I Thought Being Told I Was Too Intelligent for AA Was a Compliment – Don M.

Good morning, everybody. My name's Don Major, and I'm an alcoholic. And I am really grateful to be here this morning, and I'm so grateful that you guys are here. I have absolutely nothing to say that I would get up this early to hear. But it's a joy to be here, and I don't think I've ever been at a conference when there were so many people that I love so much that were on the docket here. And last night, everybody was great. John, with that history, was super. And, of course, Joe and Polly just knocked it out of the park. And now I've got to follow that up, but we'll see what comes out. And I'll thank the committee, mainly Jimmy and Mary Beth. They've just been great. Thank you. And I really appreciated the gift and the box of fruit that was in my room, so thank you so much. Well, I'm supposed to talk on the third step, and I'll give it a real try. I'm not doing that, but before I talk on anything, there's something I need, and what that is is divine intervention. I need divine intervention first to get me out of the way. I used to stand up to give a talk and say, if I can get me out of the way, I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that. If I could get me out of the way, I wouldn't need AA. I wouldn't need any of this. I would have been in Louisville, Kentucky today instead of New Jersey. And by the grace of God, it's a Friday day, it's April the 9th of 1981, and I'm not one hair more able to get myself out of the way today than I was in 1981. I truly have to have divine intervention. Now, if some of you folks are maybe new and offended by some old fool being up here babbling about divine intervention, I not only understand you in my old seat, and I have a suggestion. I will probably talk a little bit about divine intervention this morning. If you will substitute in your mind the magic from the steps for divine intervention, it will get you to exactly the same place, and it won't offend your sensitive intellect so terribly. At a place I really need divine intervention is following directions. There's a little fella inside me, and he and I are the world's greatest experts on everything. Whether we know anything about it or not is totally beside the point. Again, And we're not only so well-informed with information, we have a great understanding, a sophistication of how the world really works. This little guy and I know who always is in charge of making the directions. It's square johns, just absolute square johns, and they're usually being advised by insurance lawyers who are worse than they are. And then the target audience of the direction is always stone morons. So in a special case like mine, and for you new folks, that is a joke, the special case. But in a special case like mine, it's always been sort of necessary, I suppose, to extrapolate to figure out what the directions really mean, because they obviously don't mean what they say. And I assure you, if I haven't done the work I need to do today to get my devand intervention, and if I've learned anything out of 32 years or so around here, I have learned that I don't get a whole lot. I don't get a whole lot of divine intervention on Saturday based on what I did on Friday. And if I haven't done what I need to do to get my magic from the steps or my divine intervention, I assure you that if I see or hear some directions that say something like, do not exceed 6 in 24 hours, my brain will actually hear that as do not exceed 36 in 24 hours. So I'm going to try to follow the directions by staying close to the third step or at least a little bit closer to the third step. And he's coming back to it and bouncing around. I think I'll start out by telling you my first reaction. And I was really ready for it when I first am aware of having heard the third step. I was in an asylum, and I don't use that word to be funny or cute. Bill Wilson uses that word, and my mother used that word. Down in the farming area, the back of the farming area of western Kentucky where I grew up, in the 1950s, people didn't have substance abuse problems and go to treatment. Nor did they have mental illnesses or problems and go to the hospital. They went crazy and got put in the asylum. And that's a whole lot more descriptive of what happened to me 18 times in two and a half years. But the first one, by the time I got there from a car wreck I'd had a year before that time, I still had braces on both legs. I had a super pubic catheter in my belly carrying my urine out to a bag, and it was on crutches. And the phenomenon of craving that was talked about so beautifully last night, the phenomenon of craving had progressed in me to the point where I just physically had lost the ability to stop myself from drinking once I started it. Something had to intervene and press me loose from alcohol. And when something did that, it took three or four days for me to be physically able to do something. Something like sit up in a chair. Well, they got me through the three or four days in that asylum, treatment center, psychiatric hospital, whatever you want to call it. And I've covered all the bases on those in my career, by the way. But after those three or four days, they set me up in a chair and decided to have an AA meeting. And somebody got up and read the steps or how it works, but I know they got to step three. And there I was in this