He Found a New Set of Terms for the Agnostic – Harold L.

You know, we're going to take a moment of silence and bring our higher power back in, whoever higher power you have. I'm going to let Harold start off again. Yeah, John, meet yourself, Harold. I keep forgetting to do that. uh hey well i'm glad to be back and i just want to say you know i'm happy that susan's here with 10 days and jane's here and whoever else is on the call that's new and even the long timers that around here man i'm Glad you're here and uh and uh before we dive in i just wanna you know thank mike uh for his uh you know which a lot of you have already thanked him for everything he does and he's pretty selfless and i know michael his whole ride and uh many of you may not know michael's story but but not just his uh alcoholism story but his lung story i mean but that many years ago mike was everything but dead and i mean that sincerely i'd go visit him in the hospital and he was a dead man walking i mean 100 just a little over 100 pounds and i meantime he looked like death i mean he was unless he got a lung transplant he would be we've already had his funeral a long time ago but by the grace of god he was able to get lungs and uh and it's changed life and so you know again we just talked about the delusion of discouragement uh many many many people with mice condition would have just gave up and been long but mike as much as he got discouraged when he can't breathe when he cannot walk from here to the door without sitting down and i watched him all his recording equipment around with an oxygen tank my home group every wednesday night and other places and people would help him and he'd have to sit down to breathe and he could watch him labor to breathe it was painful to watch um but uh man what an inspiration he's been so many so i know he's an inspiration everybody on here just what he gives up in service but just to watch and persevere through what he came through and do it with uh gratitude and whenever i go see him in the hospital he did grand and it was all about asking me questions and how i'm doing in my life and he was more interested in me than he was his deal and And so that's, you know, that says a lot about who Michael is and what God's done in his life. And it's obviously confirmed that he's had a heart transplant. So he's an amazing guy. And I'm always grateful to call him friend. And I've always grateful when he says, hey, can you come do this? I'm almost quick to say, well, if I schedule to do it, you'll know I'll do it for you just because it's Michael. So he is a pretty special guy. And there's a lot of other people on here that, like you said, Tammy and some other Judith and other people that really helped make this Monday deal go down. And so I'm grateful to all of you. I mean, it takes a lot OF time and to be transparent, you know, because I speak a lot. I've reached some real burnout stages on the Zoom thing, but I love Alcoholics Anonymous and I love to be engaged in it, but to be very transparent. But Mike keeps grinding. So if I want to whine about it, all I can do is just look at Mike and then Mike will whine right away. It's like, man, this dude's Zooming. I feel like I spent two quarters of my life on Zoom between work and AA, and Mike spends his life on zoom right now. And it's a blessing for a guy like him with lung disease. It's a lesson that he has Zoom. So it's blessed him as much as he's blessed everybody else. And so again, thank you, Michael, and everybody else involved with Threads of Recovery that put this Monday thing on or whoever's involved in monday fellowship god bless you uh we're on delusion number four so delusion one i'm not an alcoholic delusion two it's not my fault delusion three it's too late for me and then now we're delusion four i'm spiritually disqualified man this is a huge delusion i mean they wrote a whole chapter called the agnostics that centers around it but this is a long one to unpack and really i know jimmy and i could spend the entire 24 hours talking about this delusion um this is a really really important delusion uh and but but because and so let me just set the stage for us because of our past uh because of things that we've done things we've experienced things we haven't we've we've uh put forth on other people you know crimes whether just flat out evil sexual financial whatever the crimes may be whatever we've engaged in the homicidal thoughts we've had in our lives some really dark evil thoughts we had in ourselves in our life thoughts of hurting ourselves hurting other people whatever wherever your dark mind is taking you whatever you've experienced it's real easy to show up here and really feel like you're pretty much disqualified I mean how could this loving god or a higher power or creator or how you know whatever you want to frame it if there's this force really exists you know how in the world did they ever excuse a poor rotten to the core person like me how could i ever get a clean slate how could I really experience grace mercy forgiveness love however you want it to do brandon how is that even possible and uh and it's something that we all wrestle with and depending on what's embedded in you and that's a really