He Watched the Givers in the Meeting and Realized He Was a Taker – Johnny H.

Hi everybody, my name is Johnny and I'm an alcoholic. I'm glad to be here tonight and I've had to be sober. I'd rather be in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. I want to thank Claire for extending the privilege of participating in an AlcoholicsAnonymous meeting. To me it's always been my opinion and I hope would always remain such as some type of a privilege to be allowed to come and sit in these rooms. I hope I don't ever get it through my sick head that I have a right to everything that goes on here just because I was lucky enough to stumble into a room and get sober and stay that way. When I'm asked to do anything in Alcoholics Anonymous, I sometimes can't understand why because I've been sober for quite a while now and I've had the opportunity to go back over my life and look at some of the things that happened to me. Nothing in my past before I came to AlcoholicsAnonymous would ever entitle me to the privileges and the good life that I live today. And it's all because of the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous and the actions that are taken here in the kind and loving hand of a firm sponsor who guide me in my decisions that I can't make myself. And if you're new here in Alcoholics Anonymous tonight, I want to let you know by no wild stretch of the imagination am I a consultant, a counselor, or authority on a program of Alcoholic Anonymous. I'm an example, good, bad, or indifferent that the program of Alcoholics Anonymous was. It had been necessary for me to drink anything, smoke anything, swallow anything, or stick anything in my arms sometime before the fourth day of November 1959, which is a long time between drinks. Sometimes I'm so dry I think I'm a fire hazard, for Christ's sake. And for you new here tonight, I want to let you know that my first meeting of Alcoholic Anonymous very nearly became my last because I sit in your meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous that day, and the people come in there talk to me about being sober, and I didn't think AlcoholicsAnonymous had anything to offer me. And the reason I didn t think that is because I was as physically sober when I came to my first meeting of Alcoholic Anonymous as I am tonight. It s physically sober. But that always seemed to be my problem. If I could have stayed loaded forever, I d never came to Alcoholics Not. But I kept getting interrupted out there on my happy road of destiny by people in little black and white cars. I think it's amazing that the longer Alcoholics Anonymous is in operation and the more successful it becomes, the more geniuses in the world try to dream up things to help us. A few years ago they came up with a breakthrough in the treatment of alcoholism. It was so overpowering that it was everywhere. It was called intervention. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's knew about it in 1940. and if you live the way I live then intervene in your life too you don't have to worry about it but you see I was sitting in that meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in a state of undrunkenness thinking it was being sobriety and what I've come to learn in AlcoholicsAnonymous in all these years that I've been here that the absence of alcohol or any type of chemicals in my system doesn't necessarily bring about a feeling of sobriete it's a state of undrunkenness And sobriety to me is the ability to live peacefully and comfortably and joyously with me and you and God. And if I couldn't do that, I'd probably be drunk before I got home tonight. I could never do it before that fateful day when I said in my meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and there's a very good chance that if I came very complacent and very easygoing and think that I've got it made or I've risen to some position in AlcoholicsAnonymous which means no longer to do the things that I'm always done here there's very good chances I'll be drunk again because I'm an alcoholic. I'm an alcoholic. If I don't find some way to live with some degree of peace inside of me without any type of mood-altering chemicals in my system, whatsoever, there's a good chance that I'm going to have to drink again. And being an alcoholic, if you put me in the wrong place at the wrong time and the wrong set of circumstances, there is a good change I'll be drunk. So my safety net lies within the cover of Alcoholics Anonymous and the people that are in there. Now, I'm extremely pleased to be here tonight fully clothed and in my right mind. And I only tell you that because the longer I stay sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, the more necessary it becomes for me to remember from whence I came. And I never want to forget that a little over 40-some years ago right now, I came too, in a cell, in solitary confinement, in a maximum security penitentiary, drifting in and out of total insanity. Now, because of a loving God has expressed himself through our program called Alcoholics Anonymous. It's no longer necessary for me to crawl around on my hands and knees like an animal. If I don't get nothing out of this deal at all, I guess I could live that for a long time. I'd like to be able to stand here and tell you that's what alcohol took me to. Oh, I'd love to be allowed to do that. I'd be able tell you this. See, that's where I took me too. The only thing that alcohol ever did in