Step 7 and the Drunkest Ph.D. This Side of Hell – Ted R.

Good morning. My name is Ted, and I'm an alcoholic. The theme of this conference is Came to Believe, and when Shirley called me a few months ago and asked me to speak here, she said your topic will be Came to Believe. See what you can do with it. Now, this has given me many restless moments over the past couple of months because it is quite a topic to do something with, but it is something that most of us, if we have made any progress at all in our sobriety, have done something with. The phrase, came to believe, means to me the gradual, sure understanding that comes to us. The belief and belief meaning positive assurance that what we believe in is so. No doubts, no reservations, but true ultimate belief that something is so. Of course in AA we apply this to the spiritual, but it applies in many other aspects of our lives because I believe that in my life I have been coming to believe in a kaleidoscope of different things, different principles, different ethics for the 56 years of my life. Coming to believe is a slow and sometimes painful process, and it changes. But when we believe, we believe strongly. When we believe we really believe that this is it. I'm going to take you back, the only way that I can develop this theme is to go back to my beginnings of believing. I didn't believe in much when I was a youngster. I was brought up in a very, I won't say irreligious, I don't think that's the word, unreligious home. My people were good people but not religious. They just didn't adhere to or go to the synagogue where I was raised somewhat Jewish. I say somewhat because there wasn't any formal Jewishness about our family. I got a Jewish education when I was old enough, but I was a very uncertain young man. I wasn't quite sure what I believed in in my youth. My youth was spent during the Depression. It was a very uncertain period for everybody. I didn't like the hypocrisies that I saw around me in not only my own religion but other religions at the time. I was looking for something. I didn'T know what I was lookIng for. And at the age of 16, I came to believe that I found it, the bottle. It was beautiful. I found that a few glasses of beer made life more meaningful, made life much more comfortable, made my outlook beautiful. I liked it. I liked the feeling that it gave me. I liked that feeling of belonging. I even liked myself and this was something uh very unusual because I think in the beginning and for a good part of my life I had that that negative feeling of being a loser everything that happened to me for the good couldn't last always had that feeling of foreboding doom and yet when I had a few drinks under my belt I felt good so over the ensuing few years I came very strongly to believe in the bottle because I graduated from beer to apple jack and then to whiskey and became quite a heavy drinker and yet for the first ten years that I drank it didn't cause me any real problems it was great, it was my higher power the bottle and I could do anything there was very little that I wouldn't attempt with a few drinks in me. And I accomplished a lot of things during this period of my life. My life was not unmanageable. My life wasn't unbearable. Alcohol made it bearable, alcohol made it to a degree manageable. And alcohol became the power in my life that I looked up to. Of course, as happens to all alcoholics, eventually this bubble burst. Eventually the great comforter began to become the great discomforter. And I began to realize that there was something amiss, there was nothing wrong in my life. My great power wasn't working for me anymore. I've learned since I came into AA that this is normal, that we run a very, very basic course. Our tolerance goes up depending on the individual, depending on our physical makeup. But each of us has a peak of tolerance and then we begin to come down. And it's on that downgrade that we beginto get the hangovers and we begintoget the miseries of alcoholism. While we still have our tolerance to alcohol, nobody could ever talk to us and say, you're an alcoholic. No matter how much we were drinking, as long as we were handling it, and I was handling it. I handled my alcohol well. I had very, very few occasions of staggering or getting into trouble. I was never in trouble with the police. I wasn't ever hospitalized. I had my miseries privately. My tolerance began to go somewhere in my late 20s, I guess. I began having trouble. I begin to believe at this point that there was something wrong and I began to get on the wagon. And I was fairly successful at times on the wagon. I had as much as two years at one point on the wagon. But during all of this period, I had nothing to replace alcohol in my life. My higher power was absent. I had no real belief in a spiritual power. I had pushed it into a corner. It wasn't that I didn't believe in God. I just didn't believe in the closeness, the availability, the fact that God was there if I wanted him. It didn't occur to me. I didn't feel that there was any connection between God and me. I acknowledge the factthat there must be some higher power in this world that was running things because I didn' know how to run them. And on that basis, there had