Step 6 and the Seven Deadly Sins – Johnny H.

It's an easy, easy thing to do. Really easy trap to fall into. You know, you're coming up with some stuff and you think, man, I could go back and take another window for you. That's something to do! If you have a real-life conscience then they can give that list of amendments and start making them if you have real life conscience. Then when you get through the amendment step if you want to go back and take another fourth and fifth test be my guest. You know what I mean? You better get down through 9 before you start going backwards. You go forward, not backwards. You're talking about blame. This guy's fault, everybody else's fault. Do you have a blaming thing on this? No. No. My disease, pop-outism, is not an excuse for being a jerk. It's not an excuse for being inconsiderate of other people. It's no excuse for sitting and stumbling over people and getting up and running around disturbing meetings about all the synonymous while other people are sitting there trying to listen. There is no excuse to be an inconsider or a obnoxious asshole at a restaurant with a waitress or when I'm out to dinner. There's no use for me doing all that stuff. There's not a use for that. As a matter of fact, being an alcoholic and being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, I should be better than that. I should have some consideration for you if you're in the meeting of Alcoholic Anonymous and you're up there participating or up there, I shouldn't have enough consideration for you to sit there while you're doing it. And if I don't want to listen to you, there's no reason for me to get up and stumble over somebody else who may want to listen, and you scare them very far across the way. Or, if I'm sitting with you, I should have enough consideration for you that if you're sitting in front of this and I shouldn't be over here reasoning with somebody else if I don't want to hear this. If my mind is closed, let it be closed, for Christ's sake. Don't close somebody else's mind. If I'm out at a restaurant having a dinner with somebody, I shouldn't, because the waitress is a little slow, I shouldn' call her a slow bitch. Get up and act blah, blah,blah, blah. Same way with physical things. What physical things? I call it anxiety. Well everybody's got anxiety for Christ's sake. I mean that's anxiety. It seems to be like the big difference in a four-step in the way it's outlined in the 12 and 12, and the way that it is in the big book. The other thing is, leaving aside all the other four step guides that have been written The one in the big book seemed to me to have three parts, resentment list, fear list, and sexual enmity list. What column? Okay. And the second part we talked about is didn't we set the ball rolling and go back and look for what our heart is in the resentment? Is that where you would also list... Because I didn't find a place where I put the list, all of the things that I don't want. That's the fourth column. That's called a four-column union term. Whether it had anything to do with resentment or not? No. The fourth column is that first column. Talk about that in your book. It's a fourth column, there's four columns of union terms in that book. That's where we list, that's what it, that... The final thing that you need is over there. I didn' t understand the question. You want to rephrase the question? Yeah, how do you do a voice check? On your interpretation I look at one way it's done in 12 as well and another way in the big book that some of the voice check guys sound. Well... I go to where my sponsor tells me to be and he has a little list of seven questions I need to answer. You know, you can write an autobiography, you could do a four column inventory out of a book, you could look at where the 12 and 4 says it. You could pay for some sort of guide. Everybody's got a guide to the four step inventory. There ain't no wrong way to do a fourth step. The only wrong way is not to do it. You have to do this. You've got to start talking about it. You know, if you get on down the road, like Scott said, and you're not satisfied with it, how many times can I go to another one? I mean, you know, later on in life, I have found out that later on alive, say an inventory, I do a four-column inventory. I'm sober. A sober inventory. Four columns, like it says in the book. The longer I'm here, the more of a book fanatic I become. You know what I mean? I just think the book is right for some reason or other. You know all that other stuff, but why gamble with some other kind of nonsense? You know, you may be doing it wrong. Alcoholics are funny. They want to do it perfect. You know what I mean? Well, that's why I'm asking. I try to keep it as complete as close to the book as I can. Just do it. Yeah, just pick up a pencil and a tablet every day at home. Write it out. Just start, you know. My name is so-and-so. Start. You know. You can't do it wrong! There's no way to do this wrong. I wrote it on a legalized tablet with a pencil, my first one. You know, I've done it with the seven questions. I've got to do inventories on some of the crap that I've gotten into since I've been sober. Sometimes you can't clear up the records of the present if your stuff is on top of