Removing Defects and Fear – Workshop: Steps 1 – Part 8 of 11 – Local AA Speakers

it's the home stretch guys you please join me in the serenity prayer god step six and seven have less written on them than any two steps in the big book of aa except for one 2, which there is nothing specifically written about in the big book. There's one page written on both steps between the middle of page 75 to the middle of page 76. There are the two, I believe, the two longest chapters on any two steps in the 12 and 12 or on 6 and 7. They seem to be the two steps that separate the raisins from the grapes. And when I say, when I humbly ask God to remove these defects, humbly is not, take him if you can, big guy. Humbly isn't, take him, you miserable. Humbling is, Pop, I can't bear this anymore. Can you help me? I can' t bear it. Can You please do this for me? Can you please enter my life and take this away? I'll do your work, please do my work. Please. And when I first did steps six and seven. I went through all of my defects of character on that defect of character list. I went though each one individually. I said, Father, please remove this terrible self-centeredness. Father, Please remove this terrible self-delusion. I Went through each one. I asked for the removal and then I said that seventh step prayer on page 76. It says in the section on fears, I asked him to remove my fear to turn my attention to what he would have me be. That's what it says on page 78. 8. I asked him to remove my fear, turn my attention to what he would have me be, and it says when I humbly rely upon him, I immediately get a sense of freedom from fear. I immediately start to match calamity with serenity. So what that, and that's a suggested meditation. Remove my terrible fear of blank. Turn my attention what you would have me be. God doesn't want me to be scared. God has no interest in me being scared. It blocks me from him. My plan, the Scott Redman program is to be frightened. God has an alternate plan on each fear. So if I'm saying to him, turn my attention to what you would have me be. And if you get a chance, take a look on 78 because it's laid out right there in the middle of the page. What do you want me to do instead of being scared? Father, I had a terrible fear of animals when I got sober. Father, please remove this terrible fear OF animals. Turn my attention to what you would have me be. In other words, what do you want me to do instead of being scared of animals? My inner voice said, stay away from animals. Now there's this notion, sometimes you hear it about meetings, I've got to walk through my fear. I have to walk though my fear Well, God doesn't always tell me to walk thru my fear That's sort of an Arnold Schwarzenegger-ish kind of approach to sobriety Sometimes he says stay away form animals It didn't say go pet a puppy go buy fish It didn'y say that It said, my inner voice said, stay the hell away from them. I did, and I'm not scared of animals anymore. I'm able to pet dogs. I'mable to do all of that stuff. I'm, I'mnot scared of them because I needed to stay away from them for a while. Please turn my attention, Father, I, please remove this terrible fear of death. Turn my attention to what you have me be. My inner voice, when I did my initial six and seven steps, say, I would have you be a man who gets a physical examination once a year. Eventually it said I would have you be a man who doesn't smoke cigarettes. What does stopping smoking have to do with sobriety? Nothing, unless you have to go to the doctor. You have to stop smoking and do it. Absolutely nothing. Let me tell you my spiritual experience that allowed me to stop smoking in AA. I got sober. I stopped drinking for the first time in my life. I had never stopped drinking. I had ever stopped taking drugs. I heard people asking God things when I got in here that seemed completely crazy to me. Asking God for jobs, to get relationships. Asking god for parking spaces. Oh no, oh not the parking space god. Not the parking place god. What if you don't get a space? And what I knew, I knew that it was astounding that I didn't drink. And my biggest fear is that I was going to start asking him for stuff that wasn't going to happen. It would all crumble and I would drink. So I wanted to stop smoking because I was just scared all the time. I was scared of getting cancer. It just made me scared. I did not wear a seatbelt once in my life until the day I stopped smoking. I thought the accident would just save me chemotherapy bills. I mean, that's just the way I was. And this is what happened. I stay away from women in AA not because they are sick but because I am sick. And I don't stay away for them like stay away form me. I just make sure I'm not, you know, I work a program. Women think like I'm a nice guy. Uh, and if you're an opportunist, you could really like, you can really. So I have always, because of who I am, never placed myself in a situation where I'm alone or, you know, I've just been very careful about that. Also, I need to make amends to my wife and make sure that I'm not in situations that could be detrimental to other people. At any rate, the reason why I'm saying this is after I talked to me one night, a young lady asked to talk to me. She was in a lot of trouble and I agreed to talk. to her. I discussed something with her after the meeting. She subsequently said that I saved her life. At any rate, and I had a huge impact on her. I finally go to my first Smokers Anonymous meeting. I'm there and I see this woman whose life I have saved taking a cake for a year off cigarettes and she gets up to the podium and she says in front of this group, people in AA who still smoke cigarettes work crappy programs. So my brain blows up, I immediately say to myself oh so I didn't save your life because I was smoking at the time. I work a crappy program I'm a crappy member of AA because I smoke bleh blehblehblehh so the dust settles, I go home and I write the 10th step about her because I wasn't where's that flatter and what came out in the wash was of course she didn't know what she was talking about. I worked a perfectly fabulous program, Smoking or Not in AA. It had nothing to do with anything. And it went off. I said, oh, so I can ask God to stop the cigarettes because whether or not I smoke has nothing to deal with who I am and alcoholics and others. It won't affect anything. It won't crumble anything. Boom. It came off me like a light and I said hey pop if you're keeping Saturday on its axis if you could move it into your busy day I'd also like to stop smoking. And what started happening is I took a service commitment and I committed to Smokers Anonymous and I stopped smoking, but it had nothing to do with AA, but I didn't get it. And that's when I got it. And for me, it was a result of step six and seven. Father, please remove this