to be an intelligence greater than mine. But that's as far as it went. And of course, I got drunk. I lasted for two years and hard work was my higher power at this point. I worked like a mule because I had a purpose in life. It's a strange thing. I think we alcoholics, if we're given sufficient motivation without AA, we can stay sober for a while. I think that motivation has to be very strong and it has to be a self-imposed motivation. It can't be something that somebody hangs around our neck. It has to be something that we hang around our own neck, a purpose that we decide we have to attain for ourselves. Right now I'm watching a young man with five years of sobriety, one of my protégés. I don't particularly care for the word pigeon. It sort of denotes a sucker, you know? He's one of my protégés, and I'm his sponsor. He decided at the age of 33 to go back to college. He is now, I guess, about 37. He has spent three years in college, day school, full-time, working part-time nights to pull himself through. In the course he has had to divorce his wife because she was in the way, too. He is making very few meetings, but he's staying sober. And he will undoubtedly stay sober until he completes his college and gets his degree. And I got hold of him some months ago and I laid this out to him and I told him, very frankly, I said, Frank, any damn fool can do it if they have enough pressure on them. I said well when that pressure goes you're going to get drunk as a lord. You're going to be the drunkest Ph.D. this side of hell. It did a little good. He's back to meetings, and I hope he stays. But I base this on my own experience because the two years that I stayed on the wagon was two years of purpose. During a period of bad drinking, I acquired a partner in my business that I needed like a hole in the head. and this partner was a complete non-entity he had absolutely no experience in my business my business incidentally is plastics and he was just a ball and chain around my neck and I could see the business going down the drain now only two years before this my business had gone down the drain I had gone into bankruptcy complete financial bankruptcy and I was on a shoestring back in business. I got on the wagon and got reestablished, and I was back in business. And then I got drunk again, and I took in this partner because I needed drinking money. And I could see the handwriting on the wall. I could just see what was going to happen if I didn't straighten out. And on my own, with this purpose in mind, I stopped drinking. I made no pledges to anybody. I didn' t tell my wife I'm going to stop. I told me I'm going to start and I stopped drinking for two years and during that two year period bought this partner out of the business. And once the object had been gained I very easily slipped back into the pattern of a drink and this nibbling lasted for about a month and then I was back into it again and the next six months was the worst, the absolute worst of my life. I was 36 years old at the time. My doctor during the period when I was on the wagon had put me on phenobarbital to calm my nerves. When I went to see him he said, take a couple of drinks and relax. And I said, Doctor, I'm on the wagon. Now, I did not identify as an alcoholic. I didn't believe I was an alcoholic, but I knew I couldn't drink. I believed that the alcoholic was the skid row bum that you see on a step or over here in the park laying on a bench with a bottle tucked under his arm and a brown paper bag, and I was never that way. I was occasionally in my car with a model of a bottle tucked into the seat, unconscious drunk, or I was occasionally in my office on the floor with a bottle under the desk, unconscious drunk, or in the toilet with my head hanging in and a bottle around the back, but never out on the street in full exposure. So I didn't identify. I didn' t think I was an alcoholic, plus the fact that I always worked, always brought home a living. But this was not my reason for turning down the drink. I was reasonably comfortable on the wagon. By comfortable, I mean I was free from the irate tempers of my wife over my drinking. I was reasonably free of financial pressures because of drinking. It was better than what I had come from. It wasn't better than the drinking. And I realized this and I didn't want to go back to the drinking so he put me on phenobarb to calm me down instead of insisting on my taking a couple of drinks and the strange thing you know we we alcoholics can become very intolerant of the medical profession in this respect and yet for a doctor to recommend to his patient taking a cup of drinks to calm down in most cases is far safer than that same doctor prescribing some pill for that patient, because more people than not can safely take a couple of drinks to relax. More people than us who can't. I think the statistics are 15 to 1 who are not alcoholics. Only one person out of 15 can drink. So it's a safe bet for a doctor, not knowing the patient's background with alcohol, to recommend a couple of drinks. But I turned it down. Well, that six months on phenobarb and scotch was murder because it didn't take long for the phenoborb to have me thirsty for a drink or that lackadaisical that I didn't