Maintaining the Spiritual Condition Through Daily Action – Don M.

Thank you, Jerry and Brian. Hi, everybody. My name is Don, and I'm an alcoholic. I'm very grateful to be with you folks tonight. I appreciate Jerry asking me and all of you allowing me to visit with you. My surprise dates April the 9th of 1981. My home group is the Calm Down Group here in Louisville, Kentucky, where I live. And I named it when a few of us started it 35 years ago because it meets on Wednesday. And by Wednesday, particularly at that time, I really needed to calm down. I've been and am so blessed by being able to sponsor people in Alcoholics Anonymous. It's been the backbone of my sobriety. I've said many times that I've been blessed and have really, really enjoyed getting to do some traveling to speak and things like that. But, you know, that's really nice, but it doesn't feed me. What feeds me is sitting with one alcoholic, eyeball to eyeball, and going through this program and applying it to our labs and seeing the light go on in the other person's eyes. That's what feeds me and I think that's what keeps me sober. I agree totally with the book that basically what it says, not in these words, but it says meetings and sponsors and prayer and the steps and everything are critical. They're absolutely indispensable, but they won't do as much to ensure our immunity from drink as intensive work with another alcoholic. That's the fail-safe. That's a go-to for us, and that's been the story of my sobriety in the last 39 years. I think I've made most of the spiritual mistakes that a person can make in that period of time. But by the grace of God, I have always been able and willing to try to answer the bell when there was an opportunity to be of service. I started out with another alcoholic, and I found out that service to another human being is not— you don't have the identification zone, but I believe that that's what it's all about, is trying to help God's kids do what they need to have done. My sponsor, by the way, I have a sponsor, and it's Bob B. from St. Paul, Minnesota. And I find two sets of instructions in the big book about giving a talk or telling our story. The most common one, the one we talk about so much is uh here every time we hear how it works uh is in a general way what i was like and what happened and what i'm like now but there's another set of directions that is really really dear to me and i always hope my story carries it it says words to the effect that our personal stories tell in their own language and from our own point of view how we've been able to form a relationship with our creator. And that is just really critical to me that I hope my story carries that. I grew up on a tobacco farm in southwestern Kentucky, right on Tennessee land. And the most informative thing I can tell you about my childhood is it wasn't a thing like I thought it was. Until I got sober and I was 37 when I got sobre, I had the most interesting and romantic saga you've ever heard way past the story and of course it was all about how by my Aaron Will and my sterling intellect I had pulled myself up by the bootstraps from the depths of poverty to those staggering heights I'd reached in life and I believed that malarkey to the point where I would have passed the life detector test and in telling it to you I'd have us both in tears I was so sincere about it. And I don't think I was honestly sober a week until I realized, man, what a load of belonging. We weren't even poor. We weren'T anywhere close to poor. We were middle-class farming people who had everything we needed and most of the things we wanted. In fact, we were better off than anybody else in the community. And those staggering heights I thought I'd reached were a whole lot more staggering than they were half. what was really going on the first 12 and 13 years of my life was my ego disorder and that ego disorder has been stuck to my nose every time my eyes have come open for my 76 years on this earth both drunk and sober. The big book calls it the selfishness and self-centeredness that's at the root of our troubles and it talks about it in a lot of different language But ever since I've been sober, it's been the disorder of my ego. And that thing has dominated my entire life. It certainly dominated my life for the first 37 years of my life. And it does so many things to me. It makes me so obsessed with myself. that without divine intervention I'll just be so obsessed with myself and how I stack up against other people and I'll be so upset and so obsessed with how I feel that without Divine Intervention I will always let how I feels be the most important thing in the world to me. Without Divine Interventional I can give some lip service to something being more important and might be able to put up a charade for a little while. But if I haven't done the work I need to do today on Friday, and if I've learned anything in my time sober, I've learn that I don't get much divine intervention on Friday based on what I did on Thursday. It's truly a day at a time deal that's depending on my actions today. And if I have done what I need do, I'll go right back to my default position and let how I feel be the most important thing in the world that ego disorder is always creating that self obsession has always created so much pain and emptiness and difference and apartness down inside me that I've