Humility Is Something You Voluntarily Reach For — That’s When Step 7 Actually Opens Up – Steve R.

Let's have an AA meeting. My name is Gary, and I'm an alcoholic. Welcome to the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting at the NAVA Club, where a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one year or more of sobriety tells his or her story. This reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each individual in our own personal stories describes in his own language and from their own point of view the way they establish their relationship with God. These give a fair cross-section of our membership and a clear-cut idea of what happened in their lives. We hope no one shall consider these self-reguling accounts to be in bad taste. Our hope is that many an alcoholic men and women in our room tonight and listening later on aabloochipspeakers.org and desperately in need will hear our speaker, and we believe that it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded to say, Yes, I have one of them. I, too, must have this thing. I'm delighted to be able to introduce a fellow who we met through a mutual friend. The mutual friend has since gone off, and we don't see a whole lot of him anymore, but the friendship that I have with this gentleman continues to grow, and also he is a gentleman who is... half of the delightful couple that meets regularly at the Solution Group, and if you haven't seen them in action, please go to that meeting and do so. I give you Steve. Hi, everybody. I'm Steve R. I'm an alcoholic. It's good to be here. First time I ever came to this room, it was Maggie Harrison down at Biscayne. She said, Steve Riddell, they're having a dance at a dinner at NABBA, and I want you to go over there and stand by the garbage can, and take everybody's plate and say, thank you. You're not allowed to eat, and you're not allowed to dance. So, that's how bad off I was. I'm going to do... For the first time in my life, I'm going to put it in a general way, what things were like, what happened, and what I'm like now. And you've got to understand that I can say at this phase of my development, because the further I move away from a drink and the closer I move to my creative path, I don't know how to use the word, I don't know how to use the word creator in there. My creator, things get a little bit less skewed, if there is such a thing. It's pretty neat, because I've got a guy in the room that took me through the steps, and I asked him to come here, because he knows the truth about me, and that may be a chance for me helping you all. So, before I came here, I didn't pray much, but I'm going to pray now, because I've got a lot of evidence in my life of the power of prayer and how well it works. God, give me peace. Show me the truth. Please direct my thinking. Speak through me that I might help someone else. Amen. You know, I'm a native of Atlanta. I haven't always lived here. I was born out on a dirt road between Dorval and Chandler. I've got two siblings. I have a brother who's eight years older than me, a brother five years older than me, who died last year of cancer. I asked him to smoke one for me on the way out, because I used to be addicted. I was addicted to that, too. And, you know, we came up in a household where I had a mom who sheltered me. She sheltered me from all the dysfunction in our home. And my brothers, naturally, through the progression of their marriage, they didn't have it as good as I did when they came through. But then Dad had done some things with his life, and I had it pretty easy. And I see my brother today, he's eight years older than me. He's a gentleman. He's a spiritual man. And we have conversations about our household. And he says, you know, you're not realistic. He says, you say nice things about our dad. And you say all these nice things about the house we grew up in. He says our house was classic textbook child abuse. And so, you know, I never felt OK about myself. I had a dad who was a do as I say do, not do as I say do. Kind of guy. And he didn't mind flogging me if I didn't if I didn't look at him right. But, you know, he was a guy who was a jovial fellow. And see, that's the thing that I have. I have all his good traits and I have all his bad traits and I don't get much mileage out of the bad, so I try to apply the good ones. I have to give him the benefit of being human and being fallible. And, you know, I used to try to figure out what was going on with them. That was their relationship. I see a lot of people who try to know what was going on with my folks. It's none of my business, you know. I'll try to say nice things to my brother about my mom. He'll go, she shouldn't she couldn't have been too smart. She married our dad. So the thing is, is I'll tell you this. In Alcoholics Anonymous, I've learned we need not be a glum lot. And there's a lot of joy about it all. And I never know what I'm going to say when I'm up here. Sometimes I channel Caliber or George Carlin or Billy Graham or something. I've had a lot of different things happen in my life. And my mom was trying to lead me to the light. My dad, he was, you know, his little warmth for him. He was a jovial guy, like I say, he was in the restaurant equipment business and he met a lot of different kind of people and he would install equipment and drag us all over town. He usually got free food and free booze everywhere because he was in that business. And so he he strayed away from the house. And he his liquor stopped working for him fast, probably in his mid