terrible fear of dying. I would have you be a guy who doesn't smoke. Okay, fine. Thanks a lot. and then I'd go smoke cigarettes and then I'd have you be a guy who goes to Smokers Anonymous I have heard I have a couple of guys one guy in particular I sponsor who is dead now my beautiful Jim Parkinson I'll say his whole name which he'd be fine with him and he's gone now and he would tell you this story just like I'm telling you this story. He suffered from a sexual problem that was getting him arrested and put in prison, and it became so much trouble that I dropped him off at court one day where he was answering to a judge for this, and he got arrested for the same thing on the way home. And he said to me, Scott, I'm going to die. What can I do? And I said, You must ask for help. Don't ask the judge to set you free. I said, go do what we do. And he went to court and he said, Judge, I did it. You're right. Can you help me? And the judge sent him to, I don't know what the exact name, Sex and Love Anonymous or whatever that is. He never spent another day in jail until the day he died. He carried the message in Alcoholics Anonymous and stayed alive because he was leaving. And I have attended meetings of AlcoholicsAnonymous where people have made fun of these other programs from the podium. And I sit there and I think, what are you thinking? What is going through your mind? How can you misuse this podium to pass judgment on these other citizens? This has nothing to do with what we're doing. Now if there's cross-talk, if there is some supposition that AA can't deal with alcoholism, that would be one thing. But that's not what we are talking about. You know, I have had to ask for, I don't call it outside help because all of this has been a direct result of my working the sixth and seventh step in AA. I went up to 300 pounds in sobriety. What does that have to do with sobriery? Nothing unless you're going through it. So I go to OA. And I go in OA, I go, hey, I'm a circuit speaker. They said, yeah, and a very fat circuit speaker too. Want to speak? And they basically said to me, you can't spend your AA money here. Different currency. Oh, good. But for me, again, it wasn't outside help. Anytime I've had to do that stuff, it's been a direct result of me working step six and seven. So that's the prayer meditation that I had to do on fears, and in 6 and 7, the last two paragraphs on page 69, I take all of the statements I've made about what should I be doing instead on my sexual inventories. I never should have been with that person. I should have told the truth. I should be an honorable man who is trying to help people and not be an opportunist and take advantage of them. All of what I should be doing inside I take. I put them in one place and in those last two paragraphs on page 169 I say, Father, how can I walk closer to this? I try to shape a sound ideal for my future sex life. I say life. I ask God to help me walk toward it. And in the last sentence on 69, it says the right answers will come if we want them, not if we like them, because sometimes I'll get an answer from God and I'll go, yeah, get your list out. Get your list up. I didn't like that one. And sometimes when a guy is asking questions in his prayer meditation and he's not getting answers and he asks why, I say, well, maybe you don't want an answer yet. That doesn't make you bad, but let's just keep doing this work until you want one and maybe something more will be revealed. I also really believe very strongly that I have never heard a complete fourth step, that I did not do a complete fifth step. If I did a complete forth step, I think if I remembered everything that day, my brain would have blown up. I would have looked like an outtake from Scanners. I think my brain would have blown up. I'm really glad I didn't remember everything. And I sort of call them crystals shaking loose from the roof of the cavern, where a couple of years into sobriety, I'll go, oh, wow. Something will happen, a memory will come back, and you'll go whoa. You know those 30s films where the newspaper spins up? Scott Redmond's a moron, a morON, a morOn, that kind of stuff. Um, I, uh, I sat down and, um, it's really funny. A guy I sponsor just took on this other guy. He had done his inventory with another guy and he said, I want to work six and seven with the guy. And he's already done his fourth and fifth step. And he and I talked about six and Seven. I talked all about the bells and whistles that I just discussed with you. He's already, he goes to the guy says, okay, take your defect list. The guy says I burn it, burn his inventory. It's hard to make an eight step list from a burnt inventory. Some people can do it. Some people can't. But at any rate, it says that once you start to do your eight-step list that you've already pretty much got it because you wrote it when you wrote down your inventory. So if you take your inventory, my sponsor told me that after I did my eight-stop list I was to get rid of my inventory because I might want to reread it. And I have sponsored many guys who have had their inventories read. Only on a couple of occasions has their mate actually gone to great lengths to read their inventory. Boy, there's welcoming a little grief in your life. It's just I had one the wife of one guy sponsor who went I mean got to the inventory. It wasn't laying around man if you call laying around like in a vault. You know, I mean she got to be in the inventory it creates a lot of beauty in a relationship. The best reading of the eighth step I've ever heard in my life happened years ago at my old home group. I try to share it any time I talk in AA. It was done by a guy named Nino. I have never seen this guy since then. This was many years ago I heard him do this. He was brand new in the program. He had never read chapter 5 before. He was there with a hospital group. He Had hospital plastic on his wrist and he was reading chapter 5 for the first time in front of this group of men. And he reached step 8 and he read, made a list of all those we it harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Jesus Christ! And he looked out into the room as if to say, have you seen this? Do you know what's in here, man? It was so gorgeous because it was so pure because it Was the only thing I saw on the list. I didn't see anything on the List. Not those people, not that money. I would not have taken not much money if I knew I had to give it back. No way! Not the car! That guy whose car I had sold? When I called him and told him I sell that car, he said, you sold my car? I lent you my car. That's like house-sending for someone and they come back and you're an escrow. When I called him When I called him back to make amends, his voice was exactly the same. He said, you're paying me back? So I had to do that eight-step list. I had put my wife and my