key word i want to lift up what's imbedded in you because you all have a spiritual embeddedness whether you want it or not i don't care if your lowest purpose is i've never been to church or you're one of those people who said i had i had religion shut down my throat or when you're one of those people that say i'm a preacher's kid whatever you all have embeddedness when it comes to the powder greater than yourself you can't deny it i mean nobody can escape the god question um you just can't i mean it's not impossible Even if you're an atheist, you can't escape the God question, agnostic or wherever you're at on your spiritual journey with this. But it's a delusion that we have to overcome because it can really hold us back from living the steps. Not that many years ago, I went out after a meeting with a guy who I'd known for the whole time I've been sober and he'd been in and out of AA for over 30 years and he finally put three years together. you could paper the walls, you know, back in St. Louis, we used to hand out cards, a white card for 30 days, a green or silver card for six months, I believe. And then a gold card for one year. And then every year after that, you got a gold star. That was before chips became, you don't have to worry about it. You know, the thing when you stand out these cards, well, we used several saying he can, he can wall paper the wall with us 30 day cards for this white cards. And that was the case with this guy. And so I'm sitting with him one night and it's just him and I had been, everybody else had left and i'm talking to him and i said hey i said man you've been around any longer than i have and you just now got three years which is amazing and it's wonderful um but what's changed because there is no new information it's the same information back then than it is today so what what's changing and i mean you were admitting and conceding that you were an alcoholic all these years so i mean really what what was changed and so he pondered that question for a minute and then he said really really comes down to one thing belief I said what he said it's just really one word here oh belief I finally believed this stuff I finally believe it and when I believe it I started to actually live it and it changed my life and I thought well man that's about as well said that you can say it's really that simple you know we have that step two so we come to believe that this power could restore us to sanity to the soundness of mind especially as it relates to alcohol but also just into the heartbeat of life how we live our life so how is that how does that take place and how do we just come to believe and so a lot of us have so many hurts habits hang-ups that we have to overcome and this delusion is one of them you know because all this you know how many people have you heard come in says man i was all great till i look up at the steps and i saw the word god where i come in and everybody starts holding hands and like hey what's up with this you know um and so whatever your stuff is i don't care where you're at on your spiritual journeys have already impact what i'm saying is this delusion is is one that uh that can really challenge us again if you're coming out from an atheistic standpoint where you just don't believe that there is a god that this is just a matter of chance and it's a pretty miraculous chance but it happened and there is no god and we're just part of this chance and we'RE JUST LIVING OUT OUR LIVES THE BEST WE CAN UM AND I DON'T HEAR THAT UM WHERE YOU'RE ADGNOSTIC WHERE YOU CAN'T JUST PROVE THERE'S A GOD YOU CAN't PROVE THERE'S a god but so you'RE JUST SOMEWHERE IN NEUTRAL LAND AND I BELIEVE WE'VE ALL BEEN THERE THAT'S WHY THE CHAPTER SAYS WE AGNOSTics OR IF YOU'RE JUST A BIBLE THUMPING PERSON WHO JUST BELIVES THE BIBLE IS EVERYTHING I DONT CARE WHERE you're at on your journey uh here we are and we have to wrestle with it and uh we have to unpack it you know we throw words around pretty loosely in society not just in a but in society as a whole we throw the word love around pretty easy we say we love all kinds of things we saywe love m&ms we love spring we love the fall we love this we love that if you're in st louis some people would say welove white castles or we love toasted ravioli Or we love gooey butter cake, all St. Louis traditions. But we just throw the word love around really loose. You know, I love this. I love that. We do the same thing with the word belief. You know? We say we believe things. But do we really believe it? You know most of the time when I'm dealing with people with step 11, step 12, or step 11 they're talking about prayer and meditation. They're talking how they're really struggling in their prayer and meditation. The reality is when you peel that onion back deep enough, it's really not prayer and medication they're struggling with. What they're struggling with is their conception of God and how I view God, how I do this power will determine how I even pursue this relationship with God. If I pursue, see God as an authority figure, it's going to be drudgery or duty that I pray. I'm only praying because I have to, it's like going to a parole officer. I'm just checking in and doing my monthly call, doing