terrible condition from what alcohol and drugs had done to me. And sure enough, when this person read the third step, I got up on my crutches and straightened up my catheter bag and said as loud as I could, do you mean to tell me there are people in this world who believe such crap? And then I proceeded to hobble on to a pay over to a pay phone and call somebody to get me away from the religious fanatics before they polluted my pristine intellect. So as you can see, I came to the third step very easily and smoothly. And I'll try to bring us up to the third step in my life. And the first thing wrong with me is that I've got an ego disorder. The book says that it's self-centeredness that's the root of our troubles. And to me, that means that I've had this ego disorder all my life. And that ego disorder has always made me so obsessed with myself, so obsessed with how I believe I stack up against others. So obsessed with how I feel that for years I have been confident that the bedrock of my alcoholism, the absolute base of it, is this one sentence. Without divine intervention, I will always wind up letting how I feel be the most important thing in the universe to me. Now, without divine intervention, I can give some lip service to something being more important than how I feel. And I might be able to. I might act for just a little while like something's more important. But if I haven't done the work I need to do to get to divine intervention, that's a smokescreen. When the chips get down, I'm going to revert to my default position. And my default position is to let how I feel be the most important thing in this universe. What was really going on the first 12 or 13 years of my life was a totally self-absorbed kid trying to run fast enough not to get swallowed up by the end. And the emptiness and the pain in my own insides that was caused by all that obsession with myself. Now, that's not what I thought my early childhood and early life were. When I got sober, and I was 37 when I got sober, and unfortunately, that means that if I live to next month, I'll be 70. But at any rate, I just lost my train of thought, so we'll go on another route here. But anyway... Oh, yeah, yeah. I would have passed any lie detector test on earth up until the time I got sober when I told you the terribly interesting and romantic saga of my early struggles and subsequent rise to power. And I am so capable of self-delusion that I would have you and me both crying before I was halfway done telling it. And I wasn't sober a week when I realized that really was a bunch of crap. We weren't even poor. We weren't anywhere close to poor. We were middle-class farming people that had everything we needed and most of the things we wanted. And those staggering heights I reached turned out to be a lot more staggering than there were high. Man, alcoholism is a many-splendored thing. I'll be discovering new parts of it every day of my life, I think, as long as I live. And one thing it is is something that my high school English teacher would probably have called a disease of superlatives. And what that means is that without divine intervention, I won't think in terms of things like good or bad. And ordinary won't ever cross my mind. I'll go directly to the extremes of everything, best, worst. The truth is, both drunk and sober, I'm afraid that I've always been a whole lot more ordinary than my ego has ever been comfortable with. But that's the mess that I brought to my first drunk. And I was 12 or 13 when I got drunk the first time. And that first night, I got in an awful lot of trouble, and I puked, and I blacked out, and I passed out. And I woke up the next morning and had a terrible hangover. And to swirl those Baptists around there were right, and that I would never, ever do that again. And not only was I sincere, it was actually fairly effective because it was nearly a week until I got drunk the second time. And the way things were going to go for the next 25 years, that was a near miracle. And I got drunk that second. And I got drunk the second time for the exact same reason that I got drunk the other few thousand times that I got drunk. When I got enough of that booze in me, for the first time in my life, I'd found something that did enough about that pain and that emptiness, that that ego disorder and that obsession on myself had always caused. For the first time in my life, it made me okay with people and things. See, without divine intervention, I can't be on your level. I'm an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. I'm capable of feeling too good for you and above you at the same instant that I feel like I'm dirt beneath your feet. I've always known that I could do anything. At the same time, I've always known that I couldn't really do anything. But when I finally got enough of that booze in me, there was a peace inside me, and I was okay with everything and everybody. For the first time in my life, I felt good enough inside that I could stand the way I felt without either running or trying to stuff anything. Now, since the way I feel is the most important thing in the universe to me, without divine intervention, I don't believe there's any mystery to my powerlessness over alcohol and the things like it. In fact, I think it's a no-brainer. I don't think it could have been any other way, because I didn't know that there was anything else to make me feel the