Step 11 and the Period Before You React – Sandy B.

Good evening everybody, my name is Sandy Beach and I'm an alcoholic and I am delighted to be here and I'm delighted they got me a stool to sit on. Old age doesn't leave you unscathed and so standing has gotten to be a problem, so this is very comfortable and I am delighted to be her. I just can tell how wonderful AA is in Phoenix. There's an energy where there's good AA that is unmistakable, and if I had to give that energy a name it would be real easy. God. You can just feel his presence in this room. And I often think Of all the things that go on on planet Earth that God has to look at, I think he smiles mightily upon the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous in carrying out what we all think he would like in the way of human beings treating each other. Coming to love each other, staying together, keeping our common purpose and when one of us falls down somebody else picks us up and it just works that way it is so powerful to not have to live on your own power it was so debilitating and yet I like almost everybody else was told ever since I was a little kid you're going to have to do it yourself nobody's going to live your life for you if you're going to make something out of yourself then you better do this if you study hard you'll get high grades you go to a good college then you'll have a lot of money and they left out one thing none of that will make you happy that was the secret they left out and it wasn't until I got to AA even though I attended a lot of church when I was younger that I found out that the only place human beings can be happy is near their own creator. That that nearness is what causes the sense of well-being and happiness. And as we move away from that, things start getting screwed up again. And it takes a long time to realize that that's an absolute in the spiritual world. and my great hero Chuck Chamberlain that was his message that I just love. There's only one problem that includes all problems. Conscious separation from God there's only 1 solution that includes all solutions conscious contact with God and alcoholics can't stand simplicity they just it just rubs us the wrong way because we're so complex there couldn't possibly be a simple answer like that well you're too far away from God next you know but my wife left me and I'm good then I'm sick and I don't feel okay you're too far way from God we don't like we don' t like the idea that there could be one solution except for alcoholics, and before we got here, there was only one solution. I don't remember any problem that I said to myself, well, I won't be drinking over this. We had one solution, and that was it. It held the answers to everything. I'd get a summons in the mail, and I'd be shaking hands. What do you do with a summon? Oh my God, oh my God. I don't know what to do with this, but I will shortly. Out to the kitchen. Bam! Hey, tear it up. Okay, now we'll move on to the next problem. So it was real easy to make decisions. Anyway, I got sober in Washington, D.C., northern Virginia area on Pearl Harbor Day, 1964. And I just picked up one white chip. I recommend that if there's any of you people that are new just get one of them and let somebody else go out it's just a lot easier that way I don't remember that many slips when I was new I think I had about three months and somebody said well some guy Charlie out in Vienna had a slip and I asked my sponsor I said what's a slip he said you're not allowed to have one and so I thought that there was a quota and your name had to be on the list in order to be eligible to have a slip so anytime I thought about taking a drink I just said oh that's right I'm not allowed to do that and so I didn't AA has really transformed my life And I'll take a little while talking about, you know, the before. But I really like talking about the fellowship and our spiritual principles and so on down. So anyway, I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. I was born in 1931. So if you do the math, in a few weeks I'll be 80. And I realized that that's old. I'm just... And I look in the mirror and I don't look that old. But when I try to move, it's like, you're old. Don't get in a fight. So I think that's good advice for all you old people out there. Don't Get in a Fight. And clearly the world was a different place in the 1930s. We'd just come through the Depression. My father graduated from Yale and was an engineer, and he got a job in Syracuse building bridges. And unfortunately, he graduated in 1928. And in 1929, nobody had a job. And so my family, especially my parents, they were well aware of the fear of what a depression can do. But they did a wonderful job bringing up my sister and I, and I don't ever remember really wanting for anything. We, I think we had a very fine childhood. I just never appreciated it. you know because when you're uncomfortable with yourself you have to blame somebody you're not certainly not going to take responsibility for your own discomfort and so I think we all blame our childhood but when I look back geez they were doing a wonderful job and my mother was Catholic so my father who was English had to convert and we all went to the Catholic Church and my sister and I, my sister has 35 years in AA up in Connecticut. She's quite ill so I'm