the urine test, whatever. Um, so how I see God, how working in my life will determine How this relationship is. And it can mean I can be this far away or I can be this close. And so this delusion has to be unpacked. And we all have stuff that is embedded in us. We didn't ask for it, but we have it. And here we bring it today with us. And what are we going to do with it? Well, I think one of the best inventories you could ever do in your life is just right at the top of the page is what do you believe? And be honest about it. As Jim mentioned in one of our segments a while back, you know, that the only thing that counts it's just thoroughness and honesty with any inventory. So, you know, be thorough, be honest. What do you believe? You know, for me growing up, I, you Know, I grew up raised by a single mom for those that have been with us the whole time. Um, I had a mom that when she ran my dad off who was an alcoholic between age two and three turned her will and might over to God. And she understood God at that time. And she lived into her Catholic faith and she never looked back from that day forward. Man, she lived in to it hard. And, uh, you know and she was the greatest winner in my life and a great winner for many many people a lot of people in AA knew her around in St. Louis we called her mama long she was very well loved she wasn't in AA but she was just my mom and so she was a part of my life people come around they'd see my mom until um she was awesome but it was her spiritual life that they got her where she's at and I can just tell you this especially for the women out there there's nothing more beautiful beautiful than a woman who's walked with God for a long time. I'm just telling you, there's nothing more beautiful. If you were on YouTube the other day and got to see Liz Bailey, it's been sober forever. Um, talk on YouTube. I mean, just a beautiful soul. I means if you look around the old timer, especially the old time of women, uh, we had sis here in St. Louis who had 66 years of sobriety when she passed away. I knew her my whole sobriete, her grandkids grew up with my daughters um i knew her family well and uh just an amazing soul i had the privilege to do you know that to to officiate her her her uh her life ceremony you know when we had a special get together for that but just a beautiful woman so but that was my mom and so she wanted me to have that same experience so we didn't have any money we lived in beautiful houses we shared a bathroom with the lady next door till i was seven i mean to give you an idea of where we were at financially but what through scholarships or however how she pulled it off i went to a catholic school from four from kindergarten to the fourth grade and of course when you go to catholic school you got to do all their stuff and you had to go to mass every day now i'm not one of those guys that gets on here and says i'm a recovering catholic or i'm a catholic irish alcoholic or any of those things although some of that may be true um i love to go TO CHURCH i love mass i loved everything about as far back as i can remember I loved it so much, I would come home and play church sometimes. I would set up the TV trays and make an altar out of them. I'd take a cool-looking blanket and throw it over the TV trays to make it look like a really cool altar. You know, I'd have to take the fruit bowl, throw out the fruit and fill it full with potato chips for the Eucharist. And I'd get some great Kool-Aid for the wine. I'd pick a towel around my shoulders for a stole. I'd bring some friends over, a couple of friends, sapsuckers over from the neighborhood. I'd give out the Bible. i can promise you we never read and uh and we would have mass and it was a beautiful day at the longhouse you know to save a few souls and off we went father herald you know and i would play that and uhand that was part of it uh of what we when i got into and and then the rock operas were out at that time you know this is back in the 70s and tommy and hair and godspell and jesus christ superstars that i could sing jesus Christ superstar backwards and forwards right now to the lp to the a track whatever i mean let's do it on reel-to-reel actually that's how long ago it was but all that stuff is embedded in me all that stuff shaped me for my life um it doesn't stop me from falling into the darkness of alcoholism but it all impacted who i am and how my life turned out and uh so when i finally gave in to the dark side and this is before i really even drank but i just started doing dark things you know 10 11 years old you know my desire to want to live any kind of spiritual life quickly faded and and off i went and and anything that had anything to do with the light we'll call it spiritual just call it the light was a threat to me and uh and so i didn't want anything to do with it and uh so i quickly dissipated into the darkness and to the abyss of alcoholism and the only time i had any kind conversation with god throughout my life uh through that time was really through through uh through foxtel prayers through flea bargain prayers you know god get me out of this and i'll never do it again um and if you're really alcoholic you gotta add this to it and this