way I needed to feel and the way I felt was the most important thing on earth. So the bottom line was pretty simple, really. It really didn't matter what it cost, and it didn't matter who it cost, because the way I feel is the most important thing in the world to me without divine intervention. I'm not going to tell you much about a drinking thing, because I'm not up here to tell my story, but I do want to lead us right up to step one, or step three. I hit the drinking thing early, and I hit it hard. By the time I was 15 or 16 years old, I was really in full-blown alcoholism. I was drunk. I was still able to hang on to things by my fingertips. In that world, the 1950s in rural Kentucky, in the 1950s in rural Kentucky, if you were cute enough and you were smart enough and you had the right last name, you could get away with murder, and I did. A kid that drank and acted the way I drank and acted in today's world would have a net thrown over him and be in the asylum before his 14th birthday. But I was still hanging on to things by my fingernails, and I wound up leaving the farm and going to Louisville, 200 miles from the farm as an early admissions student. I had an academic scholarship. My reaction to that was to say so drunk the first semester that I lost all concept of day and night. Just a matter of passing out and coming to. I lost my scholarship, wound up for seven and a half years working full-time, going to school full-time, drinking full-time, and somehow getting through undergraduate law school. And then I had 10 years of practicing law, and I've already kind of given you a hint about the end of that 10-year deal. That was that car wreck that robbed me of so many bodily functions temporarily and a couple permanently. It broke both legs, crushed both knees, lost part of the main artery in one lower leg. They had to do a bypass and use the vein in the upper leg to replace that artery. And it separated my pelvis and pulled my plumbing in two inside. So I didn't have a urinary effort to function, for over a year for that wreck. And the doctors told me early on that I'd never walk again without a brace on at least one leg, and that they were very sure we would not find a surgeon that would attempt to find the ends of my plumbing and put it together so I would never pee again. My reaction to that, you've already heard my reaction to the third step when I was in that shape. Before I got to that asylum and heard the third step, there was about a year there when I didn't go dead broke up because a little law firm had been there for a while. I was in the hospital. I built up around another guy and myself. And during that period of time, I would lay in the hospitals. And I'm talking about the physical hospitals from the wreck. And I would lay there and every single day my friends would bring me booze and more dope than the doctors were giving me. And I would lay in that bed and say really intelligent things. I would say things like, you know, fellas, anybody can stop drinking when the going gets a little tough. But it takes a man to lay in there with you when the bills start. That's the way it was. I couldn't consider quitting because I didn't know there was anything else that made me feel the way I needed to feel. I described that singing in the asylum, that first asylum, when I left there because I was so intellectually offended by the third step. That may give you a hint that I had a wee bit of a problem with the second step. And it's hard for me to talk, would be hard for me to talk about the third step and me without talking about one. And two, because I believe with all my heart that they weren't called the steps by accident. They could have been called the 12 premises, the 12 propositions, the 12 tenets. But they were called the 12 steps because in a conventional staircase, step two actually uses step one as a base. You really can't have a step two without a step one and so on. So I believe that steps one through nine are all built on top of one another. And I obviously, you had a hard time with that first one. I knew that I was an alcoholic intellectually by the time I was in my mid-teens. So for that reason, I don't think that a verbal or intellectual admission of alcoholism is necessarily much toward hitting bottom. Because even though I admitted that, the near fatal mistake I made was that I thought I could live with it. I was partly ashamed of it. And I was partly proud. You know, I knew about Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill and Alexander the Great and Hank Williams and all the great alcoholics in history. And I knew I was their brother, you know, under the skin. Soul was too big for my body. I was just wounded by my own understanding, I'll have you know. But what I didn't, I thought I could outrun it. I thought I could outsmart it. I thought I could bribe it. And it turned out that I wasn't going to be, the only exception in the history of the universe. That everybody that's ever had this thing called alcoholism, in one form or the other, we die from it or we recover from it. And I just thought it was going to be inconvenient, don't you see? But when I finally did reach the conclusions in step one, and the main one for me was that there was no human help. That there was absolutely no human help. And I exhausted them all. I was 18 times in some kind of, institution in a two-and-a-half-year period. So I