thirties, mid forties. And I was just I was born when he was in his thirties. And so, you know, it was my mom, she had to put up with a lot of crap from my dad. He was making up the profits and he wasn't keeping his vows. And so I experienced a lot of that stuff in that household. And when I first got here, my perceptions have changed a lot. When I first got here, I would tell I was one who would tell you. My mom drug me to church, made me go and shoved her religion down my throat. Well, in sobriety with a higher power who works powerfully in my life. Now I'm going to tell you, I'm glad she loved me enough to take me to church and give me the opportunity to make my own choice whether or not I really wanted to study scripture and worship with other people in the church. You know, I got away from all that stuff. And, you know, I was in the only thing I never felt part of anything. I had these big ears. And my mom dressed me funny, very, very stylishly, you know, and all my friends were wearing blue jeans and I always color stuff. A lot of it she sewed. And I was a mama's boy. I'm here to tell you, you know, and it's OK because, you know, I was born. I was two months premature, seven months. So we'd like to think that my brain didn't finish getting formed around the house. And I still that's part of part of the problem. But part of my problem is my thinking now that I don't drink. But I've received a reprieve from that. And it's interesting because I never thought I was ever going to be OK. And I never felt OK from when I when I first went. I can remember there's two things in this life that a very spiritual man has taught me. There's only two feelings and there's love and fear. And I can I can look back and I can remember the first time I was afraid. My brothers would not let me go with them. And I was only about this big and I started trying to follow them. And I got stuck like Tim Conway, you know, I got stuck in the mud and a diaper. And I can remember moving around saying, you guys are not going to include me. What is this? You're not including me. So that's the first time I didn't feel part of. OK, then I go to school my first day of first grade and they tell me about it. I remember I had two hands and two feet in the door. I'm screaming, I'm not going to go. And they had to push me in there. I never got along. I never got along with people. I never felt good about myself. And I would do a lot of things. There's there's some things in our defect character. The phoniness and the fake. I found that it's the unnatural things that we do to make people to draw people to us actually repulse them all the more. You know, I was doing I was doing a lot of things all along the way to try to say, hey, won't you accept me? Won't you be my friend? And I never learned to be true to myself, which they hid that on my chip. By the way, it took me a few years to find that. I didn't know how to be true to myself in an effort to make me pull me out of that. My mom tried involving me in scouts. She tried involving me in a choir, choir, church choir. We came along. We came along. And she got to this point where she was tired of my dad's drink and she was tired of his woman. Dising. She caught him at it. And he didn't you know, he wasn't trying to hide it. Doesn't seem like, you know, he just he didn't care. Seemed like not. I don't really know because I never had a chance to ask you about it, but. I, I never really cried about this. I'm like, I'll be cool. It cleanses your soul. When I was 15, I was 15. I'm going to choir to someone. I really had a good time at church. I really had a good time. I really enjoyed going there. I enjoyed being with those young people. I enjoyed the Bible and I enjoyed singing in a choir. That's what drew me there mostly. And we had a great choir director in Sandy Springs at the first Baptist church. And I got to go on a choir tour. And we sang with Billy Graham a couple of summers. And, you know, that was kind of cool. You know, I felt I felt like, hey, you know, this might be the thing I want to do with myself. So that that second summer I came home and we went on vacation. And with my all our family had a bunch of places down to the little lagoon and Gulf Shores, we went down there and I was pretty good on water skis even there. And we had my mom was too. And we I used to take the short road. Well, we went skiing August 10th, 1969. And I was on the short road. I was having a good time ducking. And all of a sudden we came into the house and we decided to go. I'm crabbing down at Fort Ward at the end. We're out there. Mom's having a good time. We're double handed and pulling in a bunch of crafts. And mom keels over and has a cerebral hemorrhage. And things kind of changed. I came back from my vacation without mom. And so immediately we got back to the house. And my dad had lost his lover and his best friend. And, you know, he, like me, was one of those guys with women. Won't you take care of me while I run your life? He didn't do it. He didn't know a whole lot. Of what to do, of what to do about me. I was a problem to him. I interfered with his drinking. He was fairly successful in business and he didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to raise a kid. My mom was the nurturer. So he pretty much said, live in my house my way or get the hell out. And at the same time, he went and married a woman. I don't know that he was in love with her, but he wanted to bring a woman in the house who could maybe take on the burden of me, get me directed, get me through school. And