time i really mean it because you you said it so many times it doesn't even hold water anymore uh but that was it i mean i and i said those prayers often you know when i would get in the jam and i told you in the beginning that the most honest prayer ever said was when i conceded to my innermost self that i was alcoholic and i really turned my will life over to a power greater than myself which was uh you know in in that jail cell and i said a three-word prayer god help me and i never drank from that day till now now bill says something his story i think is ironic he says that i'm paraphrasing but he says it you know his impact god's impact on his life was sudden and profound but for most people that's not the case it's something that they experience over time and i would have i would subscribe to the ladder i would Have said that i would just you know coming to believe waking up spiritually was a long process for me um but the reality was when i look back on it in inventory and through book studies and i was reading that one time in a book study about bill's statement and i thought about it and then revelation happened the light come on you know god's impact on my life was sudden and profound too because the moment i honestly asked him honestly it's a key word and gave my life over to god and and sought whatever direction i was going to follow i've never had a drink from that moment to now and so his impact on my life was sudden and profound too i just didn't wake up to the realities of it for quite some time and so that's the nature of the beast so we come day and i came down cox and i'm just like everybody else i've seen those words god and all this stuff and i hadn't really faced anything about god in years and and uh so it didn't it wasn't appealing to me and i wasn't excited about it for a couple reasons one is that i've done a lot of ugly stuff in my life i mean stuff that wasn't proud of i had secrets i had crimes that i committed that hadn't been held accountable before yet i had sexual secrets i mean going down the line i was no different than anybody else so that stuff worried me when it came to this whole god thing but ultimately i thought my i thought you know to put it into articulated i was disqualified the spiritual condemnation the spiritual persecution that i experienced between my ears and even from others from just the embeddedness that was already in me if you harold you're going to hell you know i don't know how many times i heard that when i was a kid some of the stuff or you're gonna go to hell you think it's hot now harold wait till you die you know things like that were said to me when i was a little kid you know growing up and all the stupid stuff that i was doing and bad decisions i was making um all that stuff becomes part of your embedded uh theology if you want when you get here and so i had this tough and it was there and it wasn't at a surface level it was at very much at a subconscious level but it was holding me back and so I had to face these things that in my life and so and we agnostics uses the word terms a lot maybe some of you never really picked up on that but it lifts up the word turns a lot and then we need a new set of terms for example at the end of the chapter we agnostic just says this much to our relief we discovered we did not need to consider another conception of god our own conception however inadequate this is an embeddedness i'm talking about was sufficient to make an approach and to affect a contact with him as soon as we admitted the possible existence of the created intelligence a spirit of the universe underlying the totality of things we began to be possessed of a new sense of power and direction provided we took our other simple steps. We found that God, listen to the words, does not make too hard of terms for those who honestly seek him. To us, the realm of the spirit is broad, roomy, all-inclusive, never exclusive or forbidding to those who earnestly seek. It is open, we believe, to all men. Now man, that is a humongous promise. I mean, it just, I can't even cling to you how big a promise that is. our lives um but you have to work through some stuff and so doing you know doing the fourth and fifth step uh really helped me with this because when i could see myself being able to forgive others for things that they've done me i was able to start to finally understand how god could forgive me but the real important thing was and we've all heard this cliche this quote you're as sick as your secrets oh man there's nothing further from the truth and boy alcoholics we love to have our secrets and in the first page of the 12 and 12 on step five and then the first pages in the big book on step five both say the same things in just different language but they both say that many old-timers are paid dearly for skipping on this principle of being fully transparent what's going on with their lives well a lot of our disqualification spiritually comes down because of these secrets we're as sick as our secrets And so as a fifth step, we go on to say, you know, after we fully tell somebody our entire life story, all of our life story. This is for a lot of people the very first time they really experienced this thing