George T. – Step Two – Step Two And The Rallying Point To Sanity – 2009

I'm a grateful alcoholic. My name is George. I'm sitting here because step two is, you know, you're going to hear me say this is my favorite step. Step two is the most my favorite step. But every week you're going to hear me say it's my favorite part of the book or it's my favorite step. The second step to me is probably the most important step. I always like to start off with the thing that I like to say most. I don't speak for Alcoholics Anonymous. No one has that right or authority. All I can do is tell you my experience, give you some strength, and maybe you can get some hope out of that. And that's what I have. That's all I have. My journey is my journey and we all have numerous ways of finding this thing called sobriety. If I got to look back to last week and we talked about step one and we were talking about certain principles. And I got to remember what I read at the definition of what a principle, the definition that I like of what a principle is out of the dictionary. It's a rule of code of conduct. It's a basic truth, lore, or an assumption. I had a lot of assumptions when I got here and we're talking about the second step now. We come to believe in how great in ourselves can restore us to sanity. My assumption was I wasn't in stain. You guys were. My other assumption is that I wasn't hurting anybody. I was only hurting myself and I didn't cause any problems, pain, or any kind of twisted relationships. It was never me. It was always somebody else. So that was my assumptions and that was my spiritual beliefs when I got here. You know the second step and I always go to the 12 and 12. It tells, you know, they have a little saying and it asks us to ask ourselves a bunch of questions. It says step two came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Didn't say it would, it said it could. Some of the things I heard when I first got here. I just didn't realize how insane I really was. We can't, why can't we believe in? A does not demand belief. A steps are only a step. A steps are only a step. A steps are only suggestions. Importance of an open mind. Varieties of ways to faith. Substitution in AA is a higher power. A plight of disillusion. Roadblocks of indifference and prejudice. Lost faith found in AA. Problems of intellectually and self-sufficiency. Negative and positive thinking. Self-righteousness. Defiance is an outstanding characteristic of an alcoholic. Step two is the rallying point to sanity. Right relations with God. I walked in here in 1994 and I shared last week a little bit of my insanity. I don't like to tell war stories. I don't think they're that important. But I qualified for this seat. Anybody that lives under a bridge and when they get into AA spends their money on alcohol and thinks that's normal. There's something very wrong with their thinking. And that's the way I walked in here. You guys just didn't understand. If you had the kind of relationship with your now ex-wife, wife that I had, if you weren't allowed to keep your job because they were tardy or weren't paying attention and they asked you to please leave before they fired you, it was their fault. It was never my fault. And, you know, you take the alcohol, I said this last week, out of the alcohol and you're left with the ick. I can tell you lots of funny stories and I can tell you lots of sad stories. It was the thinking that preceded the first drink. I'm one of those guys that on Monday morning I was planning Saturday. I was trying to figure out when my paycheck came in, how much money I have, where I was going to spend it and how I was going to spend it and what was I going to do between Tuesday and Thursday to get extra money so I can drink at night when my friends went out. And that's the way I lived my life for a lot, a lot of years. You know, and I had a lot of problems getting a grip on that. You know, if I look back at that first step on the illness part. I was a little bit more of a drinker. I was a little bit more of a drinker. And I was one of those guys that was destroying a lot of things around me. And I didn't lose anything. I'm one of those that likes to say I gave everything away by my behaviors, my actions and my alcoholism. And that, you know, the loneliness, the despair we talked about last week that the literature talks about, that's where I lived for a long time. And that was my normal. Now you come in here and I walk into a room. And when I walked into the room, there were people that were actually drinking. And I said, you know, I'm a drinker. I'm a drinker. I'm a drinker. I'm a drinker. And I walked into the room. There were people that were actually happy. And it was very aggravating to me that people were enjoying themselves. When I was brand new and somebody was laughing in a meeting, I did not realize they were laughing at what was being discussed. I thought they were laughing at me. It's all about me, you know. The Alcoholics theme song, I am always on my mind. And I will let you know about it. And I did that at the beginning. This is what was going on in my head. And there was no powers greater than me. The 12 and 12 talks about a whole bunch of things that I really enjoy. The first thing it talks about is the different types of people that walk into the room. And with every problem in the 12 and 12, there is a solution or an answer to whatever the problem is they're laying out before you. They talk about the first case, the one who won't believe, the belligerent one. He's in a state