my life, it kept me alive long enough to find the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and New People. I'm assured as I'm standing here, if I hadn't taken a drink of alcohol, I'd have probably been dead before I was 10, 11 years old. I've been a misfit all my life. Always been a misfit. I'm restless and I'm irritable and I am discontent I don't realize then as I've come to understand here with you people that those are the symptoms of the most deadly disease That's ever been known to mankind. I didn't know that's what I had Because I didn' t know what was wrong with me I knew a lot about whiskey because my family all drank whiskey they were whiskey drinking people They were Irish They had no religion so they just went nuts these people they were crazy They drank whiskey and went to penitentiaries, they drank whiskey And worked in them whore houses on the other side of the tracks They were just crazy people And I don't remember that scarring me It wasn't until later in sessions with my therapist That I learned that I was scarred by that I didn't understand any of that at all All I knew was, I said, I'm not going to drink whiskey I saw what whiskey did to people I had a ringside seat watching people drink whiskey and destroy their lives So I'm never going to do it again I'm always going to be drinking whiskey So I started looking for a way out of it and I looked a lot of places my grandmother she was 90 years old she never took a drink of alcohol or smoked a cigarette in her life and my grandmother wouldn't think it was a big deal I've been sober all this time my grandmother would say big deal I haven't had a drink for 90 years but you look at her like all them non-alcoholics you tell them you ought to have a drink make you feel better from Christ's sake get that thing off your face I don't judge I just observe and report the facts to you, really My grandmother found everything she needed Everything she needed to sustain her life In the insanity that she had to live around My grandmother was a great person My grandmother had found that in her church And she went to it every day of her life And I sat around one day Watching my grandmother get this transformation While she was gone And the idea came to me That maybe I should go where my grandmother goes And do what my grandmother does And I could become like my grandmother What I didn't know then is that I'm not like my grandmother because my grandmother's not alcoholic. I didn't know then, as I've come to understand now, that I am mentally and physically different than my grandmother, that something happens to me when I drink alcohol that doesn't happen to maybe nine out of the other ten people who drink alcohol. I didn' t know I had this tremendous reaction to alcohol, this abnormal thing that happens to alcoholics of my type when I drank alcohol. If I'd have known that, I would have known it. I went and said church with my grandmother. I sat there and waited for this thing that happened to my grandmother to happen to me, and it didn't happen to me. I don't remember anything happening to me. The most significant change in my life came to me one day sitting on the back porch of my grandfather's house with my grandfather, watching my grandfather drink whiskey out of a fruit jar. My grandfather put that down, and I picked it up and took a drink of it. That's all I did. The next couple of minutes of my life is what makes me an alcoholic. I'm not an alcoholic because I spent the next 20 years of my life creating mayhem out there in the world. I am an alcoholic it because I had this abnormal reaction to alcohol. And what I come to understand that everybody doesn't have it. Everybody who drinks, it doesn't happen and I don't know why and neither does anybody else. None of these great geniuses who've been studying us for all these years and these spiritual giants who've risen so high have ever understood why alcohol reacts differently in my life than it does to most of the people drinking. I don' t know and I really don't care. I really do not care why because what happened to me when I drank alcohol happened to me every time I drank alcohol. I took a drink of alcohol and three days later they pulled me out from underneath the bridge, stood me in front of a judge, and sent me to the Hutchinson State Reform School. Twenty years later I took another drink of alcohol. They pulled me off a car in Compton and stood me in front a judge and sentenced me to twenty years in the penitentiary. Now that's what happened to me when I drank. I got drunk and went places. I just traveled around out there. I went from reform school to reform school to junior penitentiaries, to penitentiaires, to nuthouses. Now they call them treatment centers. I'm a little more partial to nut house. It's a little more macho. I've always figured if you're going to be bad, you ought to be bad. I don't think you oughta quit drinking cause you puke a little. Think you oughtta hang in there. I think you oughta give it everything you got. I think Alcoholics Anonymous work a hell of a lot better when you run out options. I gave it everything I had out there. I threw everything into the battle of life and lost the battle and didn't know what I was fighting. I didn't Know What Was Wrong With Me. It's the most baffling thing in my life, but I didn' t understand what was going on because I never one time ever came out of one of those institutions after being sober for a