called spiritual experience. It's like this is our tube. This is our communication line to God. You can just play along with me. But this is Our Communication Line to God." This is Our Tube. But when we get here, Our Tube is completely filled up. I mean, it's like that's concrete dusted. And so nothing's happened. We don't hear anything. You go into meetings, you hear people say, well, God really spoke to me today. Or man, I was doing my meditation this morning, my reflection and God was really, I was really in connection with God. I was just in that Zen moment, you know? And I'd hear that stuff in the meetings. I'd be like, no, that's not happening for me. Matter of fact, you don't mind. My head's so noisy, you Know, and there's so many voices talking up here that if I went to a counselor, they charged me a group break. That's how many voices are up here. I mean, I just wasn't having that experience. But as I started to get my tube unclogged, as I started to look at the resentments and I started to resent, it started to getting removed. And I started To deal with the amends I owed and tell the secrets in my tube starting to get unclothed, you know, God's this channel started to change and God's voice went from a dead problem to actually I'm starting to have this conscious contact that we talked about this this intuitiveness. And now, you Know, now there's another voice in my head and I probably had that voice when I was a kid that told doctor me, but now I have really more than just this dark ism voice. You know, for example, if I went to Walmart and stole this iPad today and I got away with it, I made it out to the parking lot and I gotten the car. I mean, I would hear two voices today. The first voice would go, yeah, you're a fake fraud, fraud, a phony. You've been a fake product on your own life. Everybody knows that people really knew who you were. They wouldn't have anything to do with you. Nobody loves you. You're a rotten piece of crap. You know it. We know it, the world knows it. So who are you fooling? Loser. That'd be one voice I'd hear. The other voice would say, Harold, I don't like stealing. And which voice is which? Which is that guy consciousness we're talking about? Which is really the enemy that's been my enemy the whole time? This darkness, this dark side, this ism, this alcoholism, however you want to frame it. And so that, you know, getting my tube unclogged really helped me to have a new voice in my life and my conscience and overcoming this delusion that I was spiritually persecuted because of the things that I've done in my life. There is really such a thing as called grace. You know, that old song, Amazing Grace. If you were at the Minnesota International Conference back in the day, you know, back in 95, I believe, or maybe it was 2000. It was one of those two in Minneapolis. We were all there at the Metrodome and Judy Collins come out, no music, just her voice. And she sang acapella, Amazing Grace. And it just 60,000 people just melted our hearts. It was unbelievable. But that song, Amazing Race, I mean, is that really true? Do I experience that grace? And, you know, of course, I had to do some work for that to happen. But these new terms that they're talking about here said, you Know, I really if I had to summarize it and do an elevator speech on my spiritual experience. It was simply, I believe God sent me to Alcoholics Anonymous and through the work I've done at Alcoholics Anonymous, it led me back to relationship with God. It's really that simple. And it still works that way today. I believe God's planted me here for a reason. I need a bloom where I'm planted, but also, you know, it's through coming and hanging out with people like you and doing nightly reviews and working steps and sponsoring guys, being sponsored, that helped me stay in contact, that I'm going to keep my tube unclogged where I can have this relationship because I can easily fall back asleep spiritually. And I can usually fall back on a delusion that somehow or another, I really am disqualified, even though I've kind of come out of that delusion. So it's just something that we have to really watch out for in our lives. You know, there's some other quotes. It says most of us think the awareness of a power greater than ourselves is the essence of spiritual experience are more religious members call it a God consciousness. And that's what I'm talking about that God consciousness. And then it goes on to say, most effectively wish the state of alcohol capable of honestly, and there's that word again, facing his problems in light of our experience can recover, provided he does not close his mind to all spiritual concepts. He can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance or belligerent denial, or as I would say, a rotten attitude. And then lastly, it says we find that no one had difficulty with the spirituality of the program. Willingness, honesty and open-mindedness are the essentials of recovery, but they are indispensable. Right. So that word terms comes up a lot. And so we needed a new set of terms in our life, I think. And here's another list is a distinguished American psychologist, William James, in the book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is