of mind which can only be described as a savage. His whole philosophy of life in which he's so glorified is threatened. It's bad enough he thinks he's a saint. He thinks to admit that alcohol has him down for keeps. But now still smarting from that admission, he is faced with something really impossible. And what I was faced with when I looked at that particular person was the fact that I was an alcoholic. See, to me, an alcoholic was a guy that lived in the Bowery who had a ragged trench coat and lived in a cardboard box under the Brooklyn Bridge. Now, I got here. In a cardboard box under the 59th Street Bridge. So I was an uptown drunk. I rationalized that behavior. I did not realize the insanity that was going on in my mind. So what is the solution for the guy that's like that? It tells us that it talks about the answer. It says, I can tell you exactly how to relax. You won't have to work at it very hard. Listen, if you will, to these three statements. First, Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe in anything. And for an agnostic, atheist, anything but religious person that I was when I walked in these rooms, that was a relief. Because I grew up a certain way. I married out of my religion. The woman carries the religion. I was not part of my own religion. I was not converted into another religion. I felt like the lost child and had no real faith. The second thing it says, to get sober and stay sober, you don't have to swallow all of step two right away. Looking back, I took a piece of me on myself. Third, all you really need is a truly open mind. Now, if you're like me, that's the big stumbling block. Because I was defiant. I was rebellious. And I had all the answers before you even asked the question. I had a man that said to me, George, and I was already answering the question. Didn't even let him get the question out. It says, just resign from the debating society and quit bothering yourself with such deep questions whether it was the hen or the egg that came first. Again, I say all you need is an open mind. My mind was very closed when I got here. There is a great, you know, we're going to talk about on page 47, within three pages, three times it tells us to go to the back and read the spiritual experience in the back of the book. And it's really important that people read that experience. There's a little quote that's by Herbert Spence that says, there is one thing that keeps a man in everlasting ignorance and that principle is contempt prior to investigation. Now, I came in here very contemptuous for everybody and everything that was in these rooms. I shared last week that I walk into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and say I was an addict. And then I go over to Narcotics Anonymous and say I was an alcoholic. What I was really doing was looking for a way for somebody to throw me out of there. And that was the insanity that was going on in my head when I was there. I was in a room. I was in a room. We were just taking out everything that I had. And I'm looking around. It was a room. It was brand new. You know, I'm getting into the middle of a subject. You can see the antiquism and the facet of why two people are serving this high wz and I didn't have to close my door at home. My husband does the same thing and the generally, the consацию. I came out of the room. I was trying to boot, and nice place I was going. I was seed, but I came out of the room in honor of my bureaucrat, that's a permanent owner of it, Only that was really helpful. I actually, I had to finish reading, because I looked at my social media history. I had to study my psychology skills. to believe in a power greater than myself, but I certainly have that belief today. To acquire it, I had to stop, all I had to do was stop fighting and practice the rest of AA's program as enthusiastically as I can. It's not a pretty hard thing to ask for if you want to get a little bit of hope, is to just practice the rest of this program. Yet, I was going to argue with you and tell you it wasn't going to work for me. And I sat in these rooms believing this would never work for me. And it says, this is only one man's opinion, Bill was smart enough to say that, and it says, it tells us a little bit in here, it says, I must quickly assure you that AA has tread a new path on their quest for faith. I used to come in here and say I had no faith. And the man that was Bill Bob Welsh, who eventually became my sponsor, he was my spiritual guide, and Larry S., whose name I don't have permission to use the last name because he's still alive and I wouldn't do that, I believe in traditions today. They both, had tricked me into AA. They had me doing like service work. And Bob used to write on the bottom of an old chair like these folding chairs, my name, and every week I had to go whenever we went to the meeting, well actually every day at the meeting place, he would move it before the 10 o'clock in the morning meeting and I had to find it, and that was my seat for the day. And I kept saying I have no faith, but I got there every day early to look at it. I had faith in the man that was carrying the message to me. And I kept telling him about how I had no faith and no belief. He said, let me ask you a question. I'm going to prove to you you do. I said, how are you going to do this? And he said, I'm going to prove to you you do. I said, how are you going to do that? He said, every day you come in here and you sit on a chair, did you once ever turn over the chair to make sure all the screws and nuts and