hoping that prayers go her way. Her name is Sue. And she sat next to me in that church and loved it. She loved every second that we were there. She thought the nuns were cute. she thought Latin was wonderful she thought the incense and spraying and all these things and confession was such a relief now I was sitting right next to her and I didn't see it that way at all I saw this place scared the hell out of me I just I was creepy sitting there watching I didn' t know what they were talking about in a foreign language and the nuns just looked strange to me it just seemed it just seemed unreal and confession I could still picture those booths way in the back of the church and going back there and I knew I had sort of figured things out and I know that you did not want to tell him very much because they were going to use it against you later on when the judgment came. So I would make up a few things and get the heck out of there. And I think I was about 11, and I was looking at the crucifix, and it was almost like it spoke to me, and it said, Little boy, do you see this? Oh, yeah, I can't miss it, man. It's right there. Well, this is what God did to his only son that he loved. So, guess what's going to happen to you? And I think I fainted in the front row and they had to carry me out of the church. So I was not comfortable with God or anything because I was making up my own interpretation of it. I was making it up in my head, and then what I made up frightened me. And that's why in our big book it says we make our own problems. Our problems are of our own making. That's how you make a problem. You just sit and think about it a little bit. And put some adjectives on it. Horrible, rotten, terrifying. This is terrifying to be in here. Really? You're the only one. so I like all other alcoholics I didn't feel like I belonged to four of us at the dinner table and there was those three and then there was me and that just carried on I went to a nice prep school probably about 50 guys in the class it was this unit and everybody was upon the team and all these things but it was always yeah there's those 10 guys and then there's me. And that's just the feeling that I had and I think a lot of alcoholics have it, that they just don't seem to belong anywhere. That something is missing. There's just something wrong inside and I'd never met anybody else who had the same thing wrong. And when I came to AA I found out what it was I was too far away from God. That was the thing and Dr. Young talks about that when Bill wrote the letter to Dr. Young and he came back and he said that alcoholism is akin to a spiritual longing for God and we seem to satisfy that longing through alcohol that it produces in us a sense that whatever was wrong all this time is now fixed that we're now whole and complete for the first time in our lives. Now, social drinkers don't have that experience with alcohol. They don'thave these huge transformations where you get this sense of well-being beyond just having a good time. To me, I remember it was like I was given the secret of life all in one swig. It just fixed everything that had been troubling me and freed me to be my true self. Unfortunately, I was always over-served, and I went beyond being my true south into a monster and things like that. So that's the background I had when I finished prep school, and I had a scholarship Yale was right in New Haven so I just went right into that university I had done construction and worked on their buildings and you know I was the townie and I'd seen the students there but I wasn't really familiar with who was coming there and when I got in that freshman class and I see people I'd see in magazines and names like Rockefeller and like that and I said oh my god I don't belong here they're going to find out I'm not of their ilk and they're going to ask me to leave. That was the fear I had early on that there would be the dean of the freshman class would call a thousand of us out and go gentlemen we found an imposter in our midst and right over there, out so I really didn't feel that I belonged there but I still wasn't drinking. I wanted to go out for athletics I had very high grades and so I was going to keep it up. And my roommates are going, you're in college, you ought to start drinking, have a good time. And nope, I'm going to hold off and hold off. And I tell this every time I talk about three months into the school year, I was at a social event where I was supposed to meet 10 or 15 other guys. Just go in, shake your hand, say hi, learn their names. It's very simple. Just walk up. Well, it may be simple to you, but it was impossible for me because I would go in there and see, they all knew it. They just were all already broken up into four or five little groups. They were having fun and then there was me and I looked at groups that I thought I might be able to join and their eyes turned to me and made a clear statement. Don't come near us. They didn't want to know me. I didn't have to ask them. I could see it in their eyes so I almost met someone that night. I came up and, oh, I'm just fooling. I'm going over here, and I never stuck my hand out. Never. And I was getting ready to leave, which is how you solve those problems. And they had a bar there, and I said, maybe my roommates are right. I would like to feel good. So