certainly exhausted medicine. I didn't have anything to do with the clergy. So I wasn't in a position to exhaust the clergy. I certainly had worn out my family. And by the time the fall of 1980 rolled around, I was actually homeless. I didn't have an address. I didn't have any home. I didn't have a car. I didn't have any clothes. My teeth were rotting out of my mouth. I didn't have any clothes. My teeth were rotting out of my mouth. My teeth were rotting out of my mouth. My head, the state of Kentucky had jerked my law license sometime before that. And I washed up on asylum number 17. I'm skipping 15. I've been there for you. And that was in Nashville, Tennessee. And the fellow that was in charge of the finances at that place, Harold Gilliland, Scott. Harold's been dead a while. But Harold told me later that he only let me in because he didn't think I'd live another week if he left me on the street. I stayed in there a month, had no place to go. It was time to boot me out. And my roommate was a real young fellow in there. And his family lived in Nashville. And those sweet folks took pity on me and said, Don, why don't you come stay with us a few days and let's try to figure out what to do with you. Well, I went and lived with them a year. And the first six months, I didn't stay straight, but it got better. I went to a world of meetings in that six months between the fall of 80 and getting sober in the spring of 81. Most of them were at a clubhouse there in Nashville called the 202 Club. I got to where I could go two or three weeks without getting ripped. And that was a world record for me. And they only put me back in the asylum one time in that whole six-month period. And the rate I had been going, twice a year in the asylum, looked like the picture of mental health. I had settled for it in a heartbeat. Late March of 81, I got on my most recent drunk. And it was another one of my pop-off vodka, slash Listerine drunks. And truly, I have drunk a barrel of both those things. And I have better memories of the Listerine than I do of that old hot pop-off. I can stand to smell Listerine today. But at any rate, and of course, I was taking as well as drinking anything I could get my hands on. April 8 of 81 was the most recent day I drank. April 9, I count as my sobriety day. And on April 8 of 81, something happened. A loving God that I didn't know was there, gave me a beautiful gift that I didn't know I had. To my knowledge, my mind hadn't changed about a thing. I was still too intelligent, and my problem was still too complex and unique for this silly little program to handle it. I was still so bad that I could never get it any way. And if I did, it would just be to get blown into by a sawed-off shotgun, or at best, then the rest of my life in the penitentiary. All those things were still beating, beating, beating right there. I went back to that clubhouse after that last drunk, and they should not have let me in, but they did. They had warned the people they sponsored to stay away from me. I had passed out in their meetings and had to be bodily carried out. They had caught me with controlled substances in the men's room. About two months before I got sober, I was walking through there, and a great big tall boy by the name of Joe Wall, who's been dead longer than Harold, I think. Joe walked up and looked down at me and said, Don, I'm beginning to think that you really are too intelligent for this program. And I thought he was giving me a compliment. Hand to God, I did. My knee-jerk reaction was, well, thank goodness they have finally figured out who they're dealing with here. But gratefully, he went on. And he said, and that's a shame, Don, because we have never had anybody too dumb for this deal, and we bury you buttholes all time. And that felt like an icy hand closing over something inside me. And it was still there two months later when I stumbled back to that door. And I stumbled in and said, will y'all tell me what I need to do if I want to live? And they said, oh, yeah, don't drink, don't take, don't go to meetings. And the first 60 days, I went to over 150 meetings. To the best of my recollection, I did not want to go to a single one of them. It was still clear to me that you all were religious fanatics. My brain was still telling me that we needed to get our head out of the sand. And get our butt back to Louisville. Get some money, a law license, good looking woman, big car, be something, for heaven's sake. But I'd been given the beautiful gift that I didn't know I had, the first tiny little bit of teachability or humility I'd ever had in my life. I was able to turn around in my brain and say, yeah, I know, partner, but you and I have nearly killed one another. And we don't have anything left to do but go to these dumb old meetings, even though they can't possibly work for us. And the sunshine, the great news, is that I had the same thing backwards about that. That without divine intervention, I have always had and will always have different. And that is that I make it all about whatever it is. I make it all about what I think, feel, and believe. And without divine intervention, it does not occur to me to go ahead and do the right thing if I don't want to. The only thing that occurs to me is, is to enlist everybody in every process that I can to try to help me feel like doing right so I can do right. And I assure you, it's not easy with