kids down there and my pop just for me, just for me, and I ain't putting you down if you do it because I got guys I sponsor who not only put themselves on their eight-stepped list, they put themselves on the top of their eight step list, and I think there's people who need to do it. I needed to not be on my eight-step list. I needed to not be anywhere near it. I had been making amends to Scott Redman at your expense my entire life. And again, please believe me, I'm not just paying lip service to this. I know that some people need to be on their own eight-stop list. I know that as assuredly as I know that I had no business being on mine. And my sponsor as a matter of fact said if you are on yours be really low on the list At any rate, the other thing I must tell you that I benefited from immensely was reading my... And, you know, the book, because the book was written at a time where they had no sense of real sponsorship in a way, they didn't really know who was going to be receiving the book in what situation. They talk about giving your inventory to a properly appointed person if you're a member of a religion. They say you can even read it to your wife as long as you don't... which I had about as much of a chance as taking the third step with her, I think, provided that we do not tell anything that will hurt them because we can't save our own skin at someone else's risk. I have had the most odious amends paid to me in AA than any other place in the world. I've had people in AA come up to me and say, geez, I really used to think you were a moron, but I don't anymore. News to me, but it's true. But I hope you feel better. I have a friend named Kevin who, anytime anybody in the program comes up to make amends to him, he always says, is this something I should know about? Man. At any rate, I really benefited from taking my fifth step with someone who became acquainted with my case and then stayed who I stayed with as I worked the amends. I tell you, it was a great thing for me. who heard me admit that thing about my son and then saw what happened when I started showing up at flag football games for that kid. When I showed up at Little League games for that little boy, the day that one of the men I sponsor showed up in my house with his two-year-old son so that me and Jesse could take care of him so he could go to the hospital and be with his wife and his new baby. And Jesse, who I couldn't go and be with took care of that little boy with me. So when I get to call those guys who know my case, what a great thing. What a splendid, gorgeous thing to celebrate in sobriety with those people who really know you, who know you and who have thrown their arms around you even if they didn't do anything that bad and say, I love you too. I've been a limousine driver when I was drunk. One night I had Steven Spielberg and Quincy Jones in the back of a limousine. I had a bag of 100 Quaaludes under the front seat, and I was driving them to Barbara Streisand's house. And I thought to myself, I'll drive into StreisAND's house, I'll crush her to death, and we'll go up in a fireball, and I'll be famous. if they had just taken one little peek now i'm sharing this in great part because the statute of limitations is over and um it was a great job for a drunk driving a bar around and um so i got the quaaludes they're getting out of the car i'm going to back powering down nine vodkas and jumping in the front seat taking all these drugs i'm in a snowstorm now and this is night after night i'm doing this not just with those people and other people in the back to now those cars have a center divider which is a one-way mirror you bring it up you can't see them they can see you it reflects what's ahead of you on the road it's night so it's showing you what's a head on the row so if you look into the rearview mirror you see what's ahead of your own the road you're drunk you have no short term memory so you look into the rearview mirror and go, and try to steer away from the mirror. So you go, they roll down the window. You go, oh, sandstorm, terrible sandstorm. It's okay, everything's okay now. But you have no short-term memory, so you forget. They roll the window up. You go... of an evening. How am I going to make these amends? I really can't. I mean, I really can't start calling these people and say, you know that the night of your prom? I might not be a bad guy getting good. I'm a sick guy getting well, but I've got to start acting like a good guy. That's just for me. I've not acted like a perfect guy. I'm not acting like cured guy. But I've gotta start obeying traffic signals, wearing a seatbelt, letting people go in front of me. And when somebody, you know, I have this little mantra I do now when some person gets in front of me and is not moving, let's say at the speed I feel that they should be moving at, which is for me, the proper speed is dropped from a plane. That's the proper Speed. Fired from a cannon is also good. And what I do now is I do this little mantra, which is connected to Step 8 and 9, where I go, this could be the guy who saves my life because he's making me go slow. So I thank him. I thank him sometimes like this, but I thank them all the same. So I started making amends to my wife and my kids and my dad, and I didn't know how the hell I was going to do it. I have many men I sponsor who have had to make amends to people who are no longer with us, and they've done it very well, and I couldn't. I couldn'T write a letter to my father. I couldn' go to his grave and ask for forgiveness and apologize. I couldn''t do it, I didn''t have it in me because I was such a megalomaniac. I fancied I was being followed all around by cameras anyway. And for me, those acts were just one more, for me a hollow, self-serving, dramatic gesture and they weren't what many people in AA have gotten tremendous results from doing this. I was scared because I knew it was an empty thing for me so I didn't know what the hell was going to happen. I didn't know how I was going to bring my, I couldn't even go to hospitals. I couldn'T even hear the sound of a heart machine because it would just bring all of this stuff up about my dad being dead. I didn'T know what I was gonna do. And I just started doing my job in AA. I was about a year sober and I was on the line to get lunch on my way to work and there was a guy in front of me and he turned around and instead of saying, what are you looking at? In my best Bronx, I said, how you doing? And he said, you don't know how I'm doing. Nobody knows how I am doing except for the people in AA. So we went outside and we talked and we exchanged numbers. And that night I went on my first real 12-step call. I got a guy with more time than me. And we called some guys and some guys said, take him down to County General Hospital, drop him off at the door, don't go in with