records in the past. You gotta get rid of that garbage for Christ's sake because there ain't no room in there for anymore. Sure, if you're here, it doesn't even get to that point where even whiskey won't take it away. John Alfalo. Hi, John. How do you and Clancy maintain your relationship? Well... Oh! somewhere in our book I can point to these direct quotations of where the book is and how far it's gone this is our main purpose in life would be to stay sober and carry the message to the alcoholic who is still suffering And I think I said at the beginning, and I'm not sure whether I did or not, this is the day I get to stay sober. This is the Day I get To Stay Sober. I don't get to Stay SoBER tomorrow until tomorrow gets here. And I can't eat yesterday's sandwich today from yesterday. You understand? So over a period of time, when Clancy does, and I suppose he does, I don't really know, I know the way I stay enthusiastic about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it's something about working with newcomers and going to meetings such as this and learning about, I can't learn enough about the program of AlcoholicsAnonymous. I just can't earn enough. I'm no authority or consultant or counselor on Alcoholicsanonymous. I just can't seem to learn enough about this thing because I have a daily reprieve. You know what a reprieved is? It's the stay of execution from a death sentence. That's how you are. I have the stay of execution of a death Sunday. I'm alcoholic. For me, the drink is to die. I can't drink and live without myself I can keep from drinking. So I'm not on the phone to me. All the time. Not all the time, you know. Sometimes I did very grudgingly go to meetings. Well, I went to a meeting Thursday night. I thought, God, I can't make it. I mean, to go over there and talk at that group meeting, you know. The secretary sitting there with his feet up trying to give me denouncements from the back row. And one of them kind of made me pull my hair off. You know, people just do whatever they want to do. And newcomers feel that. Nobody's paid any pensions or anything except the guy I brought with me, you know. And they didn't want to go. I know what kind of a meeting is, but it went anyhow. And at that meeting, the guy that I brought was me and I took a newcomer out for coffee after the meeting. You feel me? So that's enthusiasm, whether you want to do it or not. Nobody has enthusiasm for it all the time, John. It's just that we're trained to do certain things. I am. And I have commitments, and I fulfill my commitments, whatever they may be. You know what I'm talking about? And it's in the fulfillment of the commitment that I can get happy, joyous, and free. It doesn't bore me to be in meetings with all hearts and arms. It would bore me every time. If you knew where in the world you'd get meets at one of these goddamn meetings if I didn't want to be there. I'm not going to come. I don't have to get a credit card signed, you know? I don' t have to, you now, get my check signed or something. I'm no going to get paid off for bringing a call load of newcomers from the treatment center to a meeting or something I don''t get to do that. I get to stay sober by going to meetings with alcoholics and drugs. I go to a lot of meetings with Alcoholics and Drugs but I don ''t do nothing. I just sit there. I go on a Wednesday night book study meeting, a Thursday night workshop and I get sit and listen about the program of Alcoholics & Drugs Monday night at 3 a.m. they speak to me. Wednesday night, Sunday night, about a million thousand people there. Especially with some guy far. Name's Kurt. He gave me a ticket for a dark radio show. Okay? That's the joy of living. That's theme of alcohol. The theme of Alcohol is 12 steps. It's the Joy of Living. There's something new that I need to live. Great! He's great at answering me, me, him, me and his mother. You get no enthusiasm in it that way. If you don't get nothing out of there yet, I guess you'll never be enthusiastic about it. And the money needs to be saved. Rod, you haven't asked a question yet. You're the sickest man in the country. I mean, when you got through talking, you heard everything you wanted to hear. Well, if you can't poke fun at newcomers, what good are they? I'm only kidding. This is a good chapter. Should we have another smoke and coffee and meet and break? Let's do that. And we're going to go very far down the road. All right, guys, have a hot mic, please. Okay. It says here on page 85, down to the bottom, we're assuming, or the Program of Alcoholic Anonymous is this book that they've written has assumed, or is assuming, this book takes in a lot of assumptions that you are in a certain place when these things happen to They're coming. A lot of people will ask you, how come this stuff is not happening to me? How come this doesn't happen to me ? How come it's not happening? Obviously they're not here. But it says there. It says, Returning home we find a place where we can be quiet for an hour, carefully reviewing what we have done. We thank God from the bottom of our hearts that we know him better. Taking this book down from the shelf, we turn to the page which contains the twelve steps. Carefully reading the first five proposals, we ask