never been able to stand the way I feel inside without divine intervention without either running just as hard as I can and or flailing around trying to stuff something in there to try to make me feel good enough that I can stand it. And that ego disorder strips me of having any peers on earth because what it does, it makes me an egomaniac with inferiority complex. I'm perfectly capable of feeling too good for someone or something and at the same instant knowing I'm not nearly good enough for that same person or that same thing. All my life, I could do anything. At the same time, I've known I couldn't really do anything. Now what that means is that without divine intervention, I don't have any peers. I can't be on your level. I can be above you. I can below you. And insanely, I can both at the same time, but I cannot be a fellow among fellows. And that's the mess I brought to my first drunk when I was 12 and 13. That first drunk was the most horrendous experience of my life. I got in a world of trouble. I puked, I blacked out, I passed out. I woke up next morning sicker than i had ever been in my life and more terrified than i'd ever been in my light the four horsemen were already gathered around my bed and i swore that all those baptists around the farm where i was born and grew up were right about only one thing but they were right about one thing and that was the boots and i would never ever touched that crap again and not only was i sincere i guess it was kind of effective because it was nearly a week until i got drunk the second time and at the way things are going to go for the next 25 years that was nearly miracle and i got drunk that second time after all the the horrors and the terror of that first time for exactly the same reason i got drank the other thousands of times. And that was when I got enough of that booze in me for the first time in my life, the magic happened. And I didn't know the magic had happened until I got sober 25 years later. All I knew was that for a few minutes on my way to Pukin and so on, I had passed through a white pleasant neighborhood. But of course it's magic. because what happened was it imitated God, a terrible, ineffective, deadly imitation, but it imimated it. It filled up that emptiness inside me. It did something about that pain, that difference and apartness. For the first time in my life, I was okay with you. I was Okay with me. I had peers. I was a fellow among fellows. And remember that the way I feel without divine intervention is the most important thing to me. And I certainly was not interested in any divine intervention for the 25 years that I dreamed. The bottom line is there's no mystery to me about my powerlessness over alcohol and things like it because for 25 years, I didn't know there was any other game in town. I didn'T know there WAS anything else that could make me feel good enough inside that I could stand it without running or flailing around trying to put something else in there. So the bottom line was tragically and sociopathically something. It didn't really matter what it cost and it didn't really matter who it cost because the way I feel is the most important thing. I'm not going to go through a drunk log tonight. I really want to talk about getting sober, living sober and forming a relationship with my God. But for those of you who haven't heard my story, I've probably got a horror story that's an eight and a half or ten on a scale of one to ten. from the first time i got drunk until i got sober uh not only alcoholism but alcohol dominated everything in my life i was off and running from the very beginning i'd been born with some gifts so i was able to stumble upstairs for 20 years somehow even though i was drunk all the time and not going to class and losing the scholarship I had as an early admission student at 16 on an academic scholarship because the first semester, I lost all concept of day and night, just a matter of passing out and coming to. And I blew that scholarship, and for the next seven and a half years, I worked full-time, drank full-timed, went to school full-times, and somehow got through undergraduate and law school. and I don't have a handful of clear memories of that whole eight years. It's just a swirling gray mass of alcoholic insanity. I wound up practicing law for nearly 10 years and with a pretty good little bit of material success, not as much as I used to think I'd had. That's one of the peculiarities of staying sober a while. we get a better focus on our past you know they tell us out here in the world you can't change the best don't you believe it we do it in here every day of the week and sometimes in a very positive way and sometimes like me and not a very positive way at all but from 39 years sober I have always I've always been a self-employed criminal defense lawyer and I've also been a criminal always had a knack for getting some cases that had some money and some publicity in them. And that's what I'd stick in your face when you suggested something was wrong with me and the way I lived. And something was terribly wrong. I've told you how bad it was leading up to starting practice in law. Well, it got worse. It got worse because alcoholism progresses just as we read before the meeting started and everybody who's ever had it. Nobody slips that news. It got worse because I no longer had a job and didn't have anybody