I had a drink. I had another one. I'm standing there chatting with the bartender. and I got halfway through the third one and I concluded that it didn't work that it was vastly overrated so I turned around to leave and I would have left except everyone in the room wanted to know me they were all they all were looking at me please join our group we want to know you who are you I didn't know where to start I'm going holy cow And so as I started over to the first group, on the way over, I realized they would be lucky to know me. And I intuitively knew how to handle everything. How do you do? Where are you from? Oh yeah, Badgers, Wisconsin. Oh yeah. I had something to say about everything. And pretty soon they're leaving. And I'm going, where are you going? We're just getting started. Well, we got to study. We got to do this. Oh, no, no. Stay, stay. Does that sound familiar? Stay. Don't go home. Anyway, they all left and I said to myself, wow, three drinks did that? I wonder what 20 will do. So I went back and stood there by the bar until I could barely walk and went back to my room and had the terrible experience when you first start drinking. The room is spinning and I'm in the toilet and I am vomiting and I'm dying and just one of those awful nights. I get up the next morning and I am sitting on the edge of the bed. Felt like I had a hatchet in my head and I was just splitting and the thought occurred to me, are you going to drink again tonight? And I will tell you it was a millisecond. I said, of course I am. I said this hatchet is a hatch. This hatchet, in my hand, is a small price to pay for what I had last night. Now, a hatchet in the head being a small price to pay. Something big must have happened last night. And that's why non-alcoholic cannot understand why we go to the lengths that we go to in order to have that experience that is so different than non- alcoholics have when they drink. So the reason we go back to it is that it was such a transforming experience. And of course, that became my top priority, the studies, down the tubes, no more athletics. But boy was I having fun. I would get to class once in a while. But I was in the fraternities, I was here with starting parties, it was just wonderful. And I barely graduated by probably a hundredth of a point. And the Korean draft was still on, so everybody was going in the military. And six of us were sitting around drinking beer and one of them said, let's join the Marine Corps. And I said, okay, let me finish this beer. So that was how I decided to join the Marine Corps, let me finish his beer. Let's go down there. And boy, the recruiter was so happy, six at once. you guys will love it, trust us, you're going to love it. And what a shock that was. So I got through that initial thing and then we went to Quantico to go through officer's training at basic school, six months to become an infantry platoon leader. And you know it It was a just jammed up life. It was sleeping outside, it was doing all these things and all of a sudden I started falling in love with it. I felt finally that I was part of something. I was a part of it. I was apart of something bigger than me and I loved it. And somewhere in the training they had a training movie about flying and I'd never been in an airplane but these pilots looked cool. In this training movie they were in a bar and they had scarves on, white scarves and they were talking with their hands and they're doing all this stuff and there was some blonde standing in the background and I went whoa this is a little better than foxholes so I signed up for flight school and I passed the physical it was wonderful I had graduated, I had met this woman from Brantford, Connecticut and we got married and off we went to have a Marine Corps career. And I got air sick on the way down to Atlanta and I had a few problems with air sickness but that went away and I was flying the old SNJ in Pensacola and once I got over the motion sickness, it was like I belonged there. I would be number three or four or two as each phase as we went through basic training and acrobatics and formation flying and knife flying and going aboard the carrier and gunnery and bombing, all the things that you go through. And then we went off to advanced training in Corpus Christi and then I finally got my wings and I'm off to overseas with a short tour at El Toro and to get further jet training and I get over, and the war's been over about six months. So I'm in the front line fighter squadron in Japan with a bunch of guys I love. It was just so exciting. I was in a... The Air Force would call them F-86s. We called them FJ-4s. And they were great airplanes. They're so old you can hardly find them in an airplane magazine now, but they were really hot then. They were great planes. and the colonel and everybody was very it was just everybody did everything they could to make his squadron a good squadron everybody worked extremely hard but they also played hard when it was over everybody went to the club and we drank as a unit we had a table we had the jet model in the middle of the table and chug-a-lugging and getting rounds of drinks and all this and I remember one occasion back then the radar wasn't as good as it is today so if they didn't get your number you didn't do it like flying under a bridge or something