period of time and said to myself, Self, do you realize how long it's been since you've had a drink of alcohol? Do you realize how long has it been since you've done a series of electroshock treatments? Why don't you have a drink? Why don'T you have a drink, self, and go out and kill your baby brother? Why don' t you have a drink of alcohol and go out and destroy everything in your life? Why don´t you have a drink of alcohol and use up every opportunity and things that come to your life and the things that people offer you? Why don ´t you just do that, self? No. I took a drink of alcohol for the reason alcoholics of my type take a drink of alcohol after being sober for a period of time is not to get drunk. I don't drink to get drunk. I drink just to go, whew, because I'm an alcoholic. But you see, my malady and what the good doctor, Dr. Silkworth wrote to us in our book Alcoholics Anonymous says is very true. That's all that's required of my disease is to ingest alcohol into my system because once I put alcohol into system then and only then am I drinking to overcome a craving that's beyond all human understanding and beyond all human health. I didn't know that. And so that's what happened to me every time I drank alcohol until at the ripe old age of 26 or 27 years old, I ended up in that cell in solitary confinement and that penitentiary with everything in my life completely and totally gone. There wasn't a single solitary soul left upon the face of this earth that would send me a penny postcard. They were all gone. But I think they should be gone. And I don't believe that I have any right have any of them back just because I was lucky enough to stumble into these rooms and get sober and stay that way. I think that anything that's good and decent in my life is some type of an unwarranted gift that I have received from the God I discovered sitting in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's the way I look at it. I sit in that meeting of Alcoholic Anonymous that day, I wandered into this room and I sit down in the back row in what I lovingly like to call my throne of contempt. I had my coat collar up and my shades on because I's cool. if I'd have been any cooler when I came here I'd of froze to death for God's sake but there I sit, for all intents and purposes I'm a dead man and I'm sitting there staring at the answer that I had sold my soul for but I didn't recognize the answer because I didn' know what the problem was it's hard to seek the answer to a problem if you don't know what it is and I didn'T know what It was because I Didn't have a clue what was wrong with me and I sit there this day and watch these people come to this place that I was at And I've said for a long, long time that I came to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous because the institution I was in let women come in there. I said that I cam to my firs meeting of alcoholics anonymous a long time ago to smell perfume and that I've been honking and sniffing around here ever since. And that's true to some extent probably because maybe that's the vehicle that God chose to bring me into Alcoholics Aanonymous, but I've come to understand that that's not the reason that I was where I was at that particular time. You see, my last time out there, I killed me. And all intents and purposes, I ended up in the old Los Angeles County Jail, which I went by today, 128 pounds dead on arrival. And so I sometimes hook or crook or some kind of strange phenomenon, I ended UP strapped down on the bed in the Old Prison Ward of Los Angeles Country Jail with a doctor standing over my bed telling me I was going to die. See, I'd had two years doing to me exactly what I wanted to do to me whenever I wanted it to be. Whenever I wanted him to do it with as much money as I needed to do with it. And that's what happens to me when I have everything that I want in life. And it's a typical example of self-will run riot, as far as I'm concerned. And all I was trying to do was to feel good. I laid in that bed for a period of time. One night, because I knew nothing better to do, because the doctor kept telling me every day I was going to die, one night, Because I Knew Nothing Better to Do, I screamed out the only prayer I ever said in my life. I said, Oh God, help me. I thought for a long, long time, because there were no blinding flashes of light, nobody from running down the hall with a dozen donuts, saying we got an A meeting down there. I didn't get up and wander off into the tulip somewhere, I just went to sleep for a little while. And I don't know how many of you ever kicked a two-year heroin habit, but that's what I was doing. That's the first time I'd been asleep in a long, long time. I'll tell you how sick I was. Two short weeks later, I'm up running around in jail looking for some more of the poison that put me on the bed I'd just gotten off of. Because what's in the back of my mind today was in the bag of my head. What's in my mind at that moment? In the back Of my mind is the knowledge that when I can't stand life on any terms any longer, I know what makes the big hurt go away. Well, I know it ain't quite doing it at that particular point, but I know if will if I can find the right combination of things because it always is. So I got loaded again. You know, I'm sure that as long as my grandmother lived who loved me, I came to one time in a manager's clinic in Topeka, Kansas on a bed strapped down, and my