I was directly responsible to. It got worst because I had more money to escalate things with. And by the time I'd been practicing law almost 10 years, I was still holding on to that world by my fingertips, but a little law firm of nine or ten lawyers and built a rep around this other fellow myself. I got full of scotch vodka and four outside issues and drove Corvette off the road at over 120 miles an hour. Did an awful lot of bad things to my body, just nightmarish. Half dozen major surgeries the first year. Lifetime 15 major surgeries on account of that wreck. The most recent one this past January. Didn't have a urinary function for a year. Had a prognosis of never having urinary function. Had a prognesis of never walking without one or two braces on my legs. Turned out the doctors were wrong. Haven't owned a brace for over 40 years, but it's over 39 years. And about a year after I directed the head of urology at Duke University, did put my plumbing back together and I didn't know that would happen and my reaction during that period once i got out of the operating room intensive care long enough for visitors to come in my friends would come in those hospitals every day and i spent more than six months of the first year in hospitals and they would bring me booze and more dope than doctors were giving me and i would land that hospital bed and say really insane things i would say you know fellas anybody can stop drinking when the going gets a little tough but it takes a man to lay in there with it when the bills start coming in and then i would explain to him that a man ought not be out there doing the crime if he's not prepared to do the time so just because i hit a bump in the road they weren't going to hear me whining give me a drink and let's go on with it. And that, folks, is powerlessness. It's insanity. And when you really think about it, it's letting the way I feel in that moment be the most important thing in the universe. The way I fell in my childish sociopathic desire to change it. Letting that be more important than my only child, than my profession, whether I ever walk, whether I've ever peed, whether I lived or died. And I'm convinced, and I've been for a long time, that after we know what we are, after we understand about the phenomenon of craving and the physical addiction to ethanol alcohol, when we put that first one in us, I'm confused as to the most self-centered act on this earth short of suicide because it's a conscious decision. the way I feel and my desire to change it is more important than family it's more important than responsibility it's most important it's important than decency it's much more important than any relationship I have with God the way I feel is the most important thing in this universe the five years after that wreck I did not practice law for five years i lost absolutely everything um the uh guys had to kick me out of the law firm i'd founded because of my behavior and the pressure he brought on them state of kentucky jerked my law license uh the office building the investments we had and returning revenue took my part my wife but at the time had to leave me on account of insanity during that period she was staying with some girlfriends and died in an accident i was in some sort of asylum 18 times in the year in the two and a half years before i got sober about half of them were psychiatric hospitals and about half of them were some version of titter joint about half had some program based on the 12 steps intensely exposed to alcoholics anonymous but I didn't see my only child for over three years everything was gone I lived without an address for over a year up until the fall of 80 which was still six months before I got sober Had no home, had no car, had no clothes. My teeth were rotting out of my head and everybody that knew me that I've ever talked to assumed I'd died. That the ego was just too bad. That man's sanity was too rampant and that even the folks that tried to well-stead me didn't think there was any chance for me and I didn't either. Fall of 1980, I wound up on Asylum No. 17 which was in Nashville, Tennessee. they let me in they told me later because they didn't think I'd live a week if they'd left me on the street I stayed in there about a month, I had no place to go, nowhere to get there and my roommate's family felt sorry for me and they lived in Nashville not really involved in AA just really sweet spiritual folks and they said Don why don't you come live with us for a few days and stay with us and let's try to figure out what to do with you so I went and lived with them a year. But the first six months I didn't stay straight but it got better and I had to get better. That first six months I went to an awful lot of AA meetings. Most of them at a clubhouse there in Nashville, Tennessee called the 202 Club still there. I got to where I could go sometimes two or three weeks without getting ripped and that was a world record for me. And how I really know I got better is they only put me back in the asylum one time in that entire six-month period. And the rate I'd been going, that looked like the picture of mental health. March of 1981, I got on my most recent drone. It was another one of my pop-off vodka slash Listerine drones. And this is not an overstatement to be funny. I have better memories of the Listerine I can stand to smell Listerines today but