like that so you could have a lot more fun flying than you can now. You can't get away with anything in today's and so one of the stunts that was pulled by a few of us in that squadron, and we weren't the only ones doing it. We had found open areas out in Japan where it was completely flat terrain, there wasn't any other obstacles, but there was a railroad track going down there. And the plan was to go out, and if you saw a train at night in that area, we had the maintenance guy take the landing light out of one of the landing gears so that only one light came on when the gear came down. And you drop the flaps and get in slow flight and get down about eight feet off the ground coming up the track right at the train and at the last minute pull up over the train and we had this vision that he pulled the emergency cord and the train stopped and they asked him what happened and he said well a train was coming right at me but at the last second, it went over me. And then I remember flying formation on one of my buddies and I saw a brief period of darkness. It was like dark light. And when you're flying formation, you're looking just at the plane and later on I said, Zeke, what was that? And he says, we dropped down inside of the top of Mount Fuji. And I pulled back up and I went, thanks, Zeek. But in spite of all that, we had a tremendous record over there. But about nine months into the tour, I was with the maintenance officer, a big red-headed Irish guy, and he was talking about how he's soon going to get promoted. He's going to gets his own squadron, going to getting nothing but the best pilots. And he pointed at me. I was a young lieutenant, and said, and I want you in that squadron. And I felt like a million dollars. And then he said, but I wouldn't let you drink. so I pretended I didn't hear him and I did not want to follow up on that comment yes sir well look at that it's a good landing over there it wasn't until I got to AA that I understood what was going on and that was I was in the middle of guys overseas who drink more than they would in the states so they were really drinking a lot of alcohol I was doing something that frightened him as a heavy drinker. I was drinking alcoholically and he saw in me an intensity and something that scared him about my drinking and boy when you got a heavy drinker warning you you must be doing something to get their attention and I thought I was just one of the guys. I didn't see any difference in mine. I would just and so we got transferred back to the states and over the next 14 years I had a wonderful bunch of assignments my wife and I had six children three boys and three girls we got transferred all around the country and kids are getting yanked out of school put back in you know they're there for one year and then we're off somewhere else and I was a flight instructor for a while my last flying was in photo squadron at Cherry Point flying the Crusader during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And my alcoholism was slowly taking away everything that I had from the inside out. It was taking away my being a good father. I didn't care whether I was at graduation or not. I had things to do. I was just, oh, I got to go into this. Just selfish, selfish. And not a good husband. I'm trying to be a good pilot, but I'm starting to experience withdrawal symptoms because I'm not drinking for eight hours. And when you do that in advanced alcoholism, you start coming apart. You start shaking. Your hands are trembling. I'm sweating. I'm losing my vision. And I'm flying in an airplane where there's just me. and so I was starting to get very frightened that something bad was going to happen but there was no AA, I mean I never heard of it. The Navy had no alcoholism was not a disease so you couldn't have it. You could be crazy but you couldn'T so there was NO medical people diagnosing or helping there were no alcohol programs so I knew it was terrifying but I was going TO have to keep doing it. I just said well this is your lot in life so go back and get in that plane. And it really, for about six months, it was terrifying to go fly that Crusader. And we had another airplane, the F-3D. And a few times I thought I was going to have to eject because I knew I was gonna pass out. And I was freaking out in there. So I'd fly with one hand on the ejection seat and one hand on the stick. The photo plane, you could do all the cameras around the stick so you could fly the mission with just one hand. And then I'd come back and how'd it go? Fine. Oh yeah, cool. Nice flight. Oh good. Pictures are a little shaky. Well, yeah, it was... If you're taking a strip of photographs and the wing turns about two or three degrees, you suddenly have a picture about 20 miles away from where it's supposed to be. So your work gives you away. And the ending came when I was in a flight of four on a cross country, and I've been talking a lot about this lately because of what happened a couple years ago. But we were in the F-3D, which was an easy radar plane to fly. It was a two-seater, and there was a radar guy over here and the pilot over here. And I decided, we were on a cross country and I don't remember where we had been but we were flying home and I had to get out of the airplane. I suddenly was having some kind of an attack. I had it happen once