bolts were in there that it would hold you? He said, that's faith. And that's belief. And I went along with that for a while and I was arguing with him again about that I had no faith or belief. He says, do you really believe that you don't believe? He says, I said yes. He said, then you believe. And that's enough. It was all you need to do to get started on step two. Very confusing when I was here. But it makes a lot of sense as I stayed here. We get to the second kind of person. The guy who once had faith but lost it. Growing up, I was pretty religious in my belief system. I grew up with that understanding until the age of seven when my grandfather died and that was one of those things you had to pay for a seat to pray. I went against the religion. At least that's the way I saw it. I don't even know if that's true. But that's the way I saw it and I turned my back on religion. And I will tell you, I turned my back on religion when my grandfather died. Whether it was the way I saw it, whether it was real or not, it was what I believed in. So I was one of those who lost my faith, I believe. There were those who drifted to indifference filled with fancy self-sufficiency who cut themselves off. Those who have become prejudiced against religion and those who are downright defiant because God has failed to fulfill their demands. That was me. I knew when I was in trouble and the cops were behind me or if I knew I was in trouble, God get me out of this one. I'll never do it again. Gets me out of it, well, maybe I'll do it one more time. I was always bargaining with God and that was always a problem. Can any experience tell those that they may still find the faith that works? And the answer to that is yes. But it's sometimes harder to people that once believed than those who never believed at all. And it says what the roadblocks are, and here's the blockage, that spiritual blockage we have to get out of the way. Of indifference, fancy self-sufficiency, prejudice and defiance prove more solid and formable to these people than any erected by the unconvinced agnostic or even the million atheist. The answer to that, and there's an answer in the 12 and 12 that says, any number of the age can say to the drifter, yes, we were deferred from our childhood faith too. The overconfidence of youth was too much for us. Of course. Hmm. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please. Of course. I lost where I was. There we are. Well, we were glad that good home and religious training had given us certain values. We were sure that we ought to be fairly honest, tolerant and just, and we ought to be ambitious and hardworking. We became convinced that such simple rules of fair play would be enough in any situation. And that's how I live my life. If I do good, I expected good. When I did good and something bad happened, I felt an entitlement to do something bad. And I thought I was doing something wrong. And I felt like I was doing something wrong. And that's how I lived my life. If bad so I can get a different result. And that was usually to get drunk. And it talks about material success, keep going on material success. We thought we were winning at the game of life. Somewhere in our literature, and it's on page 127, it tells us that for us, spiritual well-being always had to come before the material, not the other way around. I had it all backwards when I got here. There again is that defiance and that closed-mindedness I had. Then you've got the intellectual type, the third type of individual that walks into AA, and I think we all believe we are. And they told me I had to get stupid when I got here because I was too smart for my own good. They said there's nobody too dumb for AA, but there are some people too smart, and George, you're probably too smart, so get stupid. Now comes another kind of problem, the intellectual self-sufficient man or woman. To those, AAs can say we were, like you, far too smart for our own good. We loved when people called us precocious. We used to our education to blow ourselves into prideful balloons, though we were careful to hide it from others. C really felt we can float above the rest of the folks on our brain power alone. And then it talks about the scientific progress of search and research. There's an answer for the intellectual. The answer is we have to either reconsider or die, and that's a pretty strong statement. If I don't reconsider my thinking and try and trust someone else, I'll probably go out and drink and go out and die, and I don't want to die. It says they showed us that humility, and intellect could be compatible, provided we placed humility first. That was a big word, that word humility. When we began to do that, we received the gift of faith, faith which works, a faith that is there for you too. Humility is not humiliation, and that's a big thing for me, because to me, that's what I thought humility was. I thought by the devastation that I had in my whole life, that was humility. What that was was humiliation, and I did that to myself most of the time. I was a little bit more humble, but I was a little bit more humble. I love, and we're not there in step five. It's going to talk about it. It says humility is a word often misunderstood. To those of us who make progress, it's a clear recognition of who and what we were by sincere attempt to become what we could be. That's a really important statement for me, because it let me know it was okay the way I walked in here. I didn't have to make my story any worse, and wherever I walked in, it was right