him, don't show them that he has any resources, just leave him there. I don't now why, but we went in with them. We went all the way up to the alcoholic ward with him. I don' know why, pero we did. About halfway through, he turns to us and he says, I feel like I'm dying. And the guy who had more time than me looked at him and said, that's because you are. And I pulled him aside. I said, how can you say that to him? I'm afraid he's not going to like us, right? How could you say such a quote? And the guys said, okay, he's in a county facility. He's been told to lie that he's got blood in his urine so he can get a bed. This isn't a bad day. This is what dying feels like. I'll let you know when you're having a bad day. This isn't it. This is dying. So I think I went back to the guy and said, don't listen to him. I like you. At any rate, sometime after this, one of the guys I sponsor told me to take a hike and get off his back with this step crap. And he proceeded to rip some people off in AA. He stole some money, ripped off a car. He was making me look pretty bad. And I wanted to sit down and explain a few things to him. And my sponsor said, you know what? Dr. Bob wrote in the back of his story that he wanted a drink for the first two and a half years of his sobriety. But he had so frightfully abused his right to drink, he had lost it. I posit to you, you have so frightful abused your right to tell people where they stand in the universe, you have lost it. You don't get to tell this guy a few things. You get to sit down and write, I'm resentful at blank for ripping people off an AA and making me look bad. What does it affect? Everything. What are the defects? I'm self-centered and self-seeking. It's not happened to me. I didn't rip anybody off. Spiritual pride, that's a new one. Didn't have that until I came into AA and became a spiritual Goliath, right? How dare a man comport himself thusly after coming into contact with someone of my spiritual caliber? It's hard to believe. i'm a mind reader and a people pleaser i care more about how i'm seen in aa than what this guy's going through i'm playing god and i'm ungrateful i ain't doing the stuff he's doing and i kept my mouth shut and i prayed about it and i was fine some months later the guy found out he was dying from fatal illness he couldn't call anybody else because everyone else had told him to go screw himself or he'd burn him out he Was told by a county agency all we can do is take you down to county general and drop you off at the door. I knew this wasn't true because I had gone into county. I had done the whole thing. I was the only guy he could call because I wasthe only guy, even though I had wanted to tell him off, I hadn't. So he called me. I got to go there. We didn't know anything about AIDS at the time. I'd kiss him. I get his sweat on my lips and I go out and scrape my lips till the skin was almost off because I was so terrified. I didn'tknow you can't get it that way. And I would say this prayer. I'd say, Father, now's the time for love. Now's the Time for Peace. Now's The Time for Understanding. I'd go down there and I didn't know it, but my father was climbing back into my life through the whole thing. And I knew it afterwards, way afterwards. It didn't come to me like that. I realized I was okay in hospitals. I realized, I started telling my son stories about what a great guy their grandpa was. Funny stories. I started getting pictures and putting them up in the house. I didn' even know it until it was over. I didn''t know that he was climbing back into m y life, that he loved me, that he thought the world of me. And I have felt that closeness with him over and over and over again since. That's the way it happened for me. And I believe that step nine is a part of my life and not an event. Even though some of these experiences, these amends get taken place as an event, I called my brother. My brother hadn't talked to me since I got sober. I called him at nine months of sobriety. He wouldn't return my call. I wrote him a letter. I said, I'm sorry for whatever I've done. He wrote me back a letter saying, if you lived to be a million and you were sorry every day that million years, you wouldn't even go close. Wouldn't even come close. I haven't talked to my brother in 15 years. He hasn't talked with my wife. He won't talk to his nephews. I have written more resentments about him. I have every couple of years I contact him and say, I love you, I am thinking about you, I just want to let you know I am here. And then after a few years, what started coming out of my 10 steps was I realized I was ungrateful. Who wants to talk to somebody who's just filled with insanity? I started saying, boy, it's okay that my kids won't have to deal with this. And then in the last couple of years, I even kind of moved further with it in a better place for me. I started feeling when stuff happened, landmark things in my kid's life, I get a little tweet, geez, which Mitchell knew about this? Geez, isn't it terrible? It's missed. The boys are growing up. It's over. That's over something else can happen, but that's over and I found this great place. I said to myself in the prayer meditation after the inventory, what if it is so injurious to my brother to be in contact with me? What if it ist so painful to him that it is a blessing for him to not be in contact with me? Who am I? Who am I to say that shouldn't be so if this is a good thing for him? Number one, number two, my God has given me as a gift, the gift of a sober loving brother and a father and a son. Who am I to stay? Thank you for the gift of the sober loving brother. But if I don't get to give it to Mitchell, I won't give it anybody who am I just say thank you for a gift of sober loving son, but my father's dead. So I'll give it to no one bull crap. It doesn't work that way. I have to. I have a moral responsibility to give that. Now, is it not as good? I don't know. It doesn't much matter anymore. Will I talk to my brother someday? We might wind up being the greatest. I don'T KNOW. I DON'T KNOW because I'm powerless. I'M POWERLESS. My life is unmanageable. I know that you will restore me to sanity. I turn my will and my life over to you. Let's get to work. The format's there. And step 10, let me talk a little bit more about 9 until I vault into 10, and then I'm going to finish off and we'll get into 12 tonight. I had to make amends to my sons. And I told you about the situation they were in. They were in a horrible, horrible situation. And I started doing a lot of lame, lame, lame, lame, lame stuff. I had to start going to flag football games, coaching little league. I went to my son's two. He was in the second grade. I went and ran, became a classroom dad and ran a reading group there and had to see how, you know, he was inthe lowest reading group. I mean, he was just a