it didn't work out. That first weekend when we came home, you know, I'm going to say that I need to qualify myself as an alcoholic. I'm bouncing around. I've got untreated adult ADHD and sometimes I have immediate negative retention. Would I just say so? So it's a case that, you know, there's a lot of things that happened along the way. And I don't need to dwell on those. I guess a good AA speak is, eh, don't stay drunk too long. Get to God fast and then tell what this program means to me. It's everything in my life. But it's not normal to go to Boy Scout camp at Burt Adams and put Falstaff and Playboys in your haversack. I did that and they sent me home. I'm not going to go in too much of a drunk load. I think that qualifies me. OK, so then we went to Lake Burton to the cabin one time and took the kids from choir there and took them in the woods and tried to make some martinis. So that was the next time that we saw that maybe I might have some problems and they didn't know what to do. And so after mom died and I got, you know, another thing after she was making to try to groom me to fit into society and learn, you know, I never and there never was any compromise for me. There never was any. It was all me. I was a taker. And I and I and I'm the only reason I was ever in a friendship or relationship with anybody is to get what I could get out of it. And I was very selfish and self-centered. And so somewhere along the way, you know, my dad used to the child, he would take me to the drive in with soccer. And I'd sit in the back seat. He thought I was sleeping. He took me to see Robert Mitchum. Some of y'all don't know about this way before your time. They took me to see Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road. Well, this guy was slick and he liked he sold whiskey and he he you know, he was a sneaky guy and a devious guy. About that same couple of years, I saw Paul Newman in HUD. And I wanted to be that kind of renegade. So after my dad married that lady to try to make a home for me, I was 15 years old. We weren't getting along. And he goes, I don't know what to do about you. So they had some ladies from the church tried to help me out. Ladies who sang in choir with my mom and worshiped with my mom. So they took us. They took me from Chamblee. We moved to Sandy Springs and they moved me into one of their homes. And I was doing pretty good for about a year and a half. That's a pretty traumatic thing for a 15 year old. But what I'm going to say is that's part of life. Life's taught me now that's just part of life. You know, you just you got you got to go on. I got a friend of mine who now today that's much more tragedy in her life than me. And she calls it a new normal. So, you know, now that's the way things happen to me now. I have a lot of new normals and that was my new normal that I wasn't willing to accept. So when I didn't get along in that house, I wasn't willing to live his way. He handed me $100 a week allowances in 1970. This should take care of your dry cleaning. You can eat out if you want to. And he checked me into the Howard Johnson Hotel on Roswell Road. I was the only kid who had a brand new car and the keys were no driver's license and was driving to school every day. And I had a hundred dollars to burn. And this is alcohol. And I've never talked about anything outside of the single purpose. But that but I hate that word. You know, I fell in with a really bad crowd and became an entrepreneur. It was pretty easy to do. And you're funded by dad. So all of a sudden, here I go from this little big county school out in the woods, I'm over in Sandy Springs. It's a little bit faster pace for me now. And we found out I was in the North Springs area. So they moved. We moved up there. I didn't get along. I didn't get along in school. I drank heavy. My granddad had died and left me a big box full of family trinkets. And what I wanted was his flask. So I got his flask and I filled it up and I carried it with me all the time. I watched my dad who kept the booze in the kitchen cabinet, one in his briefcase, one in his glove box and one in his desk for work. I started drinking like that. And all my friends, parents, they didn't like to see me coming because none of them had cars. And I did. And I had a job and I was making my own money. And it just wasn't good. I wouldn't get along with the school. So my brother saw that I was going to end up getting killed. And so it. At age 17, he said, you're going to die running with this crowd. And he says, I don't think this is what our parents wanted for you. You know, I'm really afraid. So he got my guardianship. He had come back from Vietnam. He got my guardianship. He used to make me do push ups for for making C's. But that's my big brother, right? So anyhow, it didn't work out. I didn't. He had a new wife and a new baby and they didn't need me in their home. I was a problem for them. As well. So my brother decided since he'd been in the military, he'd been in military school. He had been received that type of discipline. He said, your problem is you have no discipline. What we need to do is discipline. So we went down to the AP's down in Atlanta and they turned me down because I had been born, I had rheumatic fever when I was born and had a heart murmur. I had some problems. And they said, well, poor H, we're not going to take you. So he goes, oh, hell, what are we going to do now? Well, he devises his plan. We'll go to Opelika, Alabama, which in 1970, all they had there was a flagpole and McDonald's, a post office and an Air