care and once more I came to believe in the bottle. But that didn't last long. There was very little to believe there other than the fact that it was giving me agony, it was given me grief, it was giving me more discomfort than I had ever experienced in my life, where in the past I had been a heavy drinker. And by heavy, I mean I could consume a fifth of whiskey a day without two ill effects, without getting sloppy drunk. I could still go about my business and do my job, drive my car. I mean, I had a few rear-end accidents here and there. Nobody ever hit me. I always hit them in the tail, trolley cars, automobiles. At 15 miles an hour one day, I hit a trolley car on the tail end. He didn't even know he got hit, but you should have seen my car with the headlights hanging down and the radiator pushed in against the fan. But I felt that I could handle things. And during this period, I even gave up driving when I was drinking. I'd leave the car parked in town and take a cab home. And finally, one night, well, I remember the night very well. It was the 11th of June, 1952. I picked myself up off of the floor of my car. After having been unconscious drunk for an unknown number of hours, I was laying in a puddle of half-digested scotch, and I wiped it out of my eyes, and I came to believe that something had to be done about this mess because I couldn't live this way any longer. There wasn't any purpose in it. Alcohol wasn't giving me the comfort that it used to give me. It was giving me nothing but grief. My home life was just an impossible endurance contest. It was just a matter of time until I moved out and arrangements were being made for me to move out my business was uh on shaky ground again although we were in the middle of the korean situation and there were government contracts in the plant and the plant was practically running itself so i had plenty of time to drink and there was plenty of money to drink on but i couldn't get along with me there was something wrong here now this isn't something that was brought on by religious convictions because I had none. This was something brought on strictly by the physical sickness and the mental sickness. I was just mentally beat and physically beat, and I didn't know which end was up, and I was sure I was going out of my mind, and I figured either I have to stop drinking or I have TO STOP LIVING. I didn' t make the ultimate decision that night of how I was going to do it, but the next day after a couple of double-headers in the same bar that I tied this historic load on in, I made a decision to call AA. Now, this in itself is very strange in my case. There was no one in that bar except the bartender and myself. Nobody suggested AA to me. I didn't know anybody in AA, I didn t know if there was AA in Philadelphia, but I had read an article some years before while I was on the wagon and my wife and I had a good laugh over it, over the fact that I didn d belong to that organization. I wasn't an alcoholic at the time I was on the wagon. It stuck, apparently, because that is what entered my mind sitting there at that bar with a glass, a double shot of scotch in front of me. And that's another strange thing. That last six months that I drank was the only time in my entire life that I ever drank scotch. I was always a brandier whiskey drinker. and for some strange reason I got touted on the scotch because it didn't give you a hangover oh what hangovers I was such a sick pup but I stuck with the scotch anyway and I finished my my scotch I I never threw a drink away I finished that last drink and I said to the bartender Jack this will be my last drink God willing it has been and will be and that was 20 years ago now I didn't know how to go about finding AA I went back to my office which was right around the corner from the bar and I pulled out the telephone book and lo and behold there were addresses and phone numbers and the next day I found AA the next day I found the Philadelphia Intergroup. It was there when that old gentleman who is no longer with us held out his hand and said, My name is Ed, and I'm an alcoholic. Can we help you? I came to believe in the human race. Here was a man who didn't know me from Adam. He didn't whether I was out to con him or what, but he was there to help. He said, Do have a drinking problem. He didn't say, are you an alcoholic? Because at that point I'd have said, no, I didn't know whether I was an alcoholic or not. But I knew I had a drinking problem and I said, yes, I have a drink problem. And he told me some of his story and he explained to me what an alcoholic was. That an alcoholic is a person who had an abnormal reaction to alcohol coupled with an obsession to drink. That simple. That simple that if an alcoholic doesn't put one drink into his system, he cannot react to the chemical alcohol and therefore has a choice and retains that choice as long as he doesn't do it. He doesn't want to put that alcohol into his systems, but once the alcohol gets in there, he no longer has a chance because it ceases to be a mental thing and becomes purely physical. I bought it on the spot. i have found nothing in the past 20 years to disprove this theory i have read everything that the medical profession and the