I can't stand to smell that old hot cheap vodka but on this most recent drunk I was drinking and taking everything and getting my hands on and by the time April 8th 1981 rolled around most recent day I drank I didn't know it but a loving God that I had never acknowledged much less asked for anything for the first 37 years of my life I was an evangelical agnostic it was part of my mission to disabuse the superstitious of their superstitions I truly thought that anybody that was a believer was weak of mind and character and the mention of God made the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck and you guys in AA talking about higher power. I think that ticked me off worse because I knew what you were doing. You were trying to backdoor me on that God crap. So that kept running me out of the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous and thank God AA kept running my back in. By the time I got sober, my physical addiction to alcohol was such that once I started drinking, I had physically lost the ability to stop. something had to intervene and press me loose from alcohol and once it did it took three or four days for me to be physically able to do something like sit up in a chair but somehow I made it through that most recent drunk I didn't know anything was different I had no idea that there was a loving God or that there wasn't God much less that I had been given the greatest life-saving gift that I had ever been given or will ever be given. And I didn't have any mental epiphany. My thoughts and feelings did not change about anything. You see, I had thought with all that exposure to AA, there wasn't much of me that wanted to live, but the little part that did knew that the only outside chance I had was to get this AA thing you had. And I believed with all my heart that in order to get it, I had to somehow find a way to change what I thought, felt, and believed and make it more like it looked like to me. You thought, built, and believe. And I had tried as best I could in the shape I was in, in good faith for two or three years to change my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, and I couldn't change anything. so I thought I had to die but somehow I got through that most recent drunk and I stumbled back to the door of that clubhouse in Nashville I didn't think they would let me in and they probably shouldn't have I had passed out in their AA meetings and had to be bodily carried out they'd caught me in their men's room with illegal outside issues they had warned the people they sponsored to stay away from me that I was a loser and I was going to die about two months before I got sober. I was walking through that clubhouse and a big old boy that's been dead for 15 or 20 years, Joe. Joe was about 6'5", and those of you who don't know me, I'm a little short guy. Joe walked up and looked way down at me and said, you know Don, I am beginning to think you really are too intelligent for this program. And I thought he was giving me a compliment. My nature of reaction was, well, thank God they finally figured out who they're dealing with. But Joe went on, and it may have saved my life. I believe it did. He said, and that's a shame, Don, because we have never really had anybody too dumb for this deal, and we bury your buttholes all the time. And that felt like an icy hand closing over something inside me. And thank God that icy hand's never gone away. you let me get a couple stitches off the path so far I feel the tips of those fingers and whammo I'm right back on the beam of Alcoholics Anonymous but to my surprise they did let me in I know what was said and who said it they said come on in Don you're keeping us sober and I said well will you tell me one more time what i need to do if i want to live and they said sure don't drink don't take don't go to meetings by the grace of god the first 60 days i went to over 150 meetings now remember i didn't know anything was was different my thoughts feelings beliefs hadn't changed about anything so i didn'd want to go to a single one of those 150 meetings at least been a legitimate reason after it got feeling better i was probably hoping i'd run back in some girl or something but and it was still totally clear to me that you all were religious fanatics my brain was still assuring me that what we needed to do was get our head out of the sand get our butt back to louisville get some money get a law license back get a big car and a good-looking woman just be somebody for god's sake But part of the gift that I didn't know I had was the ability to turn around in my brain and say, yeah, I know, you're right. This stupid little deal with their group therapy sessions they call meetings and their myth of a power of some kind can't possibly solve our complex and unique problems. But we just have options. So we can keep going to the dumb old meetings even though they can't possible work. and thank god i had the same thing backwards about going to those meetings that without divine intervention i've had backwards every day of my life without divine invention i make it all about what i think feel and believe that is the end all be all without divine prevention in nature if i don't feel like doing right it doesn't occur to me to go ahead and do right anyway the very best we can hope for is trying to get me fixed so I feel like doing right so I can do right all