grandmother was sitting beside my bed praying for me. my grandmother loved me and adored me she prayed for me every day of her life but I'm going to tell you something it wasn't until I asked God for help in my deathbed in the Los Angeles County Jail that I was able to get it because I can see the path from that utterance of that prayer oh God help me to this very instant and the path that brought me to you good people that day in November 1959 because I wouldn't have come here in any other kind of circumstances in any kind of situations I wouldn'T even have been in the place I was at because they didn't let people like me be around the people that I was around anyhow. And I sit in that meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous staring at this thing that I'd sold my soul for and didn't recognize it. I don't know what was it, I wouldn't understand these crazy people. I had to tell myself silly things like well, I'll sit on wait for these women to get up and tell their racy stories. You got to remember that when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous there weren't very many young pretty girls hanging around Alcoholics Anonymous. If they were, they weren't setting up that penitentiary where I was I'll tell you that. These old gals got up to talk and one of them said she drank for a long time You could look at her know she'd been somewhere for a longtime She said I used to drink I said, I'll bet you did Bad stuff too. I knew everything when I came to Alcoholics Not I'm a walking encyclopedia of useless information. I know so damn much about what ain't true I don't know what is true. And so there I see it a dead man for all intents and purposes I didn't know was going on. I'm fascinated by these people I don't understand these people. I don' t understand why anybody would do what these crazy people did. These people got up on Sunday morning, on Sunday mornin', and they gave up their whole day. They left their families and bought their own gasoline, got in these cars, bought their old lunch, they drove up these old back roads, they spent two hours, talked to a room full of people who didn' t want to listen to them. People like me who sat in the back row and made fun of them. Let me tell you how sick that is. Here I am, sitting in the penitentiary. I don't know when I'm going home and I'm making fun of people who are leaving in an hour Oh, but I'm hip You know, I'm so hip the balls of my feet tickle me when I walk The reason I don'T understand these people for the first time in my life That I could possibly remember I'M LOOKING AT PEOPLE WHO ARE GIVING A LITTLE JUST FOR THE HELL OF GIVEN IT AND EXPECTING NOTHING IN RETURN For the first TIME IN MY LIFE I'M GAZING UPON GIVERS INSTEAD OF TAKERS And you see, I don't understand givers because I'm a taker. Takers do not understand gibers. Takers are all losers. You're looking at one. You see, I'm the taker of things and the user of people. That's why I'm illiterate. I'm selfish and I'm self-centered and I am self-serving. I've got an ego bigger than this whole room. My entire lifetime was spent before I got to you good people for a long time after I was here. Maybe even a great deal of the time today. I don' t know. Without a conscious thought or a conscious concern for any other human being who lives upon the face of this earth. I wasn't interested in you at all, unless you had something I wanted. Then when I got it, I cashed it aside like so much trash, and I went on about my business. That's the way I lived my life. Well, I didn't live like that one day or one week until the heat got on. I lived a life like that from my earliest recollection of life for a long time after I was knocked off the snow. I asked one of these people one day, what do you get out of coming up here anyhow? I didn' t know. He looked at me and he said, when you can answer those questions, kids, you won' t have to ask them. I was wanting one of those deep psychological evaluations that I could cling to and hang on to but like all things in Alcoholics Anonymous for people who are so self-centered and self-serving as I the simplicity of AlcoholicsAnonymous just damn near escaped me because it is very simple here are the things we do, here are things we take here are steps we take, they're read to us in every meeting that we go to but when you're slick and as keen and as cool as I am and wrapped up with so many images that I don't even know what I am. I haven't got any way in the world to try to figure this out. I'm looking for some complicated answer to these set of complications that are in my life. I don'T realize that it's a set of simple problems that I DON'T understand. As I said in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous when I was new, the thing that you proved to me more than anything else is that I was not alcoholic. Because you would say things at podiums of Alcoholic Anonymous that I didn't understand. Or maybe I was too dipped or too into myself to understand anything. I heard things like, I used to drink. Now I don't drink anymore and everything is just wonderful. My thought about that was, God, I'm not alcoholic. I wish it was. If I was alcoholic then all I'd have to do is not drink and I'd be okay. You see, because I'm as physically sober as the people telling me that and I'm crazy. I don'T understand what's going on. I'M LIVING IN NIGHTMARES. I CAN'T SLEEP AT NIGHT BECAUSE I GOT THE FACES OF THE PEOPLE I'D HARMED