psychiatric profession have printed about alcoholism and have found nothing yet to disrove the theory that a.a came up with 37 years ago that the alcoholic reacts to alcohol and it's that simple stay away from the first drink and you can't get drunk it is that damn simple we don't need all kinds of mumbo-jumbo and we don' t need all kind of degrees of alcoholism and alphabeta, you name it. The alcoholic reacts to alcohol. At that moment I accepted the fact that I was an alcoholic. I was so relieved to find out that that was all that was wrong with me. I have never disliked the word alcoholic I love it Much better than the things I had been called Much better Much easier to swallow Now I knew what I was Now I know who I was I was an alcoholic It didn't take very long in AA To find out that You have to replace something for the bottle that you're removing out of your life, no matter how much self-knowledge we have about this disease of alcoholism. Still, our great enemy when we're dry isn't a desire to drink. Our great enemy is our desire to run from the problems of living because life is that enemy. Life is the thing that is pressuring us. Life is a thing that pushing us. Life was the thing that drove me to my first drink when I was in my teens. It wasn't devastating at that time. It was comforting. Life is the thing that encourages the other a hundred million non-alcoholic drinkers in this country to take a drink to relax, to take a drink, to limber up their tongue. It isn't just the taste of alcohol that they go after it's the result the feeling that it gives now after many years of dependence on this feeling it's not easy to part company with it unless we can replace it with something and that's something that we replace it has to be faith it has to be in something besides the bottle when i came into aa i did not believe in the spiritual higher power as most religions bring it out. I didn't believe that God had anything to do with my coming into AA, nor would he have anything to deal with my staying sober. I came to believe in the group. I came for the sake of the church. I came in to believe in people in the groups. I came into belief in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous which would keep me away from the urge to run for that first drink. because that's what it would be. It wouldn't be my tongue hanging out for a drink. It would be that old panic button again, running from some living problem that had become that unbearable, that I would be willing to throw all of this into the soup. And in the beginning, it's not hard to throw. You know, you don't have that much. We hang on by our teeth and we're uncomfortable as the devil in the beginning. And so what are we throwing? You know, that drink looks awful good to us. But after a little bit and you begin to realize that there is something here in this program that you can accomplish these living problems without a drink, you can become comfortable without a drank, then your sobriety begins to become very valuable to you and you begin seeking new and better and deeper ways of believing. I think I was around AA for about three years before I actually believed that the prayers that I was saying, and I was singing prayers every day because my sponsors told me, ask God's help through the day and if you get through the night, if you can't get through today without a drink, say thank you. And I did it. I didn't mean it, but I did. Had they told me when I came in to go to the corner of Broaden Chestnut, let's say, and stand on my head and rub some horse manure in my left ear, and that would keep me sober. I would have done it also. That is how much I didn't want to drink when I first came into AA. And knowing all about that first drink theory, I thought this was all I had to know. You know, I was very cocky. I was very, very cocksure of myself. I figured, you know, they said just take it a day at a time, and I said, nah, this is for life. I mean it. This is for live. It took me a while to get onto that day-at-a-time proposition. Of course, like everybody else, I've done it a day at the time. But up here, you know, it's a little more difficult to bring the grandiose ideas down to day-tight compartments, because we alcoholics don't normally think that way. We think in terms of the world and the universe, not just one miserable day. I said the prayers they told me, if you don't believe it, fake it. It can't do you any harm. Can't do any harm? What? I mean, it's insurance. Maybe it'll work for you. Who knows? Maybe it will work. There was a piece many years ago in a grapevine that said, I think I can quote it, that I'd rather die having prayed to God and find out that there is no God than die having not believed in God and found out that there is a God. And I think this fits into the picture here. I mean, what have you got to lose? It just might be true, so try the prayers, you know. I think from the day or from a couple of days after I came into AA, I have always said that prayer. I have never missed it. And there came a day in my life, maybe three years sober, when an occurrence happened to me that I might as well relate it because it may sound silly to some, but it was a tremendous spiritual awakening to me. I