The Bell That Isn’t a Bell Until You Ring It – Joe P.

my name is Joe Peterson I'm an alcoholic hi everybody first thing I really have to do is tell you how much I have enjoyed this weekend I was excited nine months ago when Bill called me to ask me if I could come to Duluth to share with you this morning. I got even more excited when I got here on Friday, and it has just been a marvelous exhibition of Alcoholics Anonymous in action, what we all have experienced in the last three days. This stuff really works. I want to thank the committee for inviting me. I get an opportunity, as Jim does, to do this quite often. And because I have had that, I have those opportunities quite often, I have an opportunity this weekend to compare the hospitality that I have enjoyed here with some other places that I've been. And I'll tell you something, you guys in Duluth know how to do it. And you might want to ask Mike sometime in the near future how he was able to lose me about an hour after he met me. It's too long a story for me to tell you this morning, but if you ask Mike, he'll tell you how it happened. I have four things that every alcoholic should have. I have a sobriety date, June 25th, 1980. I have a home group I have a home group it's the only home group I've ever had it's a step group the Joppa Town 12 step group I've been a member of that home group since the day I came to Alcoholics Anonymous I have a sponsor a sponsor who has been sober for 43 years and has shared his whole recovery experience with me and maybe the most important thing without question the most important thing that i have is an absolute belief in a god of my understanding that you all taught me how to put in place let me share with you though the importance of of a sobriety date this is especially for the new people I got to tell you this story a year or so ago I was speaking at a conference and there was another speaker from California by the name of Kurt M. from San Diego and he told a story about his sobriety date he told the story about a young man that he was sponsoring and really new in sobriery, maybe a month, two months very short period of time and there came a time after a couple months when he didn't see him as often as he would like to have the guy kind of went his own way and they didn't lose contact but he hadn't seen him in quite a while and he came across him at a meeting and he said to him, how long have you been sober now? And the guy said well I had 90 days but I drank last night So now I only have 89. Now, so if you're new, that's not the way we count. So sobriety dates are very important. I'll tell you one story that will clearly demonstrate to you how I belong in Alcoholics Anonymous. many years before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous I had a place in Ocean City, Maryland and every weekend 52 weeks a year I would make the drive from Baltimore to Ocean City Maryland and this went on for a long long time and most of the time I would do it drunk and it seemed like every time I would do it junk I would make some kind of a half-assed commitment to myself that I wasn't going to do that again. And the next weekend, the same thing would happen. This one weekend in particular comes to mind. On my way to Ocean City, I left my office for lunch on a Friday afternoon. I left for lunch at the normal time, 10 o'clock, and decided that I'm going to stop at the local watering hole and have some lunch before I make this three-hour drive to Ocean City. So I get to the bar, and I have a couple drinks, and someone bought me a drink, andI bought them a drink. And you know how that goes. And I'm not even thinking about lunch before you know it. It's 12 o'clock, and somebody is still buying me drinks, and I'm still buying them drinks. And to make a long story short, at about 3 o' clock, I finally get out of that place having been there since 10 o'clock in the morning to make this three hour drive to Ocean City and I get out on the highway and I'm not five minutes away from that place when I have one hand over one eye now I don't think I have to explain that to any of you we all know what that does but as I'm driving down the road with one hand over One Eye, this commitment that I made last week that I'm not going to do this again, came back to me. And I'm starting to get irritated with myself and furious. You have done it again. Just last week you said that you would not let this happen again. And the farther I got away from that bar and the closer I got to Ocean City, the more irritated I got with myself. You have don't it again." So I finally get to Ocean city. and as I arrive in Ocean City, I have come up with the answer. I've got the solution now. When I got to Ocean City I bought an eye patch. Now the good news about the eye patch is you could move it from one eye to the other. But isn't it interesting how in the depths of alcoholism that we seem to think we always have the answers, when the real truth is we really don't know enough to ask the question. Alcohol for me, as I am sure for many of you, was the solution for a long, long time for me. You know, it gave me strength, it give me courage, it gives me abilities to do things I thought I couldn't do without drinking. But there came a point in time when the answer became a problem. and what I didn't realize as that happened was that once the answer became a problem it could never be the answer again and yet I chased that delusion for a long, long time always looking for the answer never ever able to focus on the problem I will tell you that when I was 30 years old I had what the third tradition calls the only requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous the desire to stop drinking I wanted to stop drinking when I was 30 years old. Because at age 30, I could see that all of the problems that were going on in my life were the direct result of how much I drank. Every time I got in trouble, alcohol was a major factor. I didn't get in trouble every time I drank, but every time i was in trouble alcohol was a major fact. So I had the answer, I had a solution. The solution was obviously stop drinking. What I didn't have at age 30 was the ability to make that happen. Had you called me an alcoholic when I was 30 years old, I would have denied it. I would had admitted to you that there may be an occasion or two when I drink a little bit too much, but an alcoholic? No, not me. I was too young. You know, I had stuff. I had a family and a house and a job and a car and a wristwatch. Alcoholics don't have that kind of stuff. I remember one time an old-timer was talking to a new guy, and he said, you know, this guy over here, he's not ready yet. And he said why not? He said he's still got a wrist watch. But denial is a thing I have discovered that kills alcoholics. Didn't know it as it was happening to me, but I did so many things as part of that denial process. You see, because I couldn't be an alcoholic maybe for the same reasons that many of you made that same statement. I can't. I'm not an alcoholic because I know what an alcoholic is. The bum in the doorway with a brown paper bag, that's an alcoholic. That wasn't me. And that description probably doesn't fit many people in this room. But I knew that that was the alcoholic and it couldn't be me. And the denial was so strong. I used to do things to hide the way I looked and to hide how I felt. To hide the ways I acted. I used so much murine, it showed up in my urine specimen. You have