me. But it's kind of like the unmade bed. If I don't feel like making up my bed, but it's really, really bothering me, I can talk to my sponsor and call Bob, Joe, Tammy, everybody, Scott, talk to them about, I don't feel like making the bed. What are we going to do here? I can do some inventories on that and maybe get some outside counseling on why I don't feel like making the bed. But the fact is that I won't get any peace or comfort whatsoever until I make up a stupid bed. And I really just hate that. That's more maturity than I can nearly stand. But at any rate, I thought for AA to work, I had to believe that it would work. I thought it had to feel like it. Like it was working. I think I probably thought I had to be able to see the causal relationship of A causing B. Turned out that had nothing to do with it. All I needed to do was drag my raggedy butt to meeting after meeting and let my old sick brain and soul get dragged in there kicking and screaming behind that raggedy butt. So they took me under their wing at the 202 club there and I had asked Cherry Carpenter to be my sponsor. Cherry was my first real sponsor. And he was a sponsor the rest of his life which was about eight or nine years. When I asked Cherry to be my sponsor, I didn't like Cherry. And Cherry didn't like me. I'd been going to meetings there in Nashville with him and not staying sober for six months. I really don't remember what it was that motivated me to ask him to be my sponsor. But I did. And Cherry Carpenter is the second most important man in my life. We could say. I gave a second to my father. And with that, I never rode in a car with Cherry one time. I never shared a meal with Cherry one time. Cherry never called me except to return my telephone calls. But he was always there when I reached out. And he was the greatest that I know of at what I think is 99% of sponsorship. Cherry was a guide through the 12 steps. Cherry would share his experience, strength, and hope with those steps any time that I would reach out for him. He explained to me the difference between the program and the fellowship. He explained that I can go to all the meetings I want to, and if I've got a desire to stop drinking, I'm in the fellowship of AA, card-carrying, good standing, no other requirement whatsoever. But if I'm not somewhere in the process of doing steps one through nine in order to reach a state of recovery, or having done that, I'm living on 10, 11, and 12 every day of my life by doing the action that is involved in maintaining my spiritual condition, if I'm not doing that, I may be a member of the fellowship, but I'm not in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because nothing is called a program in that first 164 pages except the 12 steps. And those guys explained to me that those steps are the prescription for alcoholism. Those steps are the prescription for alcoholism. They explained that they work on alcoholism much like penicillin works on an infection. They explained that if I've got an infection that's going to kill me if it's not treated, but will respond to penicillin, I don't need to know the origin, width, breadth, and nature of my infection. And I don't need to aggravate all the people around me in the medical profession whining about that crap. I don't need to understand a single thing about how penicillin works in the human body. I don't even need to... I don't even believe that that little bottle of pills can take care of all those terrible things wrong with wonderful me. And here's the real kicker. I don't need to want to take the pills. It's irrelevant whether I want to take the pills. If I've got the infection and I take them as directed, I'll get just fine. And I was told that if I would approach the 12 steps exactly that way, I would be fine. And by the grace of God, I have lived in being just really blessed. And watching dozens, hundreds of other folks be really blessed in sobriety by that same approach. But I had to start acting as if when I got sober in April of 1981, and I didn't know why I was doing that. I was embarrassed getting on my knees and praying, even though I was by myself. It was just total acting as if. But finally, since I was getting on my knees every morning and every night, and I was going to AA meetings, OTAs, the miracle of the second step began to happen. I began to come to believe. It had started out with me doing what Bill describes in the 12 and 12. It doesn't talk about it in the big book. But in the 12 and 12, Bill talks about folks like me. If I had waited until I intellectually believed that there was a power greater than me out there somewhere that had enough interest in me that that power would clean up the mess that I had admitted I was in, when I did step one, if I had waited on that, I'd have been in a pauper's grave for over 32 years. It was sufficient when I became willing to act like a person would act if they did believe that a power greater than themselves could restore them to sanity. And, of course, it wasn't long because I did, in fact, start coming to believe. In fact, I thought I was getting rather spiritually erudite. And I finally got us to the third step. So I was contemplating my third step. And there was going to be a great deal of complexity and even pomp and ceremony with this deal. And I was thinking how it would play out with the movie rights and everything of turning my will in life