my life I've been absolutely convinced that the difference between good people and me is they felt like doing wrong and if we could just get me fixed so I felt like doing right I could be good people too well I've known for nearly 40 years now those good people and they were good people even though they may have been resentful about doing right they may Have been cussing under their breath they may of had highly suspect motives but they did right and that made them good people and despite all my grand rationalizations and intentions I did not and that made me bad people. You see, I began to have a realization that has saved and enhanced my life for over 39 years now. And I love the word realize. I got sober I thought to know something and to realize it was essentially the same thing and then I didn't really relate it. Realize is a form of the word real. When I've realized something that literally means it has become real inside me. And there's all sorts of stuff I've known for over 60 years that I haven't brought into reality inside me so I began to realize this great fact that those thoughts, feelings and beliefs of man that I thought were the center of the universe have never one time in my 76 years on this earth left a footprint on reality. Now, if I abdicate my behavior to that old crazy picture show in the back of my head, that's going to leave a great big ugly footprint right in the middle of reality. But the thoughts, feelings, beliefs in and of themselves, no, they're just a will-o'-the-wisp. Just kind of an amorphous thing floating around between my ears that cannot touch reality The only thing that leaves a footprint on reality is my behavior. And I began to realize that I could separate my behavior from that old crazy picture show. I began To realize that that didn't have to feel like doing the right thing to do the right then I began to realize That I didn't actually believe to take action consistent with belief. I didn't have to actually have faith I needed to take action consistent with faith so what happened see I thought for those meetings to do any good I had to first believe AA would work which it did I thought it had to feel like it was working while it wasworking which it didn't I thought I had to be able to see the causal relationship of A causing B which I still haven't seen and don't care. It turned out none of that had anything to do with it. At that time, all I needed to do was get my raggedy butt in meeting after meeting and let my old sick brain and soul get kicked in there, dragged in there kicking and screaming behind the raggedly butt. Then they told me if I wanted to live I was going to have to read the big book. I told them I'd read it two or three times. They told me they knew that. They told me I'd been quoting it to them while I'd been dying. And they told me the first thing I needed to get straight is that this book is not a philosophy book. There's nothing in there that I can learn or somehow master that'll keep me sober for a heartbeat. That what it really is, is a simple instruction manual for my actions. In fact They specifically told me, they said, Don, in your case, you've had enough information about AA and recovery for over two years to stay sober a day at a time the rest of your life without learning one single new piece of information. What's killing you, dummy, they say, is not what you know and don't know. What's killin' you is what you're doing and not doing. and that's when they explained to me that the action that is the 12 steps the action that is the first nine steps which will very temporarily bring us to a state of recovery and deflate our ego my original sponsor Cherry Carpenter in Nashville told me he thought that situation would last about eight seconds in my case but the action that is the first nine steps and then immediately followed by the action every single day that is step 10, 11, and 12 in order to maintain my spiritual condition. Thank God. I thought at first my daily reprieve was contingent on my spiritual condition and that was terrifying because there were days and still are when it's best to tell my spiritual conditioning ain't very good. so it just seemed like I was a sitting duck being struck gone when my spiritual condition was bad that's not what the bank on the paper says I get my daily reprieve through the maintenance of my spiritual condition and that's the difference in day and night because you see my spiritual condition is part of how I am and I don't have a wonder way to change the way I am right now, change the way I am. Can't do it. But the maintenance of my spiritual condition is all action clearly set down in this book and I can take those actions regardless of what I'm thinking, feeling and believing and when I take those action it is the action that gives me my daily reprieve, not my state of being And that was so wonderful to realize because my daily reprieve went from totally beyond my control to totally within my control. But they explained that that action of the steps is the prescription for alcoholism, that it works on alcoholism exactly like penicillin or an antibiotic works on infection. If I have an infection that will kill me if it's not treated, but will respond to antibiotics, I don't need to understand the origin and nature of my infection. And I don'T need to aggravate the people around me and the medical profession