if we have admitted anything, for we are building an arch through which we can lock a free man at last. Remember we talked about a foundation? About building a foundation that's solid and is not on sand, it's a solid foundation. Is our work solid so far? Are the stones properly in place? Have we skipped on the cement put into the foundation? And we tried to make mortar without sand. Do all of you know what a foundation is? Well, a foundation is something that they build a house on. You do not build a home from the roof down. And I'm sorry, you can't hang a brick from the helicopter and build your house. Some people would have you believe If you can do that, by the way they talk about a program not quite so much. This book says that we have to build a foundation. We have to have a solid base in which to stand on. Now if we don't have a solide base up to this point in our life, up to this point of our program, if we dont have solid rock to stand on when we come to this, we're going to get knocked on our ass. Very simple. You're just going to be knocked 10 off your stomach because because you're going to start biting into a chunk of stuff in the next four steps. But the 12 and 12 says this is the step that separates the men from the boys. And if you don't have a foundation for them, if you haven't built this thing solid so far, if you've built this things on a lot of assumptions and there's some type of an egotistical idea that your life is solid now because you don' drink alcohol and you attend one or two meetings a week and you put a dollar in the basket and your life is better, circusly. You have to build on this foundation and you're just getting ready to get swept up into the sea with alcohol and maybe die from it. It says here without any reservation whatsoever step six on all his faults has indeed come a long way spiritually and therefore empowered to be called a man who is sincerely trying to grow in the image and the likeness of his own creator. In our book Alcoholics Anonymous there's only two paragraphs verse 6 and 7, 5. It says if we can answer to our satisfaction when we then look at step 6 where it emphasizes a willingness to be indispensable are we ready to let God remove from us all these defects of character? Can he take them all? Everyone. If we still cling to something we will not let go we ask God to help us be willing. We ask God. Now we're assuming here that we have come in some kind of a contact with a power great in ourselves. So we can't do this if we ever come in contact with a power greater than ourself. So you can't just jump out here on step six and talk about our defective character that we haven't worked up to this point through step five. There's no way to do it. You just continually possible do this. Why don't you run some kind of ego trip if you think so? Sometimes there's big egos. Yeah, God. Remove my defective characters. God would probably say to you, what are they? Well, I don't feel right. Yeah, but what's wrong with you? Get the hell out of me, God, or take it away from me. That's how stupid some of this stuff really is. What are we supposed to do? He says, when ready, we say something like this. My creator, I am now willing that you should have Paul with me, good and bad. I pray that you remove from me every single defective character that stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellow. Grant me strength as I go out from here to do your bidding. Amen. We're then to came to step seven. We've already taken his six and seven and his prayers as we've done five. There's a very interesting line in this paragraph that I just read. It says, I pray that you now remove from me every single defective character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. I don't know what that says to you, but what that said to me, I don' t even know what defectors are supposed to be removed. I don''t know. It isn't my business to know which one is defected. My own business is that I'm supposed to surrender myself to God as I understand God and have Him remove all my defective character which will make me useful to you and myself. That's all. I don ''t even know they are. How would I know what my defects of character are? If we give in to the twelve and twelve along about this period of our lives, we'll find out what the defects of characters are. And whether we like it or whether we don't like it, everybody's got it. The good book calls them the seven deadly sins. Christ. It's kind of apocryphal to Christ, but that's what it is. Sloth, envy, all that kind of stuff. Seven deadly sins are the defects of character. If we don't seem to think that God will remove your defects of characters, If you're willing to give to him, if you don't think he won't remove your defective character. Let's consider this for a moment. The greatest natural instinct that man has is the instinct of self-survival. That is the greatest instinct that men or animals have, is self-servicing. Yet for years you and I, alcoholics if we're alcoholics, have been trying to destroy ourselves with alcohol. Or any other facet of our life, we've been trying get rid of ourselves completely oblivious to self-denial, self-survival. And yet in step one, we ask God that we'll repel us over alcohol. We