hard to read. But I've read the book indicates a multiple multitude of ways in which men have discovered God. We have no desire to convince anyone there's only one way by which faith can be acquired. And what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all. it means that all of us whatever our race creed or color are the children of the living creator with whom we may have formed a personal relationship on simple and understandable terms there's that word again as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try those having religious affiliations will find there is nothing disturbing to their beliefs or ceremonies there is no friction among us over such manners and so that's the beauty of it so you get through this process of embedding you got to unpack it deconstruct all this stuff i think that's why the inventory of what do i believe is so powerful and then over time and you'll never be completed with it but over time you start to reconstruct a new spiritual path for yourself and a new understanding that's beyond you know explanation really i mean i had no way to explain it but it's just a change it's a miraculous transformation of heart mind and soul that just gets transformed here as we stay here but but we got to be with but what i'm saying is we we got to be honest about the delusion of belief we say we believe things but do we really and that's what i really challenge people there's a story out there where jimmy's at out by niagara falls true story about a trapeze artist named charles blondin they call him the great blondie and he was famous all over especially in france but also on east coast and you know on the coast uh but he used to walk a tightrope across niagara falls a lot and hundreds and not thousands of people would come out to watch him do it and he would walk across that tightroke which is amazing feet if you've ever been to the falls you know how beautiful it is but can you imagine just walking across that thing on a tight rope holding the pole doing this going across that rope but he didn't just do that he did he walked across the the tightrope doing all kinds of stuff once he held a stove and cooked an omelet on it once he went across in a gunny sack he went cross to the thing like it was nothing doing all kinds this insane thing and blowing people's mind and one day his wife came with him and his wife was a very small petite woman who was a trap piece artist she didn't even weigh 100 pounds and she came with them and uh he brought a wheelbarrow small wheelbarow and she got in it And he pushed her across that tightrope across the Niagara Falls. And he'd go there and come back. And one of the times back, he looked at the crowd and you're all going crazy. They just can't even believe what they're watching. And he says to them, do you believe I can do it again? And of course, they're hollering out, well, yeah, you can do this. You can do that again. You're the great blonde. And of force, you could do it. Again, he goes, do really believe I could do that yet? Yeah, you should do it then somebody come and get in the wheelbarrow. Think about that statement, because on record, and you can find the information yourself, out of the thousands of people he made that opportunity to, not one person ever come and got in a wheelbarrow. But yet they hollered out by the hundreds that they all believed he could do it. And so it just shows you how loose we are with words is what I'm saying. So when we say we believe, do we really? Because I can promise you we all have doubts. Every one of us has doubts. and all of us have challenges sometimes. And those doubts can be pretty painful sometimes. But what I want to shift gears with, and I'll pass it to Jimmy, is that you come to believe in a power greater than yourself. You start to have this experience. Your tube gets unclogged. You start the experience of God. You start hearing God's voice in your life. You start feeling His closeness and His love and His grace and His mercy like you never felt it before. But then quickly you can become locked into this little box of what I call certainty. and you become so certain that how you experience god is how everybody's going to experience god if they don't experience it the way you're experiencing then they're wrong and it's a very shallow place to be this box of certainty i call it an idolization because you believe that your beliefs are the right beliefs and anybody else that claims to have an experience with god or this power during herself is not in the same box of certainly that you're in then it's not true it's a lie it's or it's some form of evil or witchcraft or superstition whatever i want you to think about that because it's there's close to 5 000 religions on the planet 5 000 and you want to lower down and say that my way of thinking or way experiencing god is the only way possible so therefore 4 999 others which includes billions of people are wrong and that's that's a really shallow place to be been there uh that box of certainty is delusional in itself and uh and i've been stuck in that place in my lifetime as well um and so you have to watch out for those things and the crazy thing about it god is the only thing we put