over to the power to God. And I would mention my intellectual groundwork that I was laying to Cherry. And Cherry would say, Don, if you're sitting in a discussion meeting or anywhere, and you hear somebody say that they don't know whether or not they've done the third step, I said, Don't worry about it. They haven't done it. Because steps one and two are reaching conclusions. But step three is the beginning of the action steps. And Cherry said, You have either gone in a room with an understanding person, gotten on your knees and said the third step prayer, and intended for that to be the watershed moment when, number one, you committed to work the rest of the steps, and, number two, You committed that when what you know in your heart, that little spark of the divine that's in all of us, what you know in your heart is the right thing to do, the next stitch to take, is in conflict with what your brain wants to do, you're concluding that you're going to try really hard to follow the spark of the divine instead of sitting back and trying to figure out the pattern and instead of being intimidated by your fears and so on. So he said it was that simple, and I still didn't get that. I thought the third step was something like God and me going in a big ornate room which I had pictured as sort of a federal courtroom on steroids. And I had this idea that God would roll out the tapestry of my life, past, present, and future, and God and I would walk up and down it, and have some discussion. I really thought I'd mention a few things, and God would say, Gee, that's good, Don. I didn't think that. We'll do it that way. And then when I got done with that, I would have God's will mapped out. I could go on spiritual cruise control. Oh, I could make policy. I would always know what I do in situations. Uh-uh. Cherry tried and tried to explain to me that the only glimpse of God's will that I will ever get, ever, ever, is in the Holy Spirit. Is in the absolute right now. And he made it clear that that didn't mean five seconds from now. You see, we all assume that it will be God's will for the next five seconds for us to be in here with me going on, and you all wondering why you got up so early. But the truth is, in the next five seconds, any one of us could have a seizure or a heart attack. The electricity could go off. The sprinkler system could come on. A fire alarm could go off. Uh, police could come in here looking for one of us that hadn't completed their amends. Uh, uh, uh, well, a drunk could stumble in, raising sand and disrupting everything. So you see, what I am convinced God's will will be five seconds from now may be completely and totally changed, and yet I want to worry about God's will for next Tuesday and ten years from now. And Cherry explained to me that the patterns of my life are not, not my business and that I am less capable of understanding the patterns of my life than a chimpanzee is of mastering quantum physics. That's when he explained about the spark of the divine that's in all of us, that knows only where to take that next stitch. Well, he also made it clear to me that third step is not designed to and does not turn a single thing over to God, but it's merely a decision. It's merely a decision to, to begin that way. And by the way, on decision, and this is directly stolen, stolen from Scott, who you all will hear from later in the weekend, but, uh, I used to think that when I formed an intention, I had made a decision. If I formed an intention, I would tell you, yeah, I've made a decision to do this and so. And I would believe I'd made a decision, but I have learned a great truth. I've learned that I don't make decisions with my brain. I just think I do. I make decisions with my feet. And it's so helpful to me not to name an intention a decision until it has graduated to an intention by me taking action on it. So Cherry explained that it was only a decision, not forming an intention. It was more than that. But it was a decision to try to turn, to turn my will in life over to God. And he explained that if I would do those simple things, listen to the spark, for the spark of the divine, and quit trying to figure out the pattern, that God would make my life what God would have it be. Um, he spent a long time talking to me about a very short paragraph, and I'm going to spend a while talking to you guys about it. It's the bottom paragraph on page 62. And it's one of my very favorite paragraphs in the book, in the, in the big book. Uh, and I believe it saved my life, and I believe that, that the wonderful life that I enjoy today in sobriety is rooted very much in that little bitty paragraph. Um, Bill has just spent, when we get to that bottom of page 62, he's just spent two and a half pages telling us that self in all of its form is going to kill us. One time I counted them, and there's more than 20 references of some form of the word self, in that two and a half pages leading up to that. And Bill does two things that he does throughout the book, sort of literary devices or what have you. He sets us up by telling us basically, hey, you know, you may have great, uh, great philosophies and moral values and that sort of thing galore, but you're not going to be able to do much, if anything, about this thing. And he really lays it out that this self, this obsession with ourself, is flat going to put us in a physical grave. And then after