Force recruiter had never signed. But maybe one or two people in his life. So I helped him make his quota and then they signed me up and they sent me. They sent me to Lackland Air Force Base. And that was a mess. I get in there, you know, I showed a little bit of military variance. But they made me a squad leader. I had to keep my stuff and 17 people, other people, the guy with no discipline. And somewhere I got to about 10 or 12 days. You got to make 30 days. That's not counting weekends. I got to 30 days and some guy made me mad. He got he got us some gigs where we had to go do some running the packs on our back. And I said, son of a gun, I'm going to kill you. The DI heard it and they sent me back. They put me in a different flight and I wasn't a squad leader. I started over day one. So the next one was I was getting a chip on my shoulder and I was needing a drink. And I went into a in there and I've been I was withdrawing heavy from heavy drugs and alcohol when I went into basic and so I was really having a tough time. They put me in that second. I got up to 17 days. I'm going to get out one of these days. And what happens? I walked across a little red fire line and flipped a cigarette butt and the DI saw me. Here I am, the guy that has a problem with authority that doesn't know how to follow rules. They sent me back. They didn't send me back. They put me in motivation. Well, this is a place where you got to everywhere you go, you run in the chow hall. You've got a fork in this hand and a knife in this hand. Roast beef, sir. Mashed potatoes, sir. And, you know, my first lesson, I used to wake up in the middle of the night going, mashed potatoes, sir. It was it was a traumatic thing. I even had to run in place in the shower. Well, somehow I came down to the I made it to 28 days and they said they called me before the board panel and said, Mr. Del, we found Erdogan. I remember Del. We're going to throw you in the brig because we found we're going to charge you a fraudulent enlistment. They found out about my record with the army. I got on my knees and I begged him. I said, you know, I got really bad problems. I got some medical problems. I was counting on this insurance. And I said I was counting on being here because I got really, really no place. To go and I'm going to die. And I cried and I begged and I prayed and they let me stay. And so they they sent me to Minot, North Dakota, on the job, on the job training. And because I had grown up in my dad's restaurant equipment business, I knew how to pipe things and I knew how I knew about burgers and pilots and everything to do with furnaces, stoves and anything gas fired. So they sent me on the job training to this place. Ninety first civil engineering. Well, the first day I was supposed to go to base orientation. There was a guy hanging around the barracks. We glued stripes on my shirt and I went to the NCO club. So I didn't learn about the base. And, you know, I got out. I stayed in there three months, three years, eight months and 12 days. And I somehow got out honorably, you know, and I came out. I started seeing a young lady that I'd known in high school. And it was a tragedy. We were both the last of three kids in both families. We both were spoiled rotten. We both were addicted to a lot of stuff in each other. And it just didn't work out after two years. Thank God we got divorced. But along the way, I'd gotten in the printing industry. And and I'd grown up a little bit and I started found a way to make some pretty decent money. But the deal is, I spent it all on booze. I tried the geography. I tried going to Dallas, Texas for five or six years. And it was really, really bad. I mean, I could go on and on and on about how drunk and how stupid. I can outstupid each and every one of you. And I'm going to tell you that. But, you know, I kept I would invariably when I got back to Atlanta, I would get drunk a lot. I blacked out every time I drank and I got thrown in jail every time I drank. And I was like three times a week, probably taken down. I had to bail myself out and then get to work the next day. I'd lose my car all over Buckhead. And I. I'd lose my car. And it was just a tragedy. I never had anything in my life to lose because I never accomplished anything in my life. And that's through about age thirty three. I went before would judge Woodrow Tucker in Fulton County for about thirty second time in seven year period. And he said, this is it. He goes, I'm going to send you to three meetings for three years. So, you know, my my sobriety date is May 31st, 1998. This was nine years previous to that. I went to AA and I went out here to this camp and they had this on the wall. Same straps and really meant a lot to me. And those guys took me under their wings and they loved me. And I I did the one I did the AA waltz, the one, two, three, one, two, three. And never fully did a good four step. I went right back out the door. But in that in that five years I was in AA, I'd met a girl two years before I got sober and we had a child and we weren't married. And I got sober and I finally realized maybe I needed to marry his mom and maybe I needed to try to make a home for him. And AA came fast for me. A lot of a lot of rapid changes as a result of doing the next right thing. Non-coincidental occurrences as a result of doing the next right thing. Nothing more than miracles of this program in God. And God prospered me in a big way. I became productive. I developed some some of the talent, God given talents. And, you know, I had a good life