where I was supposed to walk in, and I didn't have to go anywhere else. That's just what it was. I've been a part of this community for a long time, and I'm glad to be here for so long. I didn't have to go out there to make it, to retest the waters, they told me. And then there's another kind of crowd, which is the biblical crowd, the religious crowd, who says we're plain disgusted with religion and its works. It talks about the Bible was full of nonsense. We can cite it. Chapter and verse. In certain spots, the morality of the Bible is pretty good. In other spots, it's pretty bad is pretty much what it comes down to. And they go on to talk about that person. And there's an answer to that as well. And it talks about the alcoholic. I lost myself again. There we are. It says, we felt in belaboring the sins of some religious people, we can feel superior to them all. Moreover, we could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings. You know, in the tenth step, when we finally get there, I was told if I spot it, I got it. And when it came to my religious upbringing, I spotted it in everybody. Because I had it. And I didn't realize that. So I was one of those religionists as well. And it talked about the phony form of respectability was our undoing as far as faith was concerned. But when finally we were driven into AA, we learned better. It says, as psychiatrists often observe, defiance is the outstanding characteristic of every alcoholic. Every one of us has that as a characteristic. So it's not strange that lots of us had our day defying God himself. Sometimes we recall it. It's God. God had not delivered to us the good things in life we specified like a greedy child made an impossible list for Santa Claus. More often, we met up with some major calamity into our way of thinking. We lost out because God deserted us. I love the fourth step. There's a line in the fourth step that talks to me about calamity. It says, we learn to now match serenity with the calamity. My second step, I was still in calamity. Because there was a God, and it wasn't anything you guys were telling me. And I'll explain that in a little bit. It says, when we encountered AA, the fallacy of our defiance was revealed. At no time had we asked what God's will for us. Instead, we have been telling him what it ought to be. And then it said, a little later on, it says that belief means reliance, not defiance. Our first tradition talks about unity. And that's one of the great things about the second step. It helps me become more unified with everybody else in this room. This is a spiritual program. Not a religious program. I don't talk about my religion in these rooms. Want to know about that? Talk to me after a meeting. We're all inclusive. And there was a reason for that. Bill was smart enough, and we go back to our early history, to know that if he made it religious, there's a lot of people that would not be sitting in here. Whether it be Jew, Protestant, or Catholic. It would be just two, or a Muslim, or a whole lot of other things. It doesn't matter. We're all inclusive, not exclusive. Everybody's welcome. We're all in the same umbrella of AA. And that's real important. So it meant that I had to get rid of that defiance and that prejudice. That was a prejudice I had when I got here. In AA, we saw the fruits of that belief. Men and women spared from alcohol's final catastrophe. We saw them meet and transcend their other pains and trials. We saw them calmly accept impossible situations, seeking neither to run nor to recriminate. This was not only a faith. It was a faith that worked under all conditions. And it was a faith that worked under all conditions. And we soon concluded whatever price, in humility, we would have to pay, we would. And then there's the last kind of guy that walks in here. That's the guy full of faith, yet reeking of alcohol. Probably a lot of ours, favorite type. And it talks about, to the clergyman and the doctor, this is a man who means well and tries hard. He's a heartbreaking riddle. To most AAs, he's not. Because there are too many of us who have found that we have been justified. We're doing everything our ability. But yesterday in the open, I've found this one morning. It was to the chronicler in 100. Then I traveled direct, and started praying with him, and he asked me to think on top of something. So I had this possible platform and started it again. And I found it. And I prayed. I stood up. I would I would not come home the next morning. I would not cry. I just cried. I firmly believed. myself. We had to wallowed in emotional and mistaken for true religious feelings. I talk about my grandfather and I talk about my family and I talk about my religious beliefs, but when I really look at it after being here for a while, it was all about emotionalism and had nothing to do with the way I was raised. I was raised with a lot of love about my religion. I was the one who didn't have it. It had nothing to do with the way I was raised. It was my warped perception, my faulty judgment, and a definite lack of awareness, which is my first step again. It tells us, and we had mistaken for true religious feeling. In both cases we had been asking something for nothing. The fact was we hadn't really cleaned the house so the grace of God could enter us and expel the obsession. No deep meaning had sense that we ever take stock in ourselves made immense to those we harm or freely given away to any human being without demand for reward. We had not even prayed rightly. We had always said, God grant