he's convinced us that we're going to be killed by self self-centeredness, and we can't do anything about it, he waves a flag at us and says, but wait a minute, here's what we did. And that's where he says, here's the how and why of it. And he tells us exactly what they did to accomplish, put the third step into action in their lives. And Bill, the next, the next device that Bill uses in the little paragraph, is, is he tells us four times, in different words, the exact same idea. The first time he says, you've got to quit playing. We had to quit playing God. It didn't work. Well, that meant that I had to quit trying to figure out the patterns and listen to that little spark of the divine and pay attention to the stitching. And like a child doing a follow the dots picture that doesn't know what the picture is going to be. But if the child will draw a line as directed from here, to here, to here, the picture will emerge. So he tells us that. Then he says, in this drama of life, God is going to be our director. Now, if I were going to be in a play, the director would give me a script. And that script would tell me what my character was supposed to say and very much of what my character was supposed to do on stage. Well, if I look at that script and say, that's not right. If I do this, the whole play is going to stink and my character will really look bad. I'm not going to do this. I'm going to ad lib and do it my way. I will have chaos until I do it the way the director says do it for the simplest reason on earth. The director has the power and I don't. And then Bill tells us one more time. He says we're going to let God be the principal. We're going to be the agent. Employ your employee. Guy drops me, puts me in his pickup truck, drives me out to a job site early in the morning, drops me off and says, Don, I need three holes dug across that line. I need them to be two feet apart. I need them to be 18 inches in diameter and I need them to be a foot and a half deep. And I'll pick you up at lunch. So the guy drives off and I get to looking at it. They don't belong over there. Too rocky anyway. They belong over here. And they don't need to be the size the man said. They need to be this size, that size. When that guy comes back at lunch, I'm going to have chaos. And I will continue to have chaos until I dig the holes the way the guy said dig them because of that simple reason at the base of the universe. The boss has got the power and I don't. And just in case we haven't got it yet, he tells us that we're going to let God be the parent and we're going to be the child. All this in that tiny paragraph. And if the kid is not going to eat the spinach, if the parent is firm, and I have found my heavenly parent to be capable of remarkable firmness, the kid will eat the spinach or the kid will have chaos until he eats the spinach for the simplest reason at the earth. And then the last paragraph on that 62, not last paragraph, the last sentence, in that small paragraph. So easy to overlook. It says, most good ideas are simple. And this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we pass to freedom. This thing is the keystone. I had to look that up in the dictionary years ago. In masonry, it's like tongue and groove stones that at the very top of an arch, they slide together. And that gives the arch the physical integrity so that it holds together. So Bill has told me four different times in one small paragraph that if I'm to walk to freedom, it's going to have to be by following that simple idea. And, of course, the script, the boss's order, the parent's will, the equivalent of that, of course, is the spark of the divine in us. And when I don't obey that, I have chaos. And I'm going to continue to have chaos until I go back and say, oops, mom, dad, I did it again. Let me start over. Now, let me say something about starting over. My entire sobriety, up to and including today, I stumble a few steps in the right direction. I forget for a little while that I ever did a third step or a seventh step. I forget that there's any such thing as an eleventh step to live on. And I get knocked in the dust by self-will. And I have to get up and say, oops, mom, dad, I'm sorry, I fouled up again, and stumble another couple steps in the right direction. And I thought that every time I fell and got up, that it was an interruption of my spiritual growth. But I found out that that process of stumbling, falling, and getting up is the only spiritual growth of which I'm capable. And apparently, my God is pretty doggone pleased with it. It seems to work fine. My God doesn't require perfection. My God doesn't even really require consistency. My God's tickled to death with my perseverance to just keep on stumbling. Immediately after that little paragraph on the bottom of 62 are the third-step promises, and that's the top of 63. And, you know, we read the 8th verse. We read the 8th verse. We read the 8th verse. We read the 8th and 9th-step promises and say, here are the promises. And believe me, I don't get up on a soapbox and say, these are not the promises. These are just some promises. Apparently, somebody counted them one time and decided you could argue there are 12 of them. You could also argue there are 11, or you can argue that there are 13 of them. And believe me, I'm not dissing those promises at all. They're wonderful and they're beautiful, the 8th and 9th-step