going there. But still, I didn't work. I didn't do a good four step. And I'll take you out every time I failed to enlarge my spiritual condition. I stopped praying. I stopped doing all the things that got me there. And at five years sober, I went back out and I didn't have a slip. I made a conscious choice to go drinking and I stayed out there for three years and I got really, really good and sick and all the all the things that God had given me in that time, the wife, the house, the I racked up some money in the bag. I had some I developed some discipline, financial disciplines, start taking care of myself, made a choice to go to church and my life increased. And when I went back out, I lost my mind. I was divorced. I'd lost. I could see my son every other Saturday. One hour supervised. I owed a lot of money to the IRS. I had a lot of deep in debt to live way above my means. Somewhere for about three years. And it got really, really bad. And the marriage that I had for about 12 years to that, you know, actually, it was nine. Seven years to that woman. It went south and we got divorced and wrecked my kid's life and lost my mind. And I came back into AA. I went to the Gwinnett room and I walked in there and took my seat. My butt was whipped. And the thing about it, I've never gotten a DUI. I wish I had. I wish I'd been caught sooner. I wish I'd been handed consequences sooner. I might have. I found out something about what was wrong with me. I just didn't know what was wrong with me. Well, it's kind of neat because there's a lot of people there. I got I got a good sponsor. I got a guy that was with me in the first meeting I was ever in that first time. He and I had formed a bond and he agreed to sponsor me. I remember my first year of my first shift. He says, damn, I had to get a new phone plan this year because of you. But the guy I got him, I got into a place where Gary was talking about this long term sobriety. There was that fellow and there was a lady, Margie. She had been friends with Lois and she just had a lot of a lot of sobriety. And I went around. I learned to hang out with people with love sobriety. I learned to go to literature studies. I learned I went my first year. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do and nothing to be. I was insane. Three meetings a day for my first year. Two meetings a day for my second year. I immersed myself in this program. I had a guy walk up to me and go, you know, if you don't have a home group, you're just hanging around. You need to get in the home group. And so he made me do the same guy. I learned a thing where the person that says the thing I can relate to the most. I went and I got to know that person in every meeting. The person who was hurting the most. I went to that person and tried to maybe encourage them some way. And, you know, I found this program. And they showed me I'm no further away from a drink than any of you. I'm not going to get any of you sober. Hopefully I don't get any of you drunk. And and the news is. All those things that were in these books, I got to see this. How about these are props? This is how hard it was for me to get some. I wore out a couple of books and I used them. I got some sober books, you know, and I had a guy tell me. You know, you know anything about English, you know anything about our language. You need to get a couple of dictionaries and every one of these words that he's italicized and every word you don't understand in this literature. You go in there, look it up, you know, and I've done that. I still do it. I still do it. I come to meetings today is to find out what happens to people who don't have meetings. But we have a close knit home group. And I was in that home group for 17 years and somebody volunteered about me. I'm not a giver, but somebody raised my hand to. PICPC and about the time I figured that out, I rotated out. So then they nudged me into treasurer and I'm watching their money now. But I learned about food and reserve and I learned how to take care of my money and I developed financial discipline doing that. But in doing that, I got to be GSR and I got to go see how it works. So I saw a guy named Lowell is pretty good. He's been sober a long, long time. And. He's an old hippie that retired from 30 some odd years of General Motors. He got he was sitting up there on the very front of the room. It's a state assembly with a three piece suit inherited here. And but he was conducting the business of AA. And there were just a lot of different people who told me they had come from a lot of different walks of life, but they owed a lot to this program for the life that they've been granted. And for me, it was way out of my reach. And I couldn't get past that, too, because I didn't think I'd ever been saying or could ever be saying it again, you know, and it's interesting because I didn't think I would ever have any spiritual principles. And maybe some days I'm not. Some people say nice things and I fail to believe it. I think, you know, the thing about us, the egomaniacs with inferiority complex, there's a lot there's a lot to that, you know, and it takes a long time for this program to work. It did, at least for me, because I found out it was belligerent. I was in denial and going through these steps and letting this process work for me. All those things that I denied about myself as soon as I was able to share them with all with you all, confess them to my higher power and then take some action against them. I wasn't able to get rid of any of them. It took me a while to see