move forward.

James Allen, in his book on inner peace, says, "Wisdom is acquired by our own exertions. He who is prepared to be honest with himself, to measure the depth of his ignorance, to come face to face with his errors, to recognize and acknowledge his faults, and at once set about the task of regeneration will find the way of wisdom."

That's what we're doing here in this step. The wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching becomes a regular habit, until he's able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he is patiently and persistently trying to correct what is wrong. That's what I think we're trying to do here in the tenth step.

You always start out from where you are. I learned that in navigation when I was an assistant navigator in the Navy. You don't just go to Japan. You got to start out from somewhere to go to Japan. So first you start out here. Then you start saying which way to guide the boat. But there's wind and waves and human imperfection in guiding the boat. First thing you know, you can get way out in the weeds, and you have to correct it. It's just that way with here.

I worry a lot about Alanons. They don't have a mascot. I know one of my clients, an old East Texas guy, told me about Ladino. Ladino, I understand, means outlaw in the Spanish language or Mexican language. He said that on the ranches in Mexico, they would take the young cattle or steers out in the warmer weather and leave them out there for the summer. Then when the weather would begin to get cold and worse in the winter, they would round them up and bring them in.

But there were always some steers who were a little rambunctious, a little stubborn, a little hard to get along with, and they couldn't get them to come in. It wasn't such a big deal because they had a lot of cattle. They'd leave them out there, and the next year when they came around, the herd instinct would kick in with these steers. They'd start rounding up the newcomers. Next, they wouldn't want any of them to go back in either.

The ranchers used to shoot these old Ladinos because they were trouble.

Then some smart ranger one day decided that he would take a string of these little burrows that they have down in Mexico out with him. They'd rope these wild steers and halter them to one of the little burrows. In the beginning, the big steer would just take the little burrow wherever the big steer wanted to go. But sooner or later, he'd want to eat or drink or do something or stop. When he did, the little burrow would start for the home corral. It would take him about two weeks to lead the big steer docilely into the home corral. Just persistent pressure on them finally gets him there.

I heard that story, and I thought, you know, I was kind of out there in the wild, and my wife—my wife got into Alanon and she led me into the home corral. I may just suggest that the jackass may be the symbol for Alanon. We could make little pins, you know, and little stores like this would sell them or make them available to Alanon so they'd know who it was. It's going to be a wonderful idea.

Billy wasn't quite as excited about it as I was. I had to think about it a little more. And you know, I realized, wait a minute, wait a minute. I've been out in the weeds several times since I've been sober. She didn't bring me back in. Something did. Something brought me back.

Once I'd been in the home corral and knew where I was and recognized a little later on that I was not comfortable where I was, I knew that I was off the beam, as we say in AA, and something led me back.

So maybe the little burrow was not an Alanon all the time. Maybe it was a loving God who was turning me back where I needed to go.

The interesting thing—the really interesting thing—is this. No matter how far out in the weeds you get, the moment you turn and start toward the home corral, your life improves immeasurably. Isn't that remarkable? You don't have to get back on track for it to work. You just got to start back in the right direction.

The tenth step of Alcoholics Anonymous is where we pay attention to what we're thinking about, pay attention to our actions, see the program work in our life, and when we're wrong, promptly admit it.

Do you ever do that? That is a remarkable phenomenon.

I have a little story that just blew me away. I told you about how one lane of traffic was mine. I used to drive a big Mercedes, and I could get on the freeway pretty much anytime I wanted to. It accelerated rapidly, and I would just blow onto there and take my lane. I didn't worry a hell of a lot about what the other people on the freeway were doing.

One morning I saw a little Volkswagen coming along, and I realized they didn't have any real acceleration. So I just stomped on it and popped right in front of this little Volkswagen. Just to check things out, I looked in the rear view mirror after I got on the freeway, and the little lady driving the car was giving me hand signals. Her mouth was moving, and I thought it was kind of cute, you know.

So the devil rides with me in a car part of the time. She decided she would whip over in the other lane, and I whipped over too. Now she was giving me hand signals with both hands, and her mouth was really going. I forgot about her because I had serious problems. Not like most people's, but my problems were pressing and serious, and I needed to think about them and worry about them.

I'm driving on, worrying about my problems. I get all the way downtown to my exit. I don't know how in the hell she did it, but she got ahead of me somehow. I pulled out of my lane and got into another lane, and she happened to be—she pulled right in behind me. I got off on the exit, and she followed me off the exit. I went down the corner and turned right. She turned right. I turned left. She turned left. I turned right one more time. She turned right one more time, right behind me.

I recognized I've got a problem here.

So I just pulled over to the curb and stopped. She pulled right in behind me and stopped. I got out and I walked back to her and said, "Uh, can I help you?"

She said, "You harassed me on Central Expressway."

She was kind of cute, and I thought about, you know, playing a little bit. But something kicked in, and I said, "You're right. You're right. I did that. I was wrong to do that. And I will do my best to be a more courteous driver in the future."

She said, "Oh, thank you."

She took off. That was all of it. Completely disarmed the thing. She had been angry enough at me to follow me off the expressway. It probably wasn't even her exit—just to tell me what I had done. I admired her courage.

Just saying that I was wrong made a lot of difference. It almost cuts out all the debate. When you say to somebody, "I was wrong," they say, "You damn sure were."

"That's right. I was wrong."

"Well, you were wrong."

"Yes, I was wrong."

Where are we going to go from here?

I was wrong. And try to make amends for the wrong that you've done. Try to straighten it up right then before it has a time to fester and grow and create a bigger problem. It's a wonderful, wonderful tool. I don't use it often enough, but it really works when I do.

The tenth and the eleventh step in my experience are related to one another. I was reading the Twelve and Twelve one day, and there's this paragraph:

"There is a direct linkage among self-examination, step 10, meditation and prayer, step 11. Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit. But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result may be an unshakable foundation for life. Now and then we may be granted a glimpse of that ultimate reality which is God's kingdom. And we will be comforted and assured that our destiny in that realm will be secure for so long as we try, however falteringly, to find and do the will of our creator."

What that says to me is: if I do this life—if I get one point for step 10 and then I do step 11 meditation prayer, three—if I combine those three together, I get a whole handful. I get a lot bigger life. So that dictated some of what I ultimately try to do in my morning meditation and in my prayer.

When I got to step 11, which says, "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will and the power to carry that out"—I didn't know anything about meditation.

You may have known about meditation, but there was a little place in the bulletin in my church where they played real sad organ music, and it was called meditation. That's where we talked about what the Cowboys were going to do that day on the football field. It was