before getting a haircut. And, I told the barber, I have to leave now. And he said, but we're not through. Yes, we are. And it was that panicky, I got to get out of here feeling. And I know you've all had them, but maybe not in an airplane. And so I decided I was going to jump out of the plane, but it didn't have an ejection seat. You had to pull up a panel and slide out the bottom. And as I'm turning to look at it, I realized this guy doesn't know how to fly, so I can't do that. So I did the next best thing. I declared an oxygen emergency, told the flight leader we have an oxygen problem back here in number three, and that means you have to land right away because if you have bad oxygen, both people could pass out. So he spotted an Air Force base nearby and went down and landed. Went to the club, had a few drinks, made like there was nothing wrong got on the flight line the next day i took a look at the airplane and i told the flight leader i'm not going to do this anymore so my alcoholism just came to the point where it said today you give up flying and it was my whole life i've known for 14 years i loved it more than anything and i turned to the flight lead and said i'm not going to do this anymore. He said, what are you talking about? I said, I'm not going to do it anymore. So somebody else flew back and then I had to see the colonel. He couldn't believe his ears. What are you taking about? And I said I'm not going fly anymore, Colonel. Why? I'm just not going to fly. When you do that long enough they have to believe you. So it took three months for the headquarters Marine Corps to reassign me a different specialty. I became an air traffic controller, which that's what I would recommend if a pilot got in such bad shape he couldn't ... I'm not going to go into ... I only did that for a year before I crashed and burned and ended up in a nut ward. But during the three months I'm waiting to get these new orders, I did the legal work in the squadron and I couldn't look anybody in the face because I knew how they felt. They were looking at me going, how did that piece of junk get in this squadron, this elite squadron? No lieutenants, all captains, one major lieutenant colonel. How could he have gotten in here and I could feel them looking at me. And I just couldn't make eye contact with anyone. I just sat, did the legal work, and then I went home. And then I'd come in and I'd do that. And finally, into three months, I got out of there and went off to this school. Well, the funny thing happened about two years ago. I was out at the Brentwood group in Los Angeles, which is a big group. It's about 500 people. And they have a newcomer's meeting and the format of the meeting is They get somebody with a lot of time, and they get up on the stage, and they talk a little bit about themselves, but they talk about a topic for half an hour. And then people raise their hand and ask questions, which is my favorite thing to do. I wish at conferences all I did was answer questions. And so before I was going up, a lady was coming to get her 30-year medallion, and her husband drove her there. And he was not in AA, but he knew all the AA people. but that night he was going to go get coffee, and his wife was saying, we have a guy named Sandy Beach who's going to lead the meeting tonight. And he said, was he a pilot? And she said, yes. He said, I think I know him. Tell him to come out here. So I went out in the parking lot. I never saw this guy in my life. And he looked at me, and he said in 1962 you were in the flight of four F3D radar planes coming back to Cherry Point on a cross country, and you declared an oxygen emergency and all the planes landed and you never flew again. And I said, how do you know that? He said, I was in the plane with you. So after all these years, what are the odds I'm running into the guy sitting over here who I thought was a radar guy, but it wasn't. He was another pilot. He had been recalled from American Airlines for the Cuban Missile Crisis and the cross country we were on was a hurricane evacuation. There was a Hurricane coming to Cherry Point whenever hurricanes coming they take all the planes somewhere safe then the pilots drink until the hurricane is gone, and then they fly the planes back. So there wasn't any radar guy going on that trip. That was going to be all pilots. And so he started filling in my memory about things, and the next day at a convention in Oxnard, he brought a bunch of photographs from the squadron, and he, you know, oh yeah, I remember this guy, remember that? He was going through the whole thing, And then he said, did you know how popular you were in that squadron? And I went, what? He said, oh, yeah, God, it was killing us that you were leaving. The colonel was going out of his mind. He was trying to save you. He called doctors. He called all these different people. When you left, we were so sad. And I said, well, that's not how I remember it. I don't remember it that way at all. So I decided that he was probably right. And I went back to 1962 and changed my past. You didn't know you could change your past, did you? And I substituted the truth for my version. and that's a lot of what sobriety and spirituality is. It's getting rid of old ideas and replacing them with the truth, and it's the most amazing thing. Whenever I think of