have powers over alcohol and God, in His infinite wisdom, has removed that defective character from us. We're not drinking. I don't think any of us are drinking. And so isn't it kind of apropos or kind of stupid to think, Two stupid things. That if God will relieve me from alcohol and destroy myself through alcohol or drugs or whatever it is I'm putting in. Suicide. Hell bends for election, I'm going to kill myself because this stuff is killing me. I was dead on arrival 33 years ago. If God were to remove and install in me my deed for self-survival, and remove that defective character from me that makes me want to kill myself, it's kind of stupid to think that if I'm willing to let him remove my defective character he won't take a little thing like envy away from me. Swap Greed Pride Blessing That's stupid to think that is But you see God Will not remove anything from you If you don't know what's wrong with you You see, you say to it I'm powerful alcohol man It's like God says What's wrong? I'm power over alcohol Okay? But what do you say to that? Move this defect. Well, what is it? I don't know! Well, why didn't... I don' t know! What if you know that you're Indian? What if your know you're a gluttonous? What if know if you're prideful, egotistical idiot? What if if you are greedy, self-serving? What do you know if your slob? What do you know if you've got all these things stuck in you? What if you won't? Knowing my peers don't mean nothing. I can say to you all I want to say to you, oh, I'm greedy. I don't know how it feels to be greedy. I only know that I've got words in my head. Greedy. I remember one night I was coming home from the restaurant and I'd been down having dinner with a couple of guys who had more money than there was in Southern California. Both these guys, I'm looking at them and I think man they could both write me a check for half a million, two, and never miss it and I'd be happy. And I'm sitting there with them. Not yet doing this. That took him down. I didn't know what, I thought it was food with a reason or something. I knew. And I'm on my way home that night and it dawned on me, I was in this, at these two meetings. One understood to die and the other was goofy. That's good terms, he don't go to meetings too often so it's goofy. That's the best way I know for somebody to not go to me, they usually end up goofing. But I'm down at home that night and I thought to myself, my God! I'm in this. I have never known that feeling before. Never. Now I never was happy when somebody else made first team from the varsity and I had to sit on the bench or somebody banged the cheerleader I wanted, you know what I mean? I was never happy that he got it and I didn't. I was angry, hot and hot and bitter, but I didn' t know I was into it. Now see, now that I know what it feels like, I can ask God to remove it. But I can' t ask him to remove something I don' t want to have because his God will say to me, What is it you want me to take away from you? Well, I feel bad. Yeah, but what is it that makes you feel bad? I don't know. I don' t know. Can't do it. God will not take anything from me that I'm not willing to give him. I can't give him anything if I don''t know it. If I don ''t know what's wrong with me, I cannot ask God to take it away from me. Remember when we went back in the beginning If we don't recognize the problem, there's no solution. No solution. If I'm stuck with one of these seven deadly sins... I got all seven of them, as a matter of fact. Some of them I'm a little heavier on than others. Envy is one of my big deals. I've been there for a long time. Grief forced me around in this. I'm not too big on gluttony, but I'll tell you something, ain't nobody gets eight. There's only seven deadly sins and nobody gets eighth, and it's every single body in this room that got seven deadly sin. Some of us are about as heavy on others than we are on the others, but it's up to us to know which one of us kills us. See, the thing that went in there says it here somewhere, in the twelve and twelve. It says, when gluttony is less than ruinous, we have a milder word for that, too. We call it taking our comfort. How about that? We live in a world riddled with envy to a greater or lesser degree. And so we rationalize that by saying everybody is infected with it. From this defect, we must surely give a warmth yet definite satisfaction. Else why would we consume such a great amount of time working for what we have not, rather than working for it? Huh. Yeah, maybe. No one wants to be agonized by the chronic pain of envy or to be paralyzed by sloth. Of course, most human beings don't suffer these defects at the rock-bottom level. We who are escaped in these games are apt to congratulate ourselves. Yes, envy. After all, hadn't it been self-interest, pure and simple, that has enabled most of us to escape? Not much spiritual effort is involved in avoiding excesses which will bring us punishment anyway. When we face up to the less violent aspects of these very same defects, then where do we stand? For example, we don't really like to feel a little superior to the next fellow, or even quite a lot superior. Isn't it true that we like to let dreams masquerade as ambition? Isn't that amazing? Where does all