in the box of certainty the only think you know we fly different places whenever i get on the airplane to fly somewhere am i certain that i'm going to get from point a to point b without the plane crashing i'm not certain of anything but i have enough confidence that i get on the plane and i fly when i get in a car and i drive from here to there am i certain i'm now going to have a car wreck or somebody's going to hit me not certain to that but i haven't got confidence that that's not going to happen so i get into the car and drive an old trip on it but when it comes to god sometimes we want to put god in this box of certainty and say well you know if you don't interpret god this way or you don'T UNDERSTAND GOD THIS WAY OR YOU DON'T EXPERIENCE GOD THIS way then you're really not an unexperienced guy really and that's just a shallow place to be and that's the wonderful thing about Alcoholics Anonymous in the writing the best of Bill Bill talks about five subjects one of them is faith and in the very first paragraph the very First Sentence he says you know turn your will life over to the care of God as you understood God is the most important language in all of AA literature. Now, this is a guy who wrote some pretty profound stuff and he wrote a lot of stuff in his own words. This is the Most Profound and the Most Important Language in the entire AA Literature Library. Turn your wheel of life over to the care of God as you understand God. So there's heavyweight stuff there to think about and that's the reality or the beauty of AA And there's no place on the earth that exists like it. You know, this common peril of page 17, this common parallel of alcoholism and our common agreement on the 12 principles of the 12 steps is what keeps us here. And we can agree on those 12 principles as a way to escape life together, to trudge the road of happy destiny, to live this thing out. But we don't have to get caught up in the certainty that we're so certain we're right. We can allow people to come to the table and that's the beauty of it. And that's the freedom that Alcoholics Anonymous has given me, is that I understand God to be plural today. What do I mean by plural? I mean not that plural is a thing. Plural just is. When I look at plants and wildlife, there's plural. There's all kinds of different kinds of plants, organisms, microorganisms, people going down the line. It's just real evidence that God is plural, that God manifests himself in a variety of ways. so the way God you experienced God or when this person experienced God and experienced God is more than reasonable and possible for where I'm at in my spiritual journey so it allows me to come to the table and listen to what is I'm confident in what I believe today but I'm not certain I definitely have doubts that pop up from time to time and I have close friends Jimmy being one of them Michael that I can share those doubts when they pop up but I've not locked into this box of certainty but I definitely not locked in and stuck in that embedded junk that i brought here with me i have a whole new understanding and framework for why i believe and it's a process and it'll going to be a process in the making till the day i die i really believe that when we give our life to god as a third step prayer promises on page 63 say one little short sentence we are reborn and i believe the minute i got in that cell and i said god i'm tired of living this life i honestly want to do something different at that moment i was 100 right with god and there's nothing i'm ever going to do for the rest of my life to get any closer to get God this power in ourselves to love me any more than he already does. But for the rest of my life, what we would call progress, not perfection, that this spiritual maturity that we try to aim for, that on a scale from zero to 100, I was probably a negative number when I started. If I lived a life expectancy, if I got out at 70, I'd be really, really grateful. But I know that I'm never going to be 100% spiritually immature. But my job is to strive to be the best that I can be one day at a time. it's not a license to go after the fool, but it's encouragement that if I keep growing and understanding and effectiveness, then my life's going to be amazing to continue to improve until the day I die. And as a lady I heard many years ago at the international told me, she said, well, she didn't say it to me. She said to the crowd she's speaking to, she says she was taught that, Hey, you got to remain green because green things are growing. And so I'll let her remain green. So I don't want to be locked into certainty, the delusion of certainty. I definitely don't want to be locked into the illusion that I'm spiritually disqualified. I'm as welcome here as you are, and you're welcome here as I am. And what a wonderful thing that is to be in a room where people come from all walks of life, and here we are. It doesn't matter your gender, your sexuality, or the color of your skin, how much money you got, where you went to high school, and we're just glad you're here. That's what they told me, and that's what I'm telling you, and I'm glad I'm here. I'm Glad Jimmy's here. And with that, I'm going to pass it to you, Jimmy.