and the things I'd done, and the atrocities that I'd committed. And a recurring nightmare is my mother standing at the gravesite of my baby brother while I stand there handcuffed between two detectives. And all the unthings said that I never was able to say to my mother. I want to walk across that thing and put my mother in her arms, my arms, and say to My Mother, Mom, I'm sorry. I don't want to be this way. You know, I just want to try to be good. I don' t know what this is, but you see, I don''t know that. And here I am standing, surrounded by a bunch of my old gang members, a bunch Of my old partners, and I've got some type of an image, and I gotta stand there and suck it up and throw my head back and act like I'm cool. And I have to live with these kind of nightmares. No wonder I have To drink. It's the only thing that makes The pain go away. And see, that's the things I Have to do. And one day, my day came on a Sunday a long time ago, I said in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, where all my answers have come to be In the years that I've been here. my answers don't come to me outside of Alcoholics Anonymous because my God does not talk to me in supermarkets my God did not talk to me classroom, my God does not talked to me a lot of other places my God talks to me through his people and through children in meetings of Alcoholic Anonymous because it's the only place I've been it's only therapy that has been introduced in my life and sitting in that meeting that day I watched a man walk into that meeting from the outside, a man than I do 23 years the penitentiary, I knew this man. And this man gave me the key to life that I have today. It's the greatest thing that anybody has ever gave me. He stood at a podium of Alcoholics Anonymous and told me I didn't have to live this way anymore if I didn t want to. That's my message to the newcomer. You don't have do it like this no more. I didn know what he was talking about. I didn not have the slightest idea. I asked him after the meeting, how do you learn how to live, Wes? He gave me greatest piece of advice that anybody could possibly give a a newcomer in Alcoholics Anonymous. He said to me, Johnny, there's a book called Alcoholics Anonymous in the library. If you go get it, I'll go home and pray that you find some part of you in it. I guess he's prayed real hard, that little fella, because I've been a student of our book, Alcoholics Andonymous, from that day to this day. And the only thing I've ever found in that book is me. I haven't looked for anything else. I am not looking for a way to sober up the world. I am not looking for a way to cure all of society's ills. I'm looking for a way that will live peacefully and comfortably and joyously with me and you and God. Now there's a strange phenomenon that takes place in my life and I wish I could maintain it on a constant basis but somehow it just drifts in and out. It seems like to me that the closer I adhere to the principles that are written in our book and the more willing I become to share that knowledge in this fellowship just for the sheer joy of doing it, the more peaceful and the more comfortable and the mergoyous I lived with me and the loving God that made me. I had a long period of construction coming to Alcoholics Anonymous because they had a lot of layers of images and self-images and self things and selfishness and self centeredness and atrocities I'd committed to be peeled away from me so I could get down to the real thing. One day The greatest thing that ever happened to me in my life Happened to me when I came to this room The greatest Thing that ever happend to me is not getting Sober Sorry I was sober when I got here The greatest Thing that every happened to be is not coming to alcoholics And all The greatest Thing that happen to me Is not my children being born or my grandchildren Being born or the good life that I have today Or the lovely wife Who brought love into my life And none of those things pale in comparison by the thing that happened to me that day, sitting in a room with a man, doing what our program of recovery says is the fifth step. I heard myself say to that man that I was an alcoholic. And from way down deep inside of me there came a freedom that I carry with me to this very instant. As I stand here before you tonight, I know exactly what's wrong with me. I don't know what's long with you because I can't see inside of anybody else. You see, what's wrong with me is that I'm an alcoholic and I suffer from a disease called alcoholism. I am not an alcoholic in anything. When I was an alcoholic, and something or other, I couldn't have this program. And the reason I couldn�t have it is I separated me from you. I'm not like you. I'm a little better than you. I'm worse than you, I'm smarter than you I'm slicker than you I'm richer than you I'm poor than you I'm NOT LIKE YOU! I became just like you alcoholic, it became my great privilege to practice the only program of recovery for alcoholics of my type in 5,000 years of recorded history. This is the only thing that's ever worked for people like me and it's not a chore. It's not hard. I'm gonna let you know that Alcoholics Anonymous is the easiest thing I've ever done. Living a program of Alcoholics synonymous has afforded me with the only good life I've ever known. The only good life I have ever known, it's so simple and so easy to me that sometimes I don't even believe how good my life is. I