this stuff come from? To think of life and lust seems impossible. But how many men and women speak love with their lips and believe what they say so they can hide love in the dark corner of their minds? In this 12 in 12, what I've come to understand in reading this This is really fresh in my memory because the people I sponsored once a month sit down and go through one of these steps in 12 and 12. We'd get in one big house, and we'd just sit there, and everybody I sponsored invited to come. These things are really amazing things. I hope I've tried to tell you. And now, we're really going to get out into the maintenance plan of the program of all kinds of amounts because if we're in the steps 6 and 7, we've received all these kind of things. Now we've, it says, so step, this step so specifically, number 7, concerns itself with humility. We should pause here to consider what humility is and what the practice of it can mean to us. to be the attainment of greater humility is the foundation principle of A.A.'s 12 steps. For without some degree of humility, no alcoholic can stay sober at all. Nearly all A.As have found too that unless they develop much more of this precious quality than may be required just for sobriety, they still haven't much of a chance of becoming truly happy. Without it, they cannot live to much useful purpose or inadvertently be able to summon a slave that can meet any emergency. I tell you, that's pretty heavy stuff. That's a little bit heavier than just don't drink and come to me. Understand why a service separates the men from the boys here? This is where it is. We usually send people, usually when you get into this part of your program of recovery if you work with a lot of people, usually a lot people bail out of here and head for another 12-step program. That's the truth. I'm not saying that to be funny or malicious. They've got looking for something else. Go to church? The marriage counselors, they go everywhere. They don't want to come to grips with this kind of stuff. They don' t want to face the humiliation or the humility that comes with doing these things. And yet this book says... The problem is that without some degree of humility, no alcoholic can stay sober at all. Remember we talked about the human ego? It's never satisfied and wants more and more and how these clubs get our constant ego deflation and grit. Man, we're biting off some heavy stuff upon ourselves. It takes for thousands of years that we have been demanding more of our share of security, prestige and romance. When we see them do succeed, we drank to dream still greater dreams. When we were first frustrated even in part, we drink for oblivion. Never was there enough of what we thought we wanted. Never was enough. I tell you, John asked me a question in the last little session about how you maintain your enthusiasm. And I answered it by saying that very same thing. I just can't seem to get enough. I just cant seem good enough for this program. I don't believe humility has got anything to do with humiliation, I don' t believe that at all. I've been humiliated by experts. Experts humiliate me. I had a judge call me a breathtaking parasite. He told me I wasn't fit to be around decent people. I'd been beaten with hoses, I'd be sprayed with high pressure fire hoses. I'd have been given shock treatment. I've been given all kinds of humiliating dreams. I had been thrown in a rubber room with long-haired underwear and had to live in my filthy food truck. Always the idea of trying to teach me something about humility. And all it really did to me was make me angry. I'm vengeful. I wanted to retaliate because I was angry. Angry people like me want to retaliation. That's a natural reaction. I know nothing about humility. Nothing. You know what humility does, really? Humility makes you feel better about yourself for some reason. It's important to destroy yourself and get away from that first line of self-regulation. How did we do that in A? Anybody? No? Huh? No. Pray for yourself. God likes to listen to training. It's stupid for me to think that I'm going to have any more power with God than anybody else. What makes me think that? My sponsor, and your man was my father, Drummond. Very important lesson into my head when I was brand new. it's very important to create a damn thing special about me just because I'm sober. Nothing. Just because I was fortunate enough to come to an AA meeting and grasp this simple way of life and practice it does not make me special at all, doesn't make me any more special in God's eyes than anybody else. Nothing. That's an ego trick to think we're special chosen people just because we don't drink anymore. Now, Do you know how we make you feel better about yourself around here? We also give you things to do. You need a coffee to make at meetings, you need a room to set up, secretaries, general service, central office, transportation for newcomers, working with newcomers. While we're doing that, we're going to very, very basic things. We're getting rid of ourselves, which is, if we remember what we said back here in the fifth sense, we've emptied ourself of self and we become automatically full of God. So being full of god, you should know about humility. This is some deep stuff, but it's