me my wishes instead of thy wishes. That once more we will be done. Therefore, we remain self-deceived and incapable of receiving enough grace to restore us to sanity. I will tell you that the walk, the words sanity, is a great definition. I walk in here and people used to say insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. That to me was not insane, that was my normal. I drank the way I drank because I was looking for that result. I didn't drink to run away from how I was feeling. It made me feel normal, and that's the way I drank. The big book, it's defined in the 12 and 12 is soundness in mind. In the big book on page 37, it says, we don't care what your precise definition of the word may be. We call it plain insanity. How can such a lack of the ability of the proportionate think straight be called anything else? The lack of the ability of the proportionate think straight. If you know the kind of thinking I had when I walked in here, like most of us when we walk in here, it was very warped and twisted, and that's insanity. Insanity is not what I thought it was. Insanity is not the person who sits in a rubber room because they're drooling over themselves and they make no sense and they're mentally deranged. Insanity is the way I think, and the way I let that thinking control my behaviors. That's my insanity. We get into the second step, and it talks about that principle I spoke about. How do I get to an open mind? When I walked in here, I believed there were three powers that I had when I came in here, and they were money, property, and prestige. Our sixth tradition says those are the things that will divert me from my primary purpose. Money, property, and prestige diverts a group from its primary purpose. In my relationship with others, I was given a higher power. How can I get? How much was it going to cost? How important am I? So there was the money and the property, because I thought I owned something then, and the prestige is just look at me. Those are the things that keeps me away from staying in alcoholics and arms. Those are the things that will get me drunk. That was my higher powers when I got here. I was given an assignment by my sponsor. I was asked to read Came to Believe, which is a great book. It's a great book. It's a great book. It's a great piece of AA literature. And to look at the little stories and how far other people found their way of their quest for faith. I was also reminded that the stories in the back of the big book or in other ways that people found their belief in their higher power. And I had to be on my own journey. This was my journey. No one was going to tell me how to believe. In Bill's story, Ebby Thatcher made a suggestion to Bill Wilson. Why don't you try your own conception of God? Novel idea at the time. I think most sponsors today, at least I know I do that for my sponsees, as my sponsor did with me. He suggested I sit down with a piece of paper and said, if I was to have a God of my understanding, what qualities would that God have? And I made that list. And that was my list. And that's what I started praying to when I got here. Actually, what I really was praying to was to the group of drunks. I love the second tradition. I'll explain that in a minute also. My second tradition was, my sixth step, my sixth tradition, which was my money, property, and prestige, was diverting me. But I walked in the rooms and like I said, those people that were laughing confused me. I couldn't understand why they were happy when I was so miserable. But I did see hope. I heard them talk about things that I was going through or was about to go through or already went through. And they did it in such a way with such love and compassion for each other that was beyond anything I could understand. I love the second tradition. I love the second tradition. It tells us that there's a loving God as He expresses ourselves in our group conscience. And when every time I go to an AA meeting, I'm having a group conscience. God is in this room. My God has skin. I will hear someone in the room usually say something where I can relate and know my God is speaking through another human being. And that's where I started getting that substitution from the religious upbringing I had and started learning the difference between spirituality and religion. I was told when I got in here, religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there. And I hold on to that because I want to grow spiritually. We talk about relapse a lot. The book tells me that the reason that people relapse is they didn't enlarge on their spiritual life. It says it two or three times throughout the book. So my job when I get here is to learn to enlarge on my spiritual life. I have no idea how to do that. I needed the guidance of a loving sponsor and a bunch of wonderful people who have been around me who love me to hell in spite of all I was doing. And it tells us in page 25 and there is a solution. If you're a serious alcoholic as we were, there's no middle of the road solution. We believe that we were in a position where life was becoming impossible and we had passed into a region from which there was no return through human aid. We had two alternatives. One was to go on to the bitter end. As best we could, blotting out our intolerable situation, which is your first step. Or the other is to accept spiritual help, which is step two. This we did because we honestly wanted to and were willing to make the effort. There's that willingness that we talk about to make a new effort to do something