Cherry Point and that period of time, I think about how lucky I was to have all those friends who cared that much, and it is a pleasant memory instead of shame, three months of shame. that's a rather transforming experience to get rid of that ugly thing you're carrying around how many of those things are we carrying around that aren't true but we think they are because we made it up that was our version of the truth there was a speaker who said just joking that his story was divided into two parts what happened during the years that he drank and what he thought happened during the years that he drink And everybody laughs, and they have that great ho-ho-ho. But we could say that about any part of our lives. There's what happened during my high school years, and then there's what I thought happened during my High School years. I heard a speaker recently say he went back to a high school reunion, and every photograph that he saw himself in, he was smiling. And his memory was he had a bad time. He hated it the whole time, and he was miserable. And so there's an old expression when we want to make a derogatory comment about someone, we say, well, you know her. She lives in her own little world. Well, so do you. And so do I. And we're the only one in it. It's our own little word. You can be married to someone for 40 years, You still don't know their own little world as well as you know your own little world. It is a separate place where we have evaluated things in a different way than the person next to us, like my sister and I. She sat in a lovely, friendly, loving church. I sat in the threatening place, which is true. Was it threatening or was it friendly? Do you see what I'm saying? There's no answer. It's whatever you said it was. And so in reality, there's probably 6.7 billion people living in their own little world right now on the planet. And I'm sure somebody intellectual out here is saying, yeah, but in addition to that, there is the real world. and the response is well maybe there is and maybe there isn't but no one lives there so I remember reading a writer somebody asked him when he thought the world was going to end he said when I die and there's a lot of truth in that So anyway, I did spend six months in a nut ward after I had a ground mouth seizure attending a class in school in Quantico, Virginia. And they had no alcohol treatment. We were just lumped in with the other crazy people and we were clearly the low man in the nut ward. The people with legitimate mental illnesses felt that they were being put upon to have drunks in there because we didn't have anything that was equaling schizophrenia. I mean, you're just a drunk. Just stop drinking. So there was nothing there particular for AA. And about the fourth month, an AA group from Bethesda, Maryland and talked to the head psychiatrist and asked if they could bring an AA meeting in. And he went along. And so one night a corpsman came in and said, all drunks fall in. There were three of us. And we went down in our little blue pajamas in an elevator downstairs and there's these guys telling their story. And they were quite engaging and I remember thinking, God damn, these guys, they're really having fun. They belong to a great organization. I told them afterwards, Let me get your phone number. If I run into a guy with a drinking problem, I'm going to send him around to see you guys. You've got something good here. And that guy's a little red-headed guy. He started poking me in the chest. I forgot that's how AA's talk. And he said, let me ask you something. He said, which one of us is going to put his overcoat on to go out and get in his car and drive home to his family and which one of us is going to put his little bathrobe on and go upstairs and get locked up like an animal and I'm going I thought to myself I just met the guy what the hell is this so that was my first indoctrination into AA truth and when I was made an outpatient getting ready to be released, I didn't go to AA. I decided that maybe, they told me if I ever drank again my career was over and on the way home I said what they really meant was if I never got drunk again my career is over. There's a big difference between having one drink and so I did a little drinking before the finale. Started out with one beer and then I was smuggling vodka into the nut ward during the day and they were looking at me very strangely so on Pearl Harbor Day 1964 I'm home it's Sunday and I call the intergroup and I say I need help and they said well there's one marine there was one AA member at Quantico and we're going to get him to come over to your house back then you didn't go to the group people came to your house and whoever came to your house was your sponsor so it was real easy must be hard to pick a sponsor I'm glad I didn't have to do that and eventually he showed up and by the time he got there I had a drink stay down and I really didn't have the problem I had an hour earlier so I told him that if he could leave some literature and he tells the story that I talked to him for a minute went outside and was shooting baskets while he talked to my family who completely filled him in he did not need to talk to me when he got through with the kids and my wife so later on he came back out and he said hey get over here and I said what he said get in the car