good stuff. The stuff that alcoholics gotta learn to run spiritual. You have to learn that there's more to this poker than just putting the club in jail and sitting in a buttoned chair somewhere. Now you've got to realize, and I realize without any type of doubt whatsoever, that physical sobriety is the number one thing, I'll tell you. I have to be physical. I have too. Some people will tell you, you have to think to drink. I quit doing what makes me comfortable right here. I'll just wake up drunk. Ain't got anything to do with thinking about me. Some people will tell you that now that they're sober, they don't have a drinking problem anymore. They have a living problem. It ain't that way with me. As long as I live, I'll have a drinkin' problem. But I have to stay awake in the first drink. First drink is a period for just me, huh? I've got to do things that say to do. I've gotta do all these things that says I have to do, or I've GOT to be rid of my defectors. I've go to be willing, I gotta write about them, I gotta be willing to give away, I gotta give them away! I gotta know what they are, so I gotta find out what they're are through self-examination and I gotta GIVE THEM AWAY! That's what I had to do! I hear people all the time saying they take 45 inventories working on their defective character. Well, the harder I work on mine, the bigger they get. I know I've got something, I like that. We work on nothing, we just do it. It said, it didn't say in here, here are the steps we worked on, but here are steps we took, we took them. We took them, and we took em. And we get to step seven, and then we get It says, we made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends for most. Now I love this stuff. It took me 12 years, 12 years to get with the last name on the list. I was 12 years older, I got in an automobile with my wife and my little girl and we drove all the way across the United States to a little town in Kansas to find my dad who I hated all my life and hadn't seen for 20 years, just so I could tell him I didn't hate him no more because he was on the list. He was the last name on the bill. Now, I've got to tell you about that because what happened that day was we camped out about 30 miles from that little town and all I had was an address. I didn' t know where it was. I had an address my mother gave me. And so this morning is the morning of doing it, and we get in this little car and we drive down toward this little town. We see the canvas, the lawn canvas, and you start getting close to this little town. My stomach starts to get upset, my head starts to pound, and I feel like I'm going to be deathly ill. We pull outside of this little address we've got, and there's a beer joint, a little beer And the address I have is a little bench around the corner that most of them are boarded up. And I knock on the door and nobody's coming, so I walk around and I was out unloading beer and I said, do you know Roller Hatch? And he says, yeah. And he said, didn't you have a beer? So I was in there. It was just this little barrel that's up on the stool. And I walked up to him and I say, Dad? He says, yes, I'm your son Johnny. I came from California. Tell you I don't hate you. He says you want a beer. I said no. Shortly after I saw you, not very long ago, I had joined the program called Al-Qaeda. I took him out of the car in addition to my wife and my two little girls and grandchildren. Came back in, we had a quote, talked to them for a while, we put them in the car, we spent all day driving around with them. And I said to him, Dad, I want you to come home with me, I wanna take care of you. Once you come to California, I want to take care of you." He said, no, I'll take you back to where you found me. Now I still got this head that was about to blow off the top of my head. My stomach, I feel like I'm going to throw up any morning. I just, I've never been that sick or had that much pain in my life. We dropped him off at the bridge yard and I gave him a picture. My wife and my three children. And he went back into the states to have drinks. When we took off and got back on the interstate and started heading back towards Houston my stomach started to settle and my head clearly didn't have a headache anymore. It felt like, to me, what it must have felt like to have an exorcism. I felt pure poison coming out of me. Poisonous hatred. Hatred. I hated that man from my first recollection of life. recollecting life I hated was a passion that you would not blame. When he walked back into that room that day, I no longer hated it. I was concerned and I loved him until the day he died. And he died years ago. But you see there was no more walls between my dad and I when he died, he drank till he died he was 87 years old. He never quit. But I got rid of it. I got really good at it. That's what he said. And there's another thing on my list that I don't know how to handle. I don' t know how make amends to a baby brother that I was responsible for directly or indirectly for his death when he was 17 years old and I couldn't take him home. I stood outside of the grave while they buried him and I was handcuffed. And my mother screamed at me like I was a murderer, saying my baby brother got my 45th overdose so he died