that part where it said humbly ask God to remove them. And it took me a lot of years to do that. You know, and most of mine, because I am defiant, most of those things he delivered me from and I just know they want to get any mileage out of it and I just don't do it as much anymore. But it's kind of interesting in this program. I've grown up in AA. I've been thinking about the last couple of days, not thinking of what I might say here to help anybody, but I'm thinking about the men and women who helped me get sober. And I've had a few of them. I die drunk, but I've had a great number of them die sober. Some of them say things like the heck with cancer. I'm dying sober. And there's been about three this year. And I go and I go to their celebration of their life. There's not a tear in the room and there's a lot of joy involved. And I look and I think about those guys and I go, they left a legacy of love. And I'm not so sure I'm going to be doing that yet. So I need to get busy. And I found that, you know, for me, I found I can't stay busy. I can't stay sober on yesterday's work. I've had some things that happened to me with my health and over the last couple of years. And I wasn't as busy as I'd like to stay. And I had this new rejuvenation. But I'm going to tell you, I'm not the world opened up to me when I was able to make the amends and get me out from under the guilt and the remorse. And the guy, some guys told me guilt's just a big waste of time. It's just another effort for you to try to gain recognition. Everything that I ever did, I volunteered for. I used to think it was a dog-eat-dog world and everybody was out to get me. And this program showed me it's a very spiritual place if I choose to participate. So, you know, somewhere in there, you know, we're people of extremes. That's a... I just wanted to be normal. But that's the place I pass through as I go from one extreme to the other. And so I came in here. I had betrayed my wife. I had a girlfriend half my age and I owed a lot of money. And I was just a real buffoon. And this program changed a lot of things about me. And, you know, I found a pathway to freedom. And we agnostic. It's important in this literature that we look at the italicized places. We look for capitalizations that come out of nowhere in the middle of the census and, you know, over the years, the things I never thought I could ever comprehend. Whenever I would get in fear and even now, today, when I get in fear, a lady showed me this prayer was give me peace, show me the truth and direct my thinking. And the minute I do that, you know, these defects of character, he uses in the literature, he calls them sins, if you will, in this time. And so doubt really is a big waste of time. It's a big defect. I can't subscribe to this program. I doubt it at the same time. I've got to I've got to trust the process and I've got to walk through it. And I'm going to tell you that, you know, there's only a few things I need to know. That I'm an alcoholic, you know, and it's important that I reach a bottom. It's important that all those yes, you eventually, too, can occur for me. I have a failure to form a bond with another human being. I did that with my sponsor and he showed me how to love myself. And I duplicated that with others. You know, and he told me to pay for it. He said he wasn't going to leave me anywhere and he didn't want me to follow him. He was willing to walk beside me as we took this convoluted mess and made something out of it. And this happened for me. I'm a problem authority. I don't like to be told what to do before I came to this program. Now, it's really weird. It comes out of my mouth a lot of times, like in the bank in different places. The rules are here to protect me. Where the hell did that come from? And it's true. You know, I've got to subordinate myself to a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with. And I've got this program has given me a lot of freedom now. You know, I'm not I'm not mad. I'm not afraid. I've got no one, maybe a couple of people. Sure. I'm very difficult. I've learned this. I'm very difficult to be around, you know, probably get away from the podium. We got to go home tonight. But, you know, it's interesting because that thing I had a problem with is relationships, business and platonic and with females. And when I, you know, I decided not to date, I ended up getting custody of my son. I ended up getting him through high school and the same lady that told me that prayer about showing me the truth, facts, truth, reality work. My perceptions don't work. She also says it's important that you want what you have. And I want what I have these days. I, I went out and I learned to love myself. I learned to relate to God. I became the kind of person I'd like to be around. I started saying any of my prayers with that be pleasing to you instead of firing off these prayers, hoping I would hit something, I found out that God's listening to you all as well as me. And I need to make it fast and not waste his time. I put a lot of pleases and a lot of thank yous in between all those guineas. And I don't waste his time. I try to pray. I used to pray for things that weren't good for me. I pray for things that he approves of these days. And I got a lot, you know, I got a lot in my life. It's important that I keep a job in a home group. It's important that I honor those meetings that I go to. It's important that I pick up some more meetings because when I go there, I find some newcomers, they teach me what I need to know. And I can