was up in Hartford, Connecticut on a business trip and I was with a group of engineers and we were trying to come to terms on some specifications they had given me on a job that couldn't be met and I WAS trying to have them eased and we WERE at each other's throats all morning and finally they decided to go out to lunch and they took me to the Hartford Club and I believe there were six of us all together I was the only non-drinker in the bunch, and they had cocktails, and this didn't faze me at all because after three years and being in business and going out with clients, I was accustomed to turning down a drink at lunch. There wasn't any problem here, and we had lunch, and after lunch the waiter came around for the dessert orders, and among the desserts was a maple walnut sundae, and apple pie and jello. I remember these things distinctly because this entire episode was etched as if by fire on my mind, and I ordered apple pie. Now, I'm an ice cream nut. I love ice cream. I love gooey sundaes, and i ordered apple tie, and when it was out of my mouth, I could have bit my tongue, you know, and yet when the waiter came around with the sundaees for everybody else at the table, they reeked of rum. They were covered with a full jigger of rum every one of those Sundays and I'm sitting there with apple pie in front of me and I felt as if the blood just ran out of me, you know? And I said thank you God and that time I meant it. And I haven't doubted since that day that there are times in our lives when we are incapable, and it says so in the big book but I didn't quite believe it. There are times in our lives when we are incapable of our own volition and our own strength to keep ourselves sober. There are times when the decision is not given to us, when the decision is so difficult for us that it is taken out of our hands, and I believe that this day was one of those times. The decision was made for me because I had asked for help. On that day, I came to believe that a power greater than myself, that not only restore me to sanity but could keep me sober, that could give me what the bottle used to give me. And I began experimenting with that power. Now, to this day, I don't know what that power is. I call that power God because God is a word that is interpreted by, if there are eight, nine hundred people in this room, I guess eight, 900 different interpretations. But each and every one of those interpretations leads to one ultimate thing, a supreme power, the ultimate, the final authority. We all believe this in our devious manners. I believe this also. But how this ultimate authority, this ultimate power shapes up. I have not been able to paint a picture. I do not have a clear-formed picture in my mind of God. God to me is a feeling. It's something that I know is there. It is something thatI know that I can latch on to at will. It issomething that Ican plug into just like the electric socket in the wall and draw strength from. Now, I was told this when I came into AA by some of the older members that we have to put our faith in a power greater than ourselves. The group that I came from was very cagey about scaring newcomers out of the group. We didn't talk too much about God. We didn'T talk too mUch about the steps. We didn'T talk too muCh about spiritual. They said, you have to believe in something that's bigger than you. You have to belief that there is a power. It can be a radiator. It can by a chair. You know, I rebelled with this. I didn't like that interpretation. And yet I have seen it work. I have see it work I saw one gentleman come into AA and he was told that he had to believe in a power greater than himself and his sponsor's name was Harry and this guy used to get down on his knees every night and say, please Harry, keep me sober. and the man is sober 27 years and Harry is long since dead but this please Harry bit only lasted for a week or so until Harry was replaced by God as this individual understood him because Harry straightened him out when he heard about it he says look you're not supposed to pray to me you're supposed to come to me for help if you need it but you pray to God as you understand him No, we're not supposed to become gods, and some of us sometimes think we are. I've had my comeuppances in this department too because I have tried to will someone sober. I have try to exert my will, put someone in the hospital, pay the bill even, pick them up afterwards, take them to a meeting, and then watch them go home and get drunk, and and say, Why? Where did I fail? Now, it wasn't me that failed. It took me a long time to find this out. I can't play God. I can only be an instrument. But it's great being an instrument." I have come to an understanding that to me is comfortable. I believe very strongly that God's will for me is my conscience. I believe very strongly that there isn't too much doubt in my mind of what is right and what is wrong for me. I don't have to spend hours or days or frustrating periods of nerve-wracking, tearing my hair out of what's God's Will. I know! My conscience tells me what God's Well is. When it's wrong, it kicks up. I feel it. And I know it's not God's well. And I have a system that I use That works for me very nicely If I want