we're going to a meeting so that's how I got to AA. I said, what? Get in the car? Yeah. And he was like, you knew you didn't want to argue with him. He was infantry Marine. His specialty was explosive ordnance disposal. And he said it was a great job for an alcoholic because nobody's looking over your shoulder while you're working. So, and he had about a year and a half and we went off to that first meeting. It was in Manassas, Virginia. I'd been sober about four hours and it was a group anniversary meeting. They had people celebrating. That was followed by a huge meal with chicken and baked beans and cabbage and it just went on and on. That was followed by a square dance with fiddles. It was country. People are square dancing around. And I'm sober eight hours now. And I have no way of knowing that all AA meetings aren't four hours long involving dancing. And he's talking about going to a meeting every night, and I'm just going, I've got to get out of here, so I'm going to make a break for it. I'm gone out the front door, but there was no street lights. There was no other lights anywhere, and it was sleeting a little bit, and I'm trying to decide which way to make A Break. And an Al-Anon lady named Betsy Lynch came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder, and I turned around, and I swear she looked like an angel or something, and she said, You come on back in. Everything's going to be fine. And I believed her. It just was that fast. I just melted, went back in, and I've never thought of having a drink or leaving AA or anything. Thought of suicide, murder, all the other things. But I never thought of leaving AA. You know, life has a way of throwing things around. I did want to talk a little bit about forgiveness. About 25 years ago, when I was up in D.C., sometimes we have lessons in our sobriety that are so powerful you can't forget them. I'm sure you've all had them. This one occurred while I was watching the local news in Washington, D.K. and they were reporting that one young man had been shot that afternoon by another young man and the kid that was shot was an A student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the reporter had found his mother and stuck a microphone in her face and said how do you feel about the kid that killed your son this afternoon and she said I've already forgiven him and she was at peace with herself and I looked at her, I didn't think that was possible I had just seen what I call a miracle and I thought of the Bible, forgive them they know not what they're doing and as a matter of fact my sponsor had said that one time when I said to him, he wanted me to forgive somebody for something that was so outrageous you know they borrowed my baseball glove or something and I asked him how far do you carry this forgiveness stuff I mean, come on, there's got to be a limit. You just don't let everybody get away with everything. And he said, well, I'll tell you what. There was a guy, they were nailing him to a cross, torturing him, and they killed him. And he says, forgive them. They know not what they do. So if you run across something that's worse than being nailed to a cross, you come back to me and we'll talk about it. And I said, oh, thanks. and then I heard about the Amish when they had remember the shootings be up there and the family went over that day to comfort the family of the boy that did the shooting they went over they said boy that family needs comforting so we'll go over and comfort them I used to talk about those events on a regular basis especially that lady in DC I just it was like how do you get how do you achieve that level it just seemed so remarkable and last April I had my three daughters ended up alcoholics and the three boys they escaped it and my youngest daughter had five years and when she had three years she was the chairman of the New Haven conference and I was a speaker and my middle daughter introduced me so it was a blast and my younger daughter had five years sobriety she was living up in Madison Connecticut and my middle daughter was visiting her up there and I get a phone call last April from my middle daughter informing me that Barbie had just been murdered that morning she took her daughter to high school and came home and somebody just really brutally assaulted her. And while she was talking to me about it, I thought about that lady in D.C., and before she hung up, I had forgiven whoever did it. And it stays that way right now. I've never had a second thought about it. And the reason I share that is because it's so powerful that the real power in forgiveness lies in doing it now. Doing it now God gets involved in that process and when you experience that there is no hatred there's no resentment and there's not anger there's just sorrow and God helps us with sorrow but he doesn't help us with hatred and we suffer those on our own because it was our choice to withhold forgiveness and three months later my oldest daughter died of alcoholism and again my daughter called me to tell me about it and I had remembered something that I read that when you receive bad news there is a period of time before you react to it I think you all know what I'm talking about. You get the news and then you say well I'm going to go over and sit on the couch and let it sink in. Do you understand what I am