and my mother thought I killed him and she still thinks that's the day. Sometimes I think that he was trying to be like me. I had a hard time getting rid of it. My sponsor told me I still could write him a letter. I said, what do you mean, write him the letter? I'm going to mail it to him. What difference does it make? Just write the damn letter and mail it. Just put any address on it, no return address. So I did that. It says he has stepped. They recommend to some people, wherever possible, to put a new sword in his MLA. That's nice. I tried that. I wrote that letter. A lot of people think when they get to this step that all they got to do is say, I'm sorry. That's the easiest thing for alcoholics to say in the world. I'm sorry, because we're the sorriest lot that ever walked down this street. We're all sorry for Christ's sake. We're just sorry people, that's all. We're sorry. I said I was sorry. I wrote the letter. I did all them things. Sometimes I sit in meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous and I look up and I see my baby brother sitting in a meeting And that meat land starts all over again. I'm 37 years old. I don't know how long ago it was I wrote that letter. Every year at Christmastime, I go down to a mission and I serve dinner at the midnight mission then I get in my car and drive out to my baby brother's grave and I decorate their graves with flowers. I stand underneath a tree where I stood hands up between two detectives in 1951 and I cry, and I dress up the grave, and put flowers, and do all the things I can do. And last year I went out there to do that and I knelt down at the grave with my wife and I and we got a newcomer with us and it wasn't quite as hard as it has been. And I didn't know why. I didn' t know why I was getting better, I just had gotten better. I wasn't doing anything better. Then one night at our 12 o'clock workshop, a woman came in and talked about the disaster. She said that when she got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, something very similar had happened to her. She didn't know how to make amends and she went to her sponsor and her sponsor told her, what do you think you can't go on about your business? Which is very much what my sponsor said, but I didn't realize what was going on. You see, I got busy in this business of staying sober in alcoholics anonymous and working with people and trying to carry the message to newcomers. And I didn't realize that by doing that, I was making amends. That by sharing me with you and you with me, somehow or other, I am being forgiven. And I am forgiven until it ain't far from now. Some things we wish on earth are good, but you can't just get rid of those. Sometimes you have learned that you have to live with these things, you can live with them. If you get busy in this program and do these things, some things you think are too horrible for you to give, but you get forgiven for it. How much more horrible can it be to such a human life? You can't live with it. I spent last week with a man who was a sniper in Vietnam. So did Ken Ricks. And he told me that Vietnam And we talk of the ideal because we both share a common bond, we both know what it's like to serve the people of life and to live that way. You can't do this if you're willing to try to make direct amends, if you are willing make a move. If you're willing to do it, if you try to do it and give the best of your ability and take care of the rest, you can do it. You can live with no tension when it doesn't get any easier. Because as you travel and try to help and do the things you're supposed to do at our hearts and arms, life will be much less of a burden. I'm looking forward to going to the cemetery this year. It's funny how soon that I've been looking forward for it. I've been looking for the truth for 20 years. I tried every 50 books to get away from doing it. I even missed a couple of years in those 20 years doing it because I didn't want to go, I didn' like to feel that way about doing it See right down the road from where my four or five pops on the road and where my baby brother died was my wife's first wife, Grace the mother of my children who committed suicide when I tried to keep them safe I know what this is easy to do. I've got a big size seat watching it happen. Isn't it amazing? In this book Alcoholics Anonymous that on page 83 of my book At the tail end of 83, I don't know where it is in your book, it says things like that we are painstaking about this world of our development. We will be amazed before we're halfway through. We will know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wait to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience has benefited us. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity would disappear. Remember when we were talking about depression, that feeling? The feeling of Uselessness and Self-Pity disappeared. We would lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking was triple where our whole attitude and outlook upon life would change. Fear of people and a economic interest state would leave us. We were included, we knew how to handle the situation, we used the bathroom, and we were suddenly realized that God was doing for us what we could not do for him.