comfort If I wanna stay comfortable with myself When in doubt, don't And this works I apply the serenity prayer in this manner There are many things in this life That I could never have accepted On the basis of forever But I have been able to accept all of these things on the basis of just for today. So I have added to the serenity prayer, God grant me the serENITY to accept the things I cannot change just for TODAY. Over the years there have been many things that I have granted the courage to change and the wisdom to know the difference. things that were unchangeable years ago have become changeable and things that i thought were changeable then i have found out there isn't any point in beating my brains out any longer i might as well accept them i think this is the name of the game comfort we're here to make peace with ourselves because if we don't make peace with ourselves we can't live in this world around us we can't live soberly. And the only way that we can make peace with ourselves is to come to believe in something bigger than we are. Now, this takes time. The eleventh step brings out very strongly the long, drawn-out process that coming to believe is, where it tells us that we try to improve our conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation. We try to approve it, meaning that what we have isn't good enough. It's good enough for today, but for tomorrow, with a little bit more sobriety and a little stronger moral convictions and a bit more honesty, it isn't enough. We need a better brand of sobrietry as we go along. The things that were right for me 20 years ago, many of them are no longer right for us today. the things that were morally acceptable 20 years ago or 10 years ago take on an entirely different pattern today, take on entirely different meaning today, because my concepts have changed. I have always been a believer that our spiritual well-being and our spiritual understanding is a personal thing and should be based on personal beliefs. I still believe this. I still belief that you cannot be true, nor can you abide by a set of principles that you do not believe. You can be the most avid churchgoer. You can go four times a day. But if you don't believe inside, and I repeat, believe means irrevocable. for sure this is so if you don't believe you're not getting anything you're no longer you're now getting a thing out of your religion we have to believe and what better place to start than the beliefs that we have inside of us from childhood the childish rights and wrongs that we know from way back yes, you can do this no, you cant and begin from there There are many, many moral concepts that I disagreed with violently when I came into AA that I have acquired since. When I came in, I used this rugged individualist code. I will believe in my principles, the hell with society's principles. If they don't coincide with mine, they have to go. but you know as you begin to become a member of that society and as you begin to watch other people who abide by those principles they rub off and you begin to believe in the other guy's principles and you begin to add to your own small set of rights and wrongs and the first thing you know you're just as stiff necked as the next guy as far as moral principles go because we want to belong We want to be a part of this great, great organization that has given us life and that has given us hope and has given his faith. And in order to be apart, we have to learn to sacrifice some of our old ideas, some of old way-out principles, and conform, make the concessions. I've made a lot of compromises in the past 20 years, a lot of compromises with me. I have compromised on a lot of things that I would have preferred to do, but eventually that sixth step got to me. You know, that's tough, that becoming entirely ready to have God remove all these defects. These defects are me. This is what makes up my whole character. Without the defects, I have no character. I used this argument for years. But you You know, and them defects get to the point where they're making you uncomfortable. And those defects get to the part of your body that says, get to a point where you know you know that this is what's wrong that this has got you entertaining the thought of a drink again then by sheer weight of guilt, let's say or conscience, you become entirely ready whether you want to or not. I have used these six and seven steps many times to straighten myself out i think that we're practicing the seventh step when we humbly ask god not to take a drink for the day i think that was my worst shortcoming and i've practiced this step successfully in that direction for all these years i found that i could do the same thing with smoking i haven't smoked in five years now it works and i'm applying it in other directions I find that the mornings that I ask for help with my miserable temper and disposition, I'm a much sweeter guy to get along with for the day. And I can recognize this. I can realize these defects in myself. I reflect them off of other people, and I feel ashamed of myself when I exercise them. All of this has come about because I have come to believe in this power that I call God and that I can call upon at will. I found that I can plug