walked out of that penitentiary on the fourth day of June 1961, it was a long time ago, to a world I didn't know anything about. I had no social skills, I'd never had a job in my life. I had $25 on a please-don't-reign-on-me suit. I didn''t have anything, I didn' t a social security card, I didn't have a driver's license, I didn't anything. Only one thing for 19 months I had been allowed to study our book Alcoholics Anonymous and tried to the best of my ability through the humiliation in the things that happen to people like me when I cross over a line from one way to another way of living and I had a dream that maybe someday you'd let me come and sit in your rooms. Oh, I never dreamed you'd ever ask me to do anything. I never dream that you'd never let people like me sit anywhere in these rooms or do anything or be privileged to be with a great group of guys we call a coffee crew here. I've never dreamed you'd have allowed me to sit next to my sponsor on a weekly basis and do the things that happen to me in Alcoholics Now. I never dreamed anything like that because I didn't think things like me who crawled out from underneath a rock would be able to sit with you good people. But But I said to myself, if they will let me come and sit in their room, I'll do anything they ask me to do. I'm happy to report to you tonight that almost 39 years of my life next month, I have done just about everything that Alcoholics Anonymous has asked me to. And it's the most amazing rewarding thing that I've ever known because it's a key to the whole enchilada as far as I'm concerned. I went on to see my mother. She fell off the steps blind drunk. I picked my mother up and put her on a couch and said, Mom, I'm going to an AA meeting. She said, fine, I think you should. I'd like to tell you my mother got sober and stayed sober but that's not true. My mother drank herself to death. Everything in Alcoholics Anonymous is not a success story. Sometimes I sit in meetings of AlcoholicsAnonymous and wonder why it went wrong. My mother drink herself to dead, but I'll tell you something. My mother hasn't taken a drink of alcohol for almost five years now because my mother's been dead for almost five years. And the last time and the only time I saw any peacefulness on my mother in my mother space is when she laid in that coffin that day. Everybody comes out. I said an alcoholic synonymous and enjoyed the fruits of this thing and watched this woman that I love drink herself to death. Powerless to do anything about it. So if I get to think of some time that I got some power that I have some say-so about what other people say or think or do if I ever get to thinking that type of an intellectual concept in my mind that type OF an egotistical thought that I HAVE THE POWER TO DO THINGS HERE all I gotta do is think about that lovely little lady of mine, that little Irish woman that I adored, my mother who stuck by me until the bitter end until she could no longer stand to watch me kill myself how much I wanted her to get sober how I would have died and gone to hell she could have had a day of this sobriety, but my mother never got that. Oh, she came in and out of AA meetings from time to time in a state of undrunkenness, but she never knew the great blessing and their great spiritual rewards of the sobriete thing we call here. It's a far cry from anything I ever dreamed possible sitting in my first meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. I went to a meeting one night and a guy walked up and told me he's going to be my sponsor. I didn't think I needed a sponsor because I'd been in AA and reading the book for 19 months and I'm so hip that the world's still cool I know a lot about AA I could read verse and chapter and I'd work my steps I'm just real slick I'm the big dude down at the club he said I'm going to be your sponsor and I said well what's that he said well I'm not going to I'm gonna help you get it done John I said okay what do you want me to do he says why do you ask me I said you just told me you were going to be my sponsor he says if I can't run my life what makes you think I can run yours I says what do you want me to do he says you do what I do I says what is it you do he says if you do what I say then you'll know what I did such is the great mystery of Alcoholics Anonymous monkey see monkey do the great thing about Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to me is I can sit in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and I can follow any type of pathway I want to follow here. I can see people who are busy with happy, smiling faces on their faces. I can See people who Are still doing today after many years of sobriety the same thing they did when they were new. And I can See people who have grown to the point of spiritual relaxation in AlcoholicsAnonymous when it's no longer necessary to quite do all that much anymore. there's some type of an enthusiastic stimulus that happens to me the busier I am an alcoholic that man was magnificent that guy named Norm Alpe who was my first sponsor for 22 years before he died because he taught me many things he told me I should go to work because I was a bum I told him I was not a bum I was an AA member he says no you're an AA bum but bums don't work get a job bum he was mean man to me he just didn't put up with any of my nonsense he just you know I got a job and went to work you know somebody stole my first paycheck if you want to