wreck, you know? And I would have these waves of remorse and all of this stuff. and I had to go into school and work the ninth step in school and do something. You see, my M.O. is the kid's sick, let him go into the school and take the bullet. He's sick. But now I've got to go in and do Something Horrible. I've Got to sit down with the teacher and say, Can you help us? I've GOT TO DO WHAT I TOLD JIM TO DO. Can you please help us we are in such bad shape the boys are a wreck because I have been terribly ill it has made the boys ill and we need your help. I didn't want to do this. This was terribly embarrassing. The boys got tested. It was found that they were in trouble, and resources got cut loose for them, and they started getting special attention, and they starting growing up and getting better. We got them a great, great education in the L.A. Unified School District, a great education because we advocated for our kids. This one teacher sat down with me and said about Micah, because he was so crazy, she said, Oh, I just want to grab him and shake him sometimes. I said, look, he's already been shook. That's exactly what we don't need now. He's all shook. It's done. We need something else. And one of the things that started happening in the house, and I told you how I fight bad. I'm a loomer and I'ma crier. That's what I do, you know? And a screamer. Loom, scream, cry. And I felt so guilty about the boys, the condition they were in, when they'd start to fight, I'd pull them apart. Pull them apart! Don't want to save them the skin. And Nancy, and they'd continue fighting. And Nancy would say, you're not letting them finish. You've got to let them finish, and it was horrible for me. I started sitting on my hands and biting my lips and trusting that they would finish because I wasn't willing to finish. So the minute anything else happened, you know that feeling in a relationship, I'm sure none of you ever had it, where you go, how do we wind up here again? We always wind up hier. We never seemed to leave here. We never finished anything. You know, any fight I had, I'd just open all the cabinets, throw all the crap out, anything emotionally, everything. I'd unload everything, download, download everything immediately. Never fought fair and never finished. And I learned how to do it by letting my kids finish a fight. And it started working and they started getting done with stuff. I mean, they're boys and they come up with something later on, but at least they'd be finished there. And there's not that feeling of hopelessness, of pointlessness, of chasing your tail. And the boy, I was a couple of years sober and I made my kids lunch and I said to Michael, what do you want on your hot dog? And he said, I want mustard, onions, and lettuce. I said, lettuce? He said, okay, I don't want lettuce. And he walked away and came back about 45 minutes later, looked at me directly in the eyes, and I'm not altering one syllable. He said I will never again allow your opinion of what I want affect what I ask for. So I asked him to sponsor me at that point. Sometime after that, Jesse broke his wrist in a schoolyard accident and he got hurt in a growth plane. And if you know the way kids develop, a growth plan is cartilage that's going to turn to bone. And once it's been injured and set, it cannot be disturbed because it's going to turn into bone and it has to stay OK. They're brothers, so they're beating the crap out of each other. Five minutes after I bring Jesse home from the hospital, and I get right up in Micah's face because I've got to lay down this limit and let him know that this can't be, it's not something I'm going to be able to repeat. It can't go on. I yelled at him. He walked away, walks in his room, slams the door. Slammed the door open. So I go to the door, I open the door and before I can unload on him he says, hold on a second, I didn't tell you you were wrong out there, you were right. But a big guy just got in my face and screamed and yelled, I didn't tell you you were wrong. Don't tell me I can't be mad. What's that? What the hell is that? That's standing up for yourself and telling somebody how you feel without telling them what to do and asking for the same treatment. That's what he had been seeing his mother and I trying to do with varying degrees of success and failure as members of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon. To stand up for yourself, the day that I had to sit down with my wife at five years of sobriety after I realized that I was hearing her car come up the driveway and thinking, are the boys watching the right thing on TV? Is the house okay? And realizing I was terrified of my wife, that we had released each other with love so much we had completely lost track of each other. I was scared of her, and I had to sit down after writing the inventory and talking to my sponsor and say, I am scared of you. Well, what do you want me to do? Nothing. I'm just telling you I'm scared of your house. Because I don't know how to do anything that's not self-motivated until I got God, encountered God. I don'T even know how TO CLEAN THE HOUSE. I DON'T clean the house because a man should stay in a clean house like a man to feel like a MAN on this earth. I think that somewhere in the back of my twisted noodle that a certain amount of housework should equal a certain amount of sex that there should be like conversion tables on the back of cleaning products from housework to sex the men are clapping because they're agreeing not because they think it's funny so I'm not cleaning the house to live in a clean house like a man, I'm cleaning thehouse and going I'm done honey and she's saying more than you'll ever know. Eighth step, ninth step. Clean the house for God. Don't know how to clean it for me. Don't want to clean it for my wife. Don't have a way to clean the house. Cleaning for sex ain't working. Clean it for God? Boy, glad you didn't tell me that my first week. If this thing works out for you, you'll clean your house for God, won't you? I wonder if I can get off more than one round before I drop. I go to my first Little League game. Go to the Little League games. There's everybody in the stand. Nancy walks over to the little league game, just takes a look at the first base stands, falls down laughing. There's me alone in the sun, pissed off. I'm here. I'm doing my job. I'm nuts, just nuts. Going down, up and down, two hat sizes. Just crazy. You know, I'm here. I'm doing my job. I'm making amends. I'm make amends." The boys are looking at me in the dugout. They're going, Mr. Redmond's going to blow up, man. Look at him. It took a couple of years for the voices to diminish in volume and number to just go and sit in the stands, to just be in the first base stands. My son, Micah just turned 21, and I gave him the 14th appropriate birthday gift on the day