in. I can plug in at the ungodliest times and the power seems to emanate from within me. It doesn't come from outside. I don't get messages. I do not get special delivery letters. I ask God for help on a job. He does not get into the shop and run the lathe. I do it. But for some strange reason, I get an added jolt of energy to do it with. Or I get the added jolt of intelligence to think with that I didn't have before. And this comes from that power that I don't know, but that I can feel and that I call God as I understand him. Over the years, I have come to believe very strongly that power greater than myself can restore me to sanity, to comfort. And I think sanity is comfort. Because sanity to me in that second step means the avoidance of all mental conflict. Sanity means that there are no longer any obsessions, whether they be obsessions to drink or obsessions to do other things. A mind that's obsessed and a mind that is full of fear is not a sane mind. It's not necessarily insane, but it is not a totally sane mind. And I think this is what this step is aiming at, to restore us to this peace that can be had if we have the faith to apply to these fears that are besetting us. And it's fear, it's fear. Fear of failure is one of the big ones. The obsessions to get things done that we know we can't, we know we shouldn't. The obsession to drink which leaves very quickly if you put some faith in this power and some faith in this program and latch on, hang on with your fingernails if necessary but hang on to something bigger than you. Even if he's only four foot ten but he's got sobriety and you haven't he's bigger than you hang on to it if he is your sponsor because that's a power greater than you at this point in your life. Now, I feel that restoration to sanity, like everything else in this program, is a temporary thing. Everything in this programme is given to us for today. Only for today there is no lasting effect. I know very few people who have graduated from this programme and gone on to a comfortable existence without it. A good many of them Some have gotten drunk. Those who haven't gotten drunk are living reasonably miserable lives. I say miserably because I see the old fears, the old complexes, the all frustrations coming back. They are not the same calm, comfortable people that they were when they were attending AA and doing the work at AA, because I feel that AA goes beyond just going to meetings. You have to give of yourself. You have to get into this program, give it away to keep it. Now, this program is a wonderful, wonderful way of life for today. But it's always today. We can't project into the future beyond the normal necessities. I mean, we have to pay our insurance premiums. I mean let's be reasonable. I don't work this week to eat this week. I work this week to eat next month maybe, because I have worked in past weeks and have enough money to eat this week. But you can't live your life more than one day at a time. There is no guarantee that we will be here tomorrow to live this life. Everything that I have is loaned to me. I can't take it with me. The only thing that I can take with me, and then I can't take it, I can leave a respect for me, for my memory. I can takethe well wishes of the people I leave behind if I have lived a life worthy of that kind of respect. This is the only thing I cantake out of this world with me Everything else that I have is loaned to me just for today. Now, how I handle it is up to me. This program works one day at a time, and each day that you work it, you are assuring yourself in your own mind that there's going to be a future. None of us could live with the thought in mind that this is our last day. we all believe that there's a future for us. We plan our lives around a future. There wouldn't be any purpose in staying sober today if we didn't figure that there was going to be a tomorrow or at least hope that there is going to have a future and that there would be a future and that we were going to get drunk. We'd go out and get drunk, what would be the great big deal? How much harm can we do if we're not going to get up tomorrow? This was the way I was drinking just before I quit. I was hoping I wouldn't wake up for tomorrow. But today, I hope that I will. And I plan on it. If it happens that I don't, again, I have nothing to lose. It has been a good day. But today I hope I will, and I plan it. If it happen that I do not, again I have nothing to lose. It has been a good day. It has been a good 20 years of days back-to-back. So all I can say in closing is a little phrase that's in the 24-hour book, I believe, that if you can stay sober today, you can stay sober the rest of your life because it's always today. Thank you. Thank you. Ted, that was a wonderful lead this morning on I Came to Believe. And I'm certain that you've left many a thought with the group here this morning. I appreciate being your chairman, and I hope to see you soon sometime. If we will now stand, we will dismiss this morning's meeting. I would like to have you all clasp your hands in our sense of unity and repeat after me the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. us this day from daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.