differently than the way I know how to do it. And then it talks about on page 42 and 43, it tells us they outline the spiritual answer and the program of action which a hundred of them had to do. And that followed successfully. But the program of action, though entirely sensible, was pretty drastic. You're asking me to give up my old ideas is what you're asking me to do. And I know that behind step two is step three. And you're going to be talking about God. And I was having none of that because I know I was going to be selling flowers on the corners a week after I heard about God. That's the way I saw it when I got here. That's just my insane thinking. It doesn't go away because I got sober. It meant I would have to swallow several life long conception, throw out several life long conception out the window. It was not easy. But the moment I made up my mind to go through with the process, I had this curious feeling my alcohol condition was relieved. And in fact, it proved to be. Quite as impossible was the discovery that spiritual principles solve all my problems. And that's a pretty broad promise and a nice statement. All my problems. Not just my alcohol problem. If I stay spiritually fit, I can deal with my ex-wife. I can deal with my children. I can practice some principles through steps so I don't commit suicide. And then I can practice some principles through the tradition so I don't kill one of you guys while I'm in a meeting. So I don't commit homicide. And those were the things that were real important to me. And that's all really based on my second step. This is all coming because of the second step that I didn't know how to apply in my life yet. It says, I have since been brought to a way of living infinitely more satisfying and I hope more useful than the life that I had before. My old manner of life was in no means a bad one. But I would not exchange the best moments, the worst I have now. And that is such a true statement for me. I didn't have a bad life. The bad things in my life were what I created. I was pretty successful in business. I wasn't successful in relationships, but I learned about that in here. I didn't really have a bad life. I had good family and good upbringing. A lot of love around me. Until I got here when I learned that other spiritual principles were the things that gave me a better way to live. A design for living as the big book calls it. It tells me that lack of power is my problem. And where and how to find that power is the main purpose of this book. Meaning the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I thought I was all powerful when I got here. My favorite statement that I heard when I came into the rooms is that there is a God, George, and you're not him. And that was real important to me because I had to let go of those ideas that I had all the answers. And I was, again, still bargaining with God. When I got here I was not allowed to speak to my children. I would call all the time and I was not allowed to get back on the phone with them. And I was going to my sponsor moaning and groaning about all this stuff. And I was asked straight out, you know, what kind of custodian was I to those children? Woke up in AA and found out I wasn't a very good custodian. That's why I was an absentee father. And that's a consequence, a direct consequence of my act of alcoholism. I didn't see that until I sat in these rooms. You know, when they say, stay long enough and don't leave before your miracle, that's part of that second step. It says, much to our relief, we discover we didn't need to consider another's conception of God. Our own conception, however inadequate, was sufficient to make an approach and to in effect a contact with him. As soon as we admitted the possible existence of a created intelligence, a spirit of the universe underlying the totality of all things, we began to be possessed with a new spirit. Possessed with a new sense of power and direction, provided we took other simple steps. We found that God does not make too hard terms with those who seek him. To us, the realm of the spirit is broad, roomy, all inclusive, never exclusive, or forbidding to those who honestly seek. It's open, we believe, to all men and women. And so do I. I believe that as long as you have a belief that this could work for you, could work for you, it will work for you. And I'm one of those that have been here since January 19th of 1994, and it's only by the grace of God and a lot of work, through a lot of love, through a lot of people, that I stayed. Now, I don't know why I stay and other people don't, and I don't know why some people have to go out and come back and go out and come back, and I don't know why people go out and die. All I know is that I did what was laid out in front of me. And I was told if I did that, I would never have to drink again. But I'd have to work at it one day at a time. When we speak to you of God, we mean your own conception of God. This applies to other spiritual expressions that you'll find to be big. Do not let any prejudice you may have against spiritual terms deter you from honestly asking yourself what they mean to you. At a start, this is all you will need to commence on spiritual growth. To affect a first conscious relation with God as we understood Him, afterward we found ourselves accepting many things which seemed entirely out of our reach. That was growth. But if we wished to grow, we had to begin somewhere, so we used our conception, however limited it was. I'll tell you the first prayer I made. I used