talking about? You have the news but you have not reacted yet. During the period before you react, you go to God. You withhold the reacting and you go to God and you say God I just want you to know what just happened will never change how I feel about you. You are the center of my life, you're the most important thing and I just want you to know that before I go and react to this. When you go back to react to it, guess who comes with you? Guess who carries you over and holds you while you let it all sink in and it is amazing how we can be carried through situations that I think are normally devastating. So I'm just sharing that because the lessons I learned paid off so dearly. Now my time is running out so I want to talk to the new people a minute and then I'm going to wrap it up. You saw that countdown today and I saw that there's quite a few new people that are here the first thing about AA is to realize it is so much fun it's unbelievable we celebrate constantly it's just amazing we just celebrate on a daily basis and we're celebrating our new freedom we're no longer in jail we're no longer trapped by that horrible disease of alcoholism. We're no long on our own, and we've had this jackpot gift that AA gives everyone. It guarantees us all a spiritual awakening, a spiritual transformation. When I sponsor people, I'm always sponsoring people, and I have two people, and I don't take more than two, that I take through the steps, then I get somebody else, and that's just always been the way I do it. And the first meeting that I have with this new person, I tell them, I personally am going to guarantee that you have a spiritual awakening. Are you interested? I've never had someone say no. This will happen. All you do is follow the instructions that I'm going to give you. And the instructions come out of our literature, our basic text. I like both of them. in our basic text I like to call a treasure map it directs us where the treasure is buried and the treasure is God so the big book isn't the treasure it's the map God's the treasure that's what we are led to if we are guided along so sponsors are spiritual guides we lead you if you're new so you see you don't have to figure anything out you just have to get a sponsor and then do what they tell you and you go but wait a minute you mean I'm not in charge of my life at all we don't like that do we we don't like not being in charge of my life and my sponsor said oh yeah you're in charge of you have a very important thing you're in charge of what's that you evaluate the results you come back and tell me is it getting worse or better that's your job and I'm here to tell you everyone comes back and says it's getting better in spite of my prejudging that it would never work one of the reasons I didn't want to pray What if it worked? I'd look like a jerk. I've been bad-mouthing prayer all my life. I was bad-mouthed in God. I didn't want to hear God. No, I don't want prayer. The Lord's Prayer? I wouldn't say the Lord's Prayers. I'd hold my hands and I'd go, no, no, not going to say it. And I finally started saying it and then I fell in love with it. I wouldn'T say the word God. I said higher power for five years. Yes, well, my higher power is doing this and doing that. Somewhere I said, you know, you can say God a lot faster than higher power. And they said, yeah, you can. Because God is just a word until you experience him. It's just a theory. We don't deal, we deal with reality here. You're going to experience something beyond your wildest imagination and then you're gonna have to explain how it happened. and most of us when it happens we go oh so that's the god they're talking about oh so so relax on all the spiritual things if you just stay open you're going to have things happen to you that are similar to the third drink only it takes longer but it's guaranteed sometimes quickly sometimes slowly God will always materialize if you work for him so I salute all of you that are new you're in for the ride of your life I thought flying fighter planes by the way when I was doing that I was not living on a spiritual plane There was nothing spiritual going on there at all. But you will find in here, I think the biggest thing you find out if you're a new person, you're going to find out who you are. It's almost like we're goingto introduce you to your real self. And as you slowly materialize in your own eyes, you're going to start realizing you are indeed a much better, deeper, caring loving person than you ever gave yourself credit for. Your internal reality is something beautiful to behold and once it becomes apparent to you and to others you will attract people to you. This is a program of attraction and what you get attracted to is God energy. You can't escape it it's just there and you feel it and you want to be around it and that's going to happen to you and then you're going to get the honor of taking another person in the darkness and slowly bring them into the light and you get to watch it. If you don't think that's a privilege. It's probably the greatest privilege that men and women in AA have is to watch the eyes of a newcomer open and a smile start appearing on their face they start looking healthy and happy and we realize that there's a God and there's no doubt. Thank you all very much. It was a pleasure to be here. Oh