promises. But they, to me, are not the most beautiful in the book. Think about this. Bill has just told us that the whole key is us listening to the spark and taking that next little step and letting go of where it will take us. And then the very next words are, When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed. We had a new employer. Being all-powerful, he provided what we needed. We kept close to him and performed his work well. Established on such a footing, we became less and less interested in ourselves, interested in our little plans and designs. More and more, we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life. As we felt new power flow in, as we enjoyed peace of mind, as we discovered we could face life successfully, as we became conscious of God, his presence, we began to lose our fear of today, tomorrow, or the hereafter. We were reborn. I don't know how you get any stronger promises than that. And I love them. And by the way, as I was leaving, Oh! I did want to make a couple more comments. I talked about everything but step 3, I think. But... But... Cherry Carpenter explained to me that where Bill says in the paragraph after the third step prayer that if there's not an understanding person available, that it's better to meet God alone than to not meet God. Cherry explained that when that was written, it was written with the belief that that book would wind up in the hands of loads of people who had no contact with anybody else on this recovery path. So when the culture is in place, it existed or did not exist at that time, that made sense. That was sensible. But Cherry explained to me that we have hundreds of understanding people at our fingertips today. We have always got an understanding person. So that means since we have the understanding person, we go in a room with another person. And then the third step prayer, I believe we say that with the intention that it's that watershed moment. Now, Bill makes another comment in that paragraph after the third step prayer. He says that the wording, of course, is quite optional, as long as we express the main idea. Let's look at that a little bit. Bill, I think, was being diplomatic there. Because what would possess me to use the same brain that destroyed everything in my life to improve on the wording of the third step prayer? It sounds like nonsense. It sounds like frank insanity to me. So what it means is that I do indeed say the prayer in the words that is written in the book. And you know, in the third step prayer, we're getting an early hint of what's coming on. And what that is, is the prayer that says, ask God to take away our difficulties. Not so we can be sober and happy and spiritual, but so that victory over them can bear witness to God's love, power, and way of life. And that's the hint that's going to go all the way through that big book. Folks, I've got an illness that is self-centeredness. I cannot effectively treat it by obsessing on myself. And it doesn't make any difference how I dress self-obsession up. And believe me, I've got an entire wardrobe for self-obsession. I've got responsibility clothing. I've got psychological clothing. I've got spiritual clothing. I've got all sorts of things that I can dress up my self-obsession and call it something other than self-obsession. But when I try to use those things to help me with my alcoholism, it's like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. It simply does not work. And as I was leaving the room from having done my third step with Cherry Carpenter, as I was leaving the room, he said, Oh, by the way, Don, not all the promises in this book are positive. He said, There are a few negative promises in this book, and you are up against one right now. Because the book says, immediately after the third step, as it segues into the fourth step, it says that our third step is a vital and crucial decision, but it can have little lasting or permanent effect unless followed at once. By a fourth step. Cherry explained to me that if they had really meant unless followed when my group thought I was ready by a fourth step, that's what it would have said. If it meant that I'd do it when my sponsor thought I was ready, that's what it would have said. If it meant do it when I thought I could do it without getting drunk over it, that's what it could have said. But he said it didn't say any of those things. It says at once, and he said, What that means to you today is it won't be necessary for you to call me complaining about your third step evaporating if you have not started your fourth step, because that's precisely what the book is guaranteeing you will happen. But by that time I had caught on, and I was as willing as only the dying can be to grab hold of this thing. So sure enough, at once, eight months later, I started a fourth step. But I was working on it in my head. And Cherry would say the silliest thing over and over. He'd say, Don, you cannot start a fourth step without a pencil and paper and a big book open to page 64. I said, well, you don't understand, Cherry. I'm trying to get this straight. Don, you can't start it without a pencil and a piece of paper. And I found out he was right. All the rest of it was squirrel caging. And thank all of you for letting me be here with you on this great weekend. And now I get to relax and listen to my friends with some great stuff. Thank you, and God bless.