of his birthday that I have given him because that's what I was taught in AA. Not once in 14 years has he gotten the radioactive day after guilt gift for the only place that would still take a hot check from me. You know, here, son, here's some drywall because I can only, you know, Osh is the only piece of land and there's no place left I can clear a bad check at. Here, and some carpet tax also. That's a sobriety muscle. You see, if you're new here, your drinking muscle is a lot stronger than mine. It's been getting a big workout. My not drinking muscle's a lot, lot stronger than yours. And the last time I remember, I was at a talk someplace on Halloween at an AA function. And you know, Halloween is so great to be in this room, you know? And I'm driving through the streets on the way to this thing and you see the great stuff. The kids are so excited and the wind's whipping around and it's just... And I had that astounding feeling that I've had so many times in sobriety where I felt connected to what was going on out there. I didn't feel like some kind of awful, broken-hearted observer. I felt part of the world. And why? Because for 14 years, I've spent a few bucks to have a little candy in the house on the day the kids were coming around. For 14 years my kids have had a chance to have an outfit that they asked for. It's not some woo-woo bizarre. it's practice. You know, I know it's because it's part of my life because I practice it. And it's just great. And I've been with enough guys who have been drunk one more time on their kids' birthdays to know and I tell them about that day, that incredible day. See, I had wound up back in the stands. Took me a couple of years but I actually got to the first base stand and sat in the stand. I called it my sobriety station. It was my sobpriety station and I'd sit there through the endless, endless little league game. Let's call it a day, boys. And exciting and wonderful and frustrating. You know all this stuff. And one day I saw my son receive one of the great compliments a human being, I believe, can receive on this planet. He was intentionally walked. If you're not a fan, that means they're scared of you and want to get to the weenie behind you. And he didn't want to jump up and down and be a geek. You know, you've got to be cool. Just laid his bat down, trotted up the first baseline and on the way up the second baseline he just turned to me at my sobriety station and he just shot me just that much stuff. Just a little stuff. It's the old man. You don't want him to be lame. Don't spoil him. Just a Little Bit. Just shot me a little grin and went up to first base and I could have missed the whole thing. Like Norm says, by a second and an inch I could Have Missed the Whole Thing. Here's the deal though. I'm not telling you my kid got intentionally walked because I'm sober. A lot of kids go through hell with alcoholism and prevail. I'm telling you, I was in the first base stands because I was sober. I was at my sobriety station. So I got to go brag about him that day. I get to brag about his SATs. I getto tell you the funny story of his delight in humiliating me about his homework. I told him something a couple of months ago. He said, shall I put that in the other forest of lies you've told me, Father? And, you know, they're not scared. They're just not scared of when my first couple years as a bride, the boys were little, and I got this new guy over to give him instructions, and I come in the room, and both these little guys, they're in their underwear, and they're right there. They're in front of this trunk, and Michael's going, what step you on? The guy goes, four, four. I'm doing four. I said, he's six. You don't have to answer him. The tenth step for me has been my linchpin for my relationship with God and my continuing to work the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. The tenth steps for me have been my trip back to the first nine propositions in the book. The tenth set for me has been my key to the life that I'm leading. Without the tenth step there is no twelfth step because I will stop sponsoring men because they piss me off. And newcomers act just like newcomers. When a newcomer calls and says, how are you? And I go, well, my wife's on fire and the children are dead. And they go, oh, okay. Anyway, my transmission's out. My favorite though is I work with some new guys and I say it's like sponsoring a copy of People magazine. All you get is headlines. Hi, I'm getting married. All you gets is headlines, you get no story at all. but it's exciting. So, I was resentful of myself for being overweight when I got into sobriety and then it prevailed and I went up to 300 pounds and I'd say I'm resentful at Scott for being overweight, it affects my self-esteem, pocketbook, ambition, perseverance, and sex. What are the defects? I'm a glutton. No, no, no. Don't fight me on this. I'm self-serving. I'm serving myself. I'm refusing to let anybody else help me. I'm not trusting in God. I'm ashamed. I'm not living in today because I'll look this way until the day I die and then probably after I'm dead. And I'd say, okay, father, please remove these defects. And he'd say what do you want me to do instead? And he's say, uh, why don't you stop eating? I go, no, no. Okay. What else you got? I get an answer and then I'd Say, okay fine. And then I have a pie and a bowl of spaghetti. So, So, I'm resentful at Scott for being irresponsible with money. It affects my self-esteem, pocketbook, ambition, personal relations, and sex. What are the defects of character? Stubborn, not trusting in God, grandiose, irresponsible, opportunist. I write it, I read it, and then I just feel like spinning some dough. something's not working here. The writing is meaningless. What am I not doing? Step six and seven. It says in that page, 75 and 76, I take out this book, I go over the first five propositions in the book and I say, am I ready to move forward? Am I trying to make mortar without sand? Have I properly worked the first 5 propositions of this book thoroughly? Okay, I'm resentful of myself for being irresponsible with money. I'm making tons of dough. We hold on to none of it. I make more money. We fall deeper into debt. My kids feel a general sense of dis-ease and fear because our lives seem to be trickling between our fingers like a handful of water, even though there's a lot of money, right? What am I not doing wrong? I got to go back to the first five propositions. Am I not really admitting I'm powerless over money? Am I nicht really admitting that my life is unmanageable around money? Am I not? Do I really don't think that, okay, God, you can keep all the electrons going around, all the atoms in the universe. I don't know. I don' t think you can balance my checkbook. I mean, is that really what I'm saying? Do I not really believe that