participate in their lives while they construct and reach God's potential for them. So, you know, it's interesting because I say, God, help me to recognize and receive that one you have for me. And this woman that I never even thought before, I walked up to her at the coffee pot and said, you know, you've always been attractive to me. The most attractive thing is the way you light up when you speak about the grace of your higher power. I said, that really is exciting. Would you like to go to a movie with me? And so I said, drive your car. You don't know me. You don't need to need to ride with me, OK? Maybe stay the hell away from me. Maybe say no. Well, we went to the show and we had a nice time and we dated in groups and we made sure. I'm going to listen to rock and roll. I went and I went to listen to Christian spiritual Christmas music and barbershop quartets and gospel bluegrass and just stuff that wasn't me. And there was not going to be any Johnny Rotten or any of that. And it's interesting because, you know, I got to where I was doubting myself. And I said a prayer, God, help me to develop my talents. And there were so many things I thought I was good at for so many years that I really wasn't. And I'm feeling bad about that. Like the coyote on Roadrunner, you know, I'm always smoldering in my life. I thought, you know, I finally there's only a few things that I'm good at. If I can offer that there there's a point in my life where not only going to literature studies every week and I still do. It's important to do that because now I open these books and they really mean spiritual things to me and they're part of my life. And the word Bill uses is deportment. My entire deportments changed the way I present myself. You know, I've learned from some smart people. Keep my expectations beneath my gratitude, keep the gratitude above my expectations. And that's what I try to do on a regular basis. Sometimes I still I'm not perfect. We won't be walking on water and I won't be inviting you to ride my shoulders. But, you know, I've got a really good life these days and I have a lot of freedom. And there's only one thing I have left to say is this. And it's really, really neat. It's a good, good topic for discussion. Space 75 in the in the 12 and 12. It is this step seven. Then we looked and listened everywhere. We saw failure and misery transformed by humility into priceless assets. We heard story after story of how humility had brought strength out of weakness. In every case, pain had been the price of admission to a new life. But this admission price had purchased much more than we expected about a measure of humility, which we soon discovered to be a healer of pain. We began to fear pain less and desire humility more than ever. During this process of learning more about humility, the most profound result of all was the change in our attitude toward God. And this was true whether we had been believers or unbelievers. We then began to get over the idea that the higher power capitalized. Our power was a sort of. We should leave pinch hitter to be called upon only in an emergency. The notion that we would still live our own lives. God helped a little now and then begin to evaporate. Many of us who had thought ourselves religious awoke to the limitations of this attitude, refusing to place God first. We had deprived ourselves of his help. But now the words of myself, I am nothing. The father doeth the works begin to carry bright promise and meaning. We saw we need and always mean God. Forced feeding of humble fire. We saw we didn't always be bludgeoned and beaten into humility. It could come quite as much from our voluntary reaching for it as could from unremitting suffering, a great turning point in our lives. Again, when we saw humility as something we really wanted rather than as something we must have. That's the talisman. It marked the time when we could commence to see the full implication of step seven. Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings. It's interesting. I don't have to make demands of God. I don't have to demand comfort from y'all anymore. You know, this program is loud to me that I'm the sum total of my efforts and I got to stay busy because my disease is still busy. I spoke a little bit long and I made a little bit of sense. But thanks. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much, Steve. It was a pleasure to hear those remarks. Actually, Tim, you're our pinch shooter emergency chip. Place. Because we forgot to ask anybody. But you're somebody. I'm Tim. I'm an alcoholic. Thanks to you. That was terrific. And run through them one time. White chip. If you're coming in or coming back and you don't want to drink today. It's a day chip. Anybody need a white chip? I need a white chip. Silver chip for 30 days. Red chip for 60 day chip gold. Red chip for 90 days. Yellow. Red chip for six months. The green chip for nine months and a blue chip for one year or any multiples thereof. Anybody want a blue chip? Silver alcohol. Amen. I've stayed sober for a year. I haven't had relapses. I'm working to get better. I don't always understand what's happening, but I'm trying to understand it. Thank you. Anybody else got a birthday? All right. Any reconsiderations on the white chip? Congratulations on the chip. Thank you one and all for joining the Blue Strip speakers meeting tonight. City of LA. You've reached the end of the show. Go for a drink. That's not the end of the show. It's the end of the show. We got a blue chip. Four. We got a. Two. One. One. Two. Three.