planning about that and asking questions. Truth is, I could learn everything there is to know about that infection. And if I don't take the pills, I'm dead. They're making a difference what I know about it. I don'T need to understand a thing about how antibiotics work in the human body. I DON'T need TO believe that those little pills can take care of all these terrible things wrong with me. And probably most importantly to me, I DONT need to want to take the bills. Nothing could be more irrelevant than whether I WANT to take The Bills. If I take them as directed, I'll get just fine. And they promised me that the action that is the steps will work on my alcoholism every day exactly like that. And the fact that I'm here instead of in a pauper's grave for over 39 years convinces me that they were right. And I've been blessed to see that miracle happen in hundreds of alcoholics over the last 39 years. then they told me if you want to live I was going to get on my knees every morning and every night ask and thank a power greater than myself I remember sitting there exactly where I was at the clubhouse tears rolling down my cheeks looking up at the wall at the second step on the wall and explaining to them one more time why the second step was what was going to kill me and i couldn't do the praying bit i was explaining to the numbskulls one more time that i had done everything i could to change my thoughts feelings and beliefs and i wouldn't change any of them and i finally heard them when they told me god knows for how many times but i finally hurt him when they said oh don you've got that backwards too we have never suggested that you think feel or believe anything and my mouth probably fell open because i think that's the whole ball game the whole objective they said oh no said we wouldn't do that done said there are two good reasons first place you're too ill to have any valid thoughts feelings or beliefs and the second place the issue of whether you live or dying will be determined solely by what you do. What you think, feel, believe won't in and of itself have a thing to do with it. So they said we don't care about the old crazy picture in the back of your head and what you believe and don't. If you want to live get down on your knees and start saying those words morning and night and I remember thinking well the rest of it's all right but this ain't happening but i didn't take into account my gifts the main gift was that for the very first time in my life i began to voluntarily follow suggestions about how to run my life even though i didn' t understand them i didn''t agree with them i did'nt think they would work and i didn ''t want to do them And I had never done a single thing that fit that description in my life. And that's the reason I'm here instead of the pulpit grave. But I didn't know what I didn'T know. So the latter part of April of 81, to my great surprise, I found myself getting on my knees every morning and every night and as far as I was concerned talking to the wall asking something I didn't believe was there do something I didn' t believe could be done but I persisted and I've been convinced for years that the two most overlooked and under discussed spiritual traits there are are courtesy and persistence and I persisting with getting on my knees morning and night even though I didn''t believe and the twin miracles of the second step after. If I'd had to wait until I intellectually believed the second Step, there's some sort of power bound could get me out of the humanly hopeless condition that we've all accepted we in if we've done Step 1 of AA. If I've had to wade into the middle penny drop, I'd have been in the pauper's grave. The first part of the miracle was that when I began to behave like a person who believed, I got all the benefits of being a believer. And the second part of the miracle was it turned out that faith and belief are just like everything else in my life. I've never thought, felt, or believed my way into a single right action in my life. I have to act my way into right thinking, feeling, and believing. so as a result of taking the action consistent with faith faith found me and I came to believe they led me through the first nine steps in Nashville at step eight and nine is a byproduct of that my law license got put back in order and I had flown past step six and seven I'd followed directions exactly I'd done my fourth and fifth step formed a picture what a spiritual dialogue looked like went back to my attic i had my own attic by that time uh got the book followed directions looked at my timex watch spent one hour going over the first five steps looks like i'd done okay got down on my knees said that seven step prayer you know we have less than half a page in the big book on six and seven the top part of age 76 and i believe with all my heart that that was where with god's I went to work on me to make me into what I had decided a spiritual don ought to be and I flew that way for nine years now wonderful things happened in that nine years at 21 months sober I went back to Louisville to try to practice law again second month I was in town they stuck me up in front of 2,000 people to talk recorded it, sent it out everywhere people started asking me to speak everywhere, be their sponsor do this and that same month February of 83 saw my only child for the first time in over