God will restore me to sanity here or is it step three? Have I not realy made the decision that I am to be his agent, I amto be the child, he is to be the father, I have to quit playing God here, I turn my will and my life over to you. So, and what does the third step prayer say? Not so that I can run off with an all-female jazz band. It says, so that i can help a new person. I can bear witness to those I would help of your power, your love, and your way of life. That's the only reason that I get to ask for help. In order to show some other human being how a column of sewage has turned themselves with God's help into something of some use. Am I not doing that? Am I nicht applying this stuff? Am I not being responsible to the people I sponsor? Or is it step four, have I not really done enough inventory here? Or isit step five, haveI kept things about myself, you know, to myself? Now, I've got a new career right now and I'm a salesperson. For the first time in my life, Ive done that. And I'vegot a 10-step that I wrote last night sitting back at the hotel. Boy, when you're selling stuff for a company, you can do all sorts of interesting things. that I think are okay. Right? They're more okay if I don't tell anybody else. Well, no. It's not okay. It's the thoroughness of the ninth step. You know, the ninth steps it's so beautiful the way it's described in the book. It talks about different ways you can do it and different situations you can wind up in. But Dr. Bob Smith got sober with Bill Wilson and they did their thing and they went to Oxford group meetings and they prayed together they had this morning time and Bill used to keep this bottle of booze around he used to drive ants into that never mind but Bob wouldn't do certain things he wouldn't admit his wrongdoings to the people in the community on a certain way he went to a doctor's convention went on a roaring bender came back and made the rounds and apologized to people and worked his ninth step and AA began. Now, I believe in that story is the true unsung hero of Alcoholics Anonymous. You see, he came off this bender. He had to do surgery on a person. He was a proctologist. As a matter of fact, a guy in Cleveland who they were 12-stepping, once he found out that Dr. Bob was a Proctologist, he said, well, if that's the way they do it, I don't want any part of this thing. and they got him to steady his hands. They de-jitterized him and then it says in the literature, Bill gave him a goofball and a beer and sent him in to do the surgery. I put forward to you the man who gave more than anybody for AA was the guy he was operating on that morning. That to me is the unsung hero of Alcoholics Anonymous. I've had my goofball and my pony bottle. I think I'll go do the surgery now. So the tenth step for me, and when I ask myself these questions about the first five propositions of the book, I ask myself, what's my demonstration? What can I do? What can i demonstrate that I really believe my life is unmanageable? Well, instead of trying to eat what I want to eat, I'll start calling another person or elicit some other power to get in the way of that process. instead of just spending the way I want to spend I will become responsible to a sponsor and talk about a budget and go to somebody in the program who seems to really have a handle on this and it's gotten better in my life these things, I'm not perfect I've still got a lot of problems but I really feel like I'm on the playing field I really do I feel that after it took us 14 years in sobriety to really be able to some financial health where I feel Nancy and I have improved the quality of our relationship immensely because we just have stopped blaming each other for this stuff, you know. And it's been a great help. I reached a wall at 10 years of sobriety where I started having some � my sponsor and I started Having some really serious problems together and we did not have any tools to work them out and we had a terrible separation. And at that point, I also had to leave my home group because I couldn't be separated from my sponsor and stay in the home group that I was in because it was a home group that he and I had started together. And I began a journey, part of my journey in Alcoholics Anonymous, which has been one of my most difficult and most painful. Do I think my sponsor was wrong? Absolutely not. I think he was right about everything he was doing. Do I feel like I'm wrong? Do I really think I handled the situation in a hurtful way. I wasn't able to have an honest and open conversation with him about what was going on. Could that be true from his end? Possibly, but that's not my job. And I learned a lot of incredible lessons when I went through the process of this. I learned that a couple of things. Number one, as part of, because I was writing resentments against him, against my home group, resentments again, against myself, I had to start, you know, here's my, the guy who I've relied on to be the meter of whether I'm on the beam or off the beam, and the relationship is really gone. He doesn't trust me. I don't trust him. We are... This was the best friend I ever had in my life. He held the Torah in both of my son's bar mitzvahs. I trusted him with my life, and he was totally responsible to it. He was and is an incredible guy, and I adore him. And should we have had a separation or not? I don't know. What I do know is the separation we had was miserable, and I had a responsibility for a couple of things. Number one, I had a responsibility for that miserable separation. Two, part of my responsibility was to start taking a look at having good separations in my life, because I only know one way to separate. Leave the village once it is leveled. Level the village. The village is an ashtray. I can leave now. Now I can live. Everyone's dead. The livestock is destroyed. The houses are burnt. Goodbye. I have to start looking at how I do that in my life. And number three, and this is the big one, how dare I allow a separation of a couple of months to color the incredible ten years of relationship we had. What an incredible mistake that would be. And I kept writing resentment after resentment, and it kept coming back and back, and I wasn't able to cross this line. I started working with a new sponsor, and I kept reading these resentments and going back to the first five propositions, and it's still not working. And then finally my sponsor said to me, you're doing everything but forgiving him. And I said, but if I forgive him, doesn't that mean I'm saying he's wrong and I'm right? And he said, no, it just means that you forgive him. And I didn't get it. And he took me to a book called The Sermon on the Mount. And he put me in a section on it in the back which is about the Lord's Prayer. And Emmett Fox takes each sentence in the Lord's Prayer and he breaks it down. And this is