hear somebody scream you ought to hear a thief when they get stolen from I ran it and raved and jumped and hollered if I caught the guy you'd have another talker here tonight because I'd probably be up there in Folsom or some place Pelican Island on where they put all the bad dudes. Saying to you, hey, it don't work. I'm here to tell you, yeah, it does work. It works real well. But it's not something that I really have to work at. It's something that i just have to live. And there are living examples in Alcoholics Anonymous on how to live an Alcoholics Anatomy. And those are the people i have been drawn to. Norm Alpey was like that. He wouldn't put up with any of my nonsense, but i'd call him in the middle of to see if he'd answer the phone. He'd say things like, I'd say to him, Norm, Norm my program ain't working, Norm. He said, why don't you try ours? And he'd hang up. And he says things like Jack, your program never worked. Is your program at the ripe old age of 27 years old got you crawling around in a cell in solitary confinement, a maximum security penitentiary, drifting in and out of total insanity? That's your program, Johnny. How do you like it? He says our program on a part time basis has allowed you to live a life that's totally beyond your imagination. Boy, how wise he is on a part-time basis. You know, because I don't, you know, I have never been the most perfect example of Alcoholics Anonymous who's ever walked down the road. I have said in meetings of Alcoholic Anonymous with guilt and shame because I have done things I didn't think were up to the standards, some of the more moral superiors in Alcoholics Anonymous. I've said in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous with heavy hearts and sorrow because things weren't going my way. But I have said in Alcoholic Anonymous more than enough with a quiet heart and a peacefulness inside of me that's hard to understand unless you've been there. You see, I know what it's like to live with a quite heart. I know what the promises of Alcoholics Anonymous are because they've been fulfilled in my life time and time and time and again. Alcoholics Anonymous is the most fantastic way of life that's ever been my experience to even be near, let alone be able to participate in. This is a fantastic way of live. When my sponsor yelled at me and made me sit still in meetings of Alcoholic Anonymous and pay attention and extend some type of common courtesy to the people next to me. He, in a sense, was trying to introduce me to a God of my very own. I didn't realize that. I didn' t realize anything about it at all until I sat in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and became more interested in people and what they were doing here and the things they were saying than I was myself. And what I'm reminded of is what my Papa Chuck told me a long, long time ago. He said that God abhors the vacuum, but God abhorred the vacuum even more under heaven and earth. He said if I could empty myself of self I would be automatically full of God. So I say to you that once upon a time I turned around one day and found out that I wasn't looking for anything anymore and that's my great discovery today. I am not looking for anything anymore. I know where everything is. I have been fulfilled more than my meager little life and my shortcomings and my weaknesses have allowed me to live here. And today I live a life of fulfillment that's beyond my wildest imagination. I live in a home with a woman that I love more than I love myself. I never even dreamed I was capable of that until it happened to me. That's another thing that I discovered here. It wasn't something that I worked at and tried to figure out and read about or dreamed about. It just happened as a result of doing the things that we do here showing up where I'm supposed to show up and do what I'm supposed to do here all these things rubbed me my old Papa Chuck used to talk a great deal about something that I'd like to share with you he said that everything in my life that's necessary for my fulfillment in life will be given to me through no efforts of my own the only requirement would be that I would try to practice these principles and try to help God's children get things done that need to be done and everything that's necessary for my fulfillment in my life will be given to me. He also told me that everything that would hinder my fulfillment of life will be removed from me through no effort of my own. It's an effortless process, that all I would have to do is come to these meetings, stick out my hand and do what I'm asked to do and everything is unnecessary in my life will remove from me through no efforts of my life and it's true in my own life. Everything that was bothersome to me in my life has been removed. And everything that's fulfilling in my life has been given to me, and I haven't even asked for it. I just turned around one day and it was there. If you're new here at Alcoholics Anonymous tonight, I pray God that you get on this path and you get in that book and discover your illness and find out the great solution to it. I guess I could stand here until I'm blue in the face and thank you for all the good things that God has presented be in my life but what i'd like to do tonight is that i'd like to really thank god for alcoholics anonymous but i think even more importantly than that i would like to thank Alcoholics Anonymous and people like you for my God. Thank you