to pray to Bob's God because I didn't believe God wanted to hear from me. I tell this story. There's a temple around the corner on 4th Street, and there's a church right across the street from it. I was raised in one religion. I used to go into the church and go into the chapel. I used to sit down and pray. I used to say, Okay, I know you're here and I'm okay in this house. Would you do me a favor? Go across the street and talk to the guy on the other side and let him know that I'm trying to get sober and I need some help. That was my prayer. I was afraid to walk into the religion of my upbringing. Eventually I did that and the walls didn't fall down. There's that perception of me again. Wondering what God was going to do for all the things I did. There's a lot of things I did growing up that aren't pretty. Those amends were made a different way in later on steps. I know God had forgiven me at that point, but I was still afraid to walk into the building. That's just the way of my warped perception. We need to ask ourselves one short question. Do I believe or am I even willing to believe that there is a power greater than myself? I asked myself that question when I was asked that. I said, no, there isn't. I was told to go outside and to go over to the beach and stop a wave. I was told I couldn't do that. He said, I can't be God. I was always told if I really thought I was God to go to the drugstore and get a box of X-lax and not go to the bathroom. If I could do that, then I could be God. I couldn't do that, so I said, okay, there's got to be something. I started praying to my sponsor's God. I really didn't believe God could do that. I really didn't believe God wanted to hear from me. I'll tell you that I believed that he believed, and that was all I needed to get started. That's one of the most important things I know that I heard when I got here. This was great news for us, for we had assumed we could not make use of spiritual principles unless we accepted many things on faith which seemed difficult for us to believe. God was difficult for me to believe. When I talk about step three next week, you're going to understand why God was difficult for me to believe, because my decision in the third week was not to turn my will in life over to the care of God. It's something I read in step two. To practice the rest of this program as enthusiastically as I can, and I'm going to say it now because you don't have to believe in God to stay sober. I think it helps a lot more if you do. That's just my opinion. That's not from Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'll make that statement because it's not in our literature. But I do know that somewhere between step two and step ten, I started getting the God of your understanding, and eventually I got a God of my understanding when I started practicing the eleventh step. But I did not have a God in step two. I didn't even have a power outside of the rooms, a sponsor, and the fellowship. That was my power. That was what I believed in. I believed that you guys believed enough that you'd get me coming back on a daily basis. In our big book, and very far in the back of it on page 17, there's a part that I love. It says, I can't do that. But you can. You forgot that you just have the source of power much greater than yourself. To duplicate with such backing what we have accomplished is only a matter of willingness, patience, and labor. What we accomplish, what they're talking about is that sobriety that the first hundred found. And anybody can have it if they are willing, patient, and living. And I think that's what I'm talking about. Patience and labor. When I got in here, I was not willing. I had no patience, and I wasn't going to do the work no matter what anybody told me. Go to a meeting every day. I was told to read five pages in the big book. I said, I'll do anything but that. Call me every day. I didn't have time for that. I'm too busy. Too busy doing what? I was in a halfway house going to the beach. I wasn't busy. All I had to do was go to a meeting. Last week, I talked about some of the principles we got out of the first step. And each week, I'd like to throw some of the principles that come along as we do different steps. In the second step, I found that we come to believe. We learn more at the beginning about a mission that there is a God and I'm not him. We get to practice. We learn decency. We learn respectability. We get some hope. We learn about a higher power, faith. We speak of God. We learn about God. We learn about truth. We learn to listen. We learn to be. We get back to that honesty again. We learn about justice, tolerance, and values. We learn about humility on step two. Morality, willingness. We learn about amends and restitutions. We learn a little bit more about open-mindedness. And the most important thing, I think, that I learned in step two is service. That's how my mind started getting from a closed mind to a more open mind because I had a sponsor that used to say, you get here. You make the coffee. You stand by the door. You set up the chairs. You sweep the floors. And I needed that direction. And that was the discipline I needed. And what the steps do helped me get disciplined so I can make, have this relationship with a God that I didn't understand yet but you guys were starting to introduce me to through that second tradition, through the love you gave me in order to open me up so I can get prepared to go to step three, which we'll talk about next week. And thank you for letting me share on step two.