three years she moved in with me two months later lived with me throughout her high school years and she and I texted and touched every day with dear friends law practice started making some money I'm driving nice cars you know wearing nice clothes all those things were going great but for the first nine years sober relationships with women and financial chaos like to kill me they like to beat me to death and i didn't know what was wrong something happened in may of 1990 to cause me to completely revisit steps six and seven and they have since that time been the most important steps every day of my life and I realized that I had missed all the boats on six and seven first place that deal going to work on me with God's help they don't say anything about me working on me worth it without God's health they talk about God removing things you see six and seven wound up being not where I went to work for me but where I gave up on working on me for i accepted that under my own power i couldn't do any better fighting my other character defects than i could drinking that i had to come back to my god like a third step on steroids and say mom dad i don't know where we are how we got here or where it was supposed to go and i'm going to try to behave like a person would behave if they were letting go of all their objectives even the ones I dressed up in spiritual clothing and just trying to accept that I cannot figure out the patterns of my life. I try to do that all my life so I know where to start stitching. I'm 76 haven't figured out a single significant pattern yet. A chimpanzee's got a better chance of mastering quantum physics than I do of understanding and predicting the patterns of my life. My job is stitching. That little thing, we call it conscience, we call it. Better angels, moral accomplice, conventional Christians call it the Holy Spirit, but a simple piece of God to send us. That lights our path, but never with the searchlight to see 100 yards down the road, lights it with a pin light for the next step. And for me, the very essence of faith is taking that next stitch in the right place when I can't see how it fits in the battery. When everything in me, my fear, my selfishness wants to do the opposite thing, I think the most faithful I get, most spiritual I get is when I take that next stitch in the right place when I don't want to and I can't see that it's going to be in my best interest. And I've stumbled that way. And also, the first nine years I was sober, I wasted a lot of time praying for character defects to be gone because I wanted them to be done. And of course, the seven-step prayer doesn't ask for that. It asks God only to remove the character defects that stand in the way I make usefulness to God and my fellows. And that's not just six and seven. That's the heart and span of the program of Alcoholics Boundaries. Third step, take away my difficulties not so I can be sober and spiritual and happy but that victory over them will bear witness those I would hail of God's power and love way of life. Steps eight and nine all practical, right? Putting our lives in order. Look on page 77. It says, yeah, we're doing that, but that's not our real purpose. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and those around us. Folks, for the last 30 plus years since May of 1990 I have tried to persist in going back to not trying to live my life for me. I've tried to live with that prayer of St. Francis the seeking to love comfort and understand rather than to be loved, comforted and understood running through my mind as much as possible every day I've tried to pray and I do seek to pray and I keep persisting in trying to give my entire interest, attention and love to whomever or whatever is directly in front of me and I've stumbled that way for the last 30 years I don't think there's been a day I've done it well enough that I thought I'd do any good I have to start over 50 or 100 times a day sometimes but I've kept stumbling and here's been the net of credit if in May of 1990 when I had a really great life God had said Don, I want you to make the list of the best you can have in every single area of your life material, spiritual professional life in AA life with your children your primary relationship and God had granted me what I had written down I would have short changed myself in every single area of my life when I'm willing to stop trying to take care of me and trying to take care of God's kids when I am willing to seek to love, comfort and understand you and not care or seek to get you to love, comfort, and understand me. Where God takes me is unbelievable. My sweet Sharon and I have been married 30 years next month, been together over 30. We've never had an argument, much less a separation or divorce. The law, the Bar Association that I so embarrassed gave it a terrible public black eye. Hasn't honored me until it's embarrassing. What God has done for me in every area of my life is so far beyond anything that I would have had the vision to perceive. And it's all been because of trying to behave as if God, as well as the world, judged me only on that next stage that I'm taking and keeping trying to take that next stitch. in the right place and lead the direction and the pattern up to God. I love you all. This thing truly, truly works. Please keep coming back. Thank you so much, Jerry and Brian and everybody.