the section on the phrase, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. I know it's late in the day. We've been doing this a long time. This might be hard to stay focused on this, but I'm going to really ask you to just stick with me. I'm gonna read you two pages of what he says about this. Setting others free means setting yourself free because resentment is really a form of attachment. It is a cosmic truth that it takes two to make a prisoner, the prisoner and the jailer. There is no such thing as being a prisoner on one's account. Every prisoner must have a jailer and the jailer is as much a prisoner as the person he is guarding. When you hold resentment against anyone, you are bound to that person by a cosmic link, a real though mental chain. you are tied by a cosmic tie to the thing that you hate the one person perhaps in the whole world whom you most dislike is the very one to whom you are attaching yourself by a hook that is stronger than steel is this what you wish is this the condition in which you desire to go on living remember, you belong to the things with which you are linked in thought and at some time or another if that tie endures the object of your resentment will be drawn again into your life, perhaps to work further havoc. Do you think you can afford this? Especially us as alcoholics. Of course, no one can afford such a thing. And so the way is clear. You must cut all such ties by a clear and spiritual act of forgiveness. You must loose them and let them go. By forgiveness, you set yourself free. you save yourself, and because the law of work works alike for one and all, you help to save that person too. Making it just so much easier for him to become what he ought to be. But how, in the name of all that is wise and good, is this magic act of forgiveness to be accomplished? When we have been so deeply injured, that though we have long wished with all our hearts that we could forgive, we have nonetheless found it impossible. When we have tried and tried to forgive, but we have found that the task is beyond us. This is the method of forgiving. Get by yourself and become quiet. Now I could only do this after I had written a hundred inventories. After I had worked the principles and the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous until I had work the rubber off them. But I hadn't crossed the final bridge. Get by herself, become quiet, repeat any prayer or treatment that appeals to you. Then quietly say, I fully and freely forgive you. I mention the name. I fully am freely forgiven. I loose him and I let him go. I completely forgive the whole business in question. As far as I am concerned, it is finished forever. I cast the burden of resentment upon God. This person is free now and I am free too. I wish him well in every phase of his life. that incidence is finished. The God truth has set us both free. I thank God. Then get up and go about your business. On no account repeat this act of forgiveness because you've done it, and you've doing it for once and for all. And to do it a second time would be tacitly to repudiate your own work. Afterward, whenever the memory, it's not that the memory won't come up, but whenever the member or the offender or the offense happens to come into your mind, bless them, diminish the thought say oh my God that's right I forgot I forgave you. Do this how many times the thought comes back after a few days it might return less and less until you forget it all together then perhaps after an interval shorter or longer the old trouble may come back but you will now find that the bitterness and resentment will have disappeared you will both be free and with perfect freedom children of God your forgiveness will be complete you will experience a wonderful joy and realization. If you cannot do this, if you do not do this how can you say that prayer? How can you say forgive me my trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us if I'm not doing it? If I am not doing this act of forgiveness if I am NOT trying how can I go to AA meetings and just parrot that thing over and over again? Forgive me my trespasses. He's a son of a bitch but I'm not talking about that. How can I do that? What Fox says is the words should choke you. You shouldn't even be able to get them out of your mouth if you are still wallowing in that blame. Now, there's nothing wrong if y'all are. We grow. I've had to go through a lot of things at a lot of different places to get to that place. But what a great thing to know. I can't really freely ask God for that thing unless I am truly asking to do it myself. And once I was able to say, I forgive you. I love you. You're the best friend I ever, ever had. I am so sad about what has happened for us. I'm telling you, it went away. It's come back. I've had to remind myself that I forgave him. I haven't had to character assassinate him. He's the best buddy I ever had. It's a tragedy that we're not still together, but we're and that's apparently good for both of us. And I was able to cross that bridge. I talked briefly before about guys I sponsor who have been taken advantage of by alcoholic situations and who have had a difficult time working with other drunks. Somebody asked me about that earlier on. Let me just say that I think that people who have grown up in alcoholic homes have an experience of being abused by alcoholism in a way that I don't have. And that as a sponsor, and I'll talk about this a little more later when I talk about step 12, as a supporter, I've just had to be sensitive to that. I can't call that self-centered and selfish in them. What I've had to say is, let's find a way around that. Let's find away for you not making this about you and you appreciating the other person's alcoholism and getting better. I'd like to ask you all to do something in between now and tonight. If you have any questions about anything I've talked about so far, write them on a little slip of paper and drop them up here. If you haven't gotten to that topic yet, if you have a topic that I haven't got into that you'd like to see me get to, drop it on a piece of paper and drop it up here, I don't know if I'll be able to get to them, maybe I will, maybe I won't. My friend Howard Cooper, who I've told you a bunch about so forth today, hopped into his car once and he was driving out to Las Vegas, and he got under the road and the chair he started going around and around. There was a cop behind him. He said, oh, crap, and he pulled over to the side and this cop walked up to him and said, are you a friend of Bill? And Howard said, yeah, what? And the cop said, well, I saw your bumper sticker. He said I'm in the fellowship. I just started my shift. I always like to pull over a brother and have a little fellowship at the beginning. just never know where you're going to get it you know thanks for listening