to hide those eyes. So at age 30, I realized that I had a problem. and I set out to try to, my mindset at age 30 was that if I could stop drinking the trouble wouldn't happen as often maybe it wouldn't be as severe maybe life would get a little bit better so the answer was crystal clear so I tried to stop drinking and I can't tell you how many times I tried every day, I mean I would wake up in the morning, and I would say to myself, you have got to do something today so it doesn't turn out like yesterday. Now, I didn't know what I was going to do today so it didn't turn out yesterday, but being a good alcoholic, I would say, well, I better take a drink first so I can make this decision with a clear head. And what I didn�t realize then and realize clearly now is that when I took that drink in the morning, that day was over for me. Alcohol had won again and I had lost again. I made real conscious effort into trying to control drinking. And when I finally realized I couldn't stop no matter what I tried, no matter how hard I tried. No matter how often I tried I couldn t stop. When an alcoholic is confronted with that you try to stop drinking and you find out that you can t. When a alcoholic is confronted with it you say to yourself if I can t stop I'm going to do the next best thing. I'm gonna control it. I'm gunna control how much I drink, how often I drink what I drink where I drink who I drink with and that list just goes on and on and well I can make a very long story short by telling you I spent the next 17 years of my life trying to find some form of control that would work and nothing ever worked it just kept getting worse Now, you may have thought, I'm a fairly well-educated person. You may have taught in that whole 17-year period of time, I might have come across the thought that even by accident, maybe none of this stuff that you're trying to do to control your drinking, to control your behavior when you drink, maybe none of this is working because you're powerless over alcohol. Well, that thought never entered my mind. I had to come here and have someone and Alcoholics Anonymous tell me that therein was the source of the problem. That's why all of those things that I tried in all of these years that I've been a part of in all those years that i tried them nothing ever worked because i was powerless over alcohol i got to Alcoholics Anonymous in a miraculous way at least i believe it's miraculous i lost it exactly as the big book describes it There were the threefold stages of alcoholism, spiritually, mentally, physically. I had long since lost it spiritually before I came here. I was a spiritual zero. My relationship with God when I came here was let's make a deal. God get me out of this and I won't do it again. Anybody else ever say that or was I the only one? See, we call that in Alcoholics Anonymous us a foxhole prayer. But I'll tell you what I know about that. God knows the difference between a fox hole prayer and a sincere plea for help from an alcoholic. When I made that sincere plea of help, I wound up in Alcoholics Anonymous. But that was my spiritual condition by the time I got to AA. I once heard alcoholism described, listen carefully to this, it's heavy. I once heard alcoholism described as the total wasting of the spirit. What a powerful message that was when I first heard it, because it described exactly how I was, exactly how I was living, exactly what I was feeling when I finally got to Alcoholics Anonymous. Totally wasted in spirit. That zest for life that I once had was gone. Every spiritual value that I ever attached to life was gone. Everything in life that used to make life worth living was gone Alcoholism took away the love from my wife the respect from my children and every spiritual value that I never had in my life including every ounce of self-respect The total wasting of the spirit The good news is that from the day I came to Alcoholics Anonymous the awakening of that spirit began and it has continued on uninterrupted now for over 26 years the awakening of the spirit how Alcoholics Anonymous can take a totally irresponsible bum like me bring him into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and teach him spiritual values which will give meaning to his life that's what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous so I had lost it spiritually I had lost it mentally. Blackouts were a daily occurrence. I had blackouts that lasted hours, days, weeks, where I would function like a seemingly normal person and not remember what I did. That's a blackout. But it was when I lost it physically that I got the attention of my family. By the time I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I only weighed up 118 pounds. My color had gone from normal to yellow to gray. That's the last stage before death, so they tell me. I had no motivations to do anything other than to drink. Totally wasted in spirit. And it was when I started to lose it physically that it got the attention of my family. And the family decided to have a meeting. Now, I've got to tell you, it's not a good sign when the family has a meeting and you're not invited. That's not a good time. They had many meetings to which I wasn't invited, and I am sure that I was the topic of conversation. They were trying to figure out what the hell to do with me, maybe how to help me. None of my family members were alcoholic. I wasn't from a dysfunctional family. If I had a dysfunctionally family, it was because I was the dysfunctional member of that family. I remember, you know, there's a part in the big book that talks about we seek lower companionship. Well, hell, all I had to do to seek lower companionship was look in a mirror. There it was. Lower companionship, I have a vivid recollection of being in a bar in East Baltimore dressed in my three-piece suit and I'm in this redneck bar and it's got everything but a dirt floor. And I got thrown out of that place. And all I was trying to do was put out a fire in a trash can. Now, they didn't appreciate the apparatus I was using to put out the fire. And they told me to get the hell out of there and never come back. That's seeking lower companionship. So the family had this meeting and at one of these meetings that they had, someone remembered that there was a guy who I used to drink with and they knew that he had gotten sober. They didn't know how, but they knewthat he had got sober and they decided to try to contact him to see if he could help me. Now, God put this man in my life on two separate occasions. The first time God put him in my life was when I literally saw this guy become an alcoholic. I watched it all happen right in front of my very eyes. Now, I watched this guy. At one point in time, he was a very successful business person, made a ton of money, had this big house, this beautiful wife, nice family. He was a Boy Scout leader, an usher in church. I mean, he lived the American dream. And I watched his life. I watched him drink it all away. You know, I couldn't figure out as I was going through this 17-year stage of the control mode. What was so difficult about what I was trying to do here? Why couldn't I leave work, stop on the way home from work, have two beers and get the hell out of there? I could never do that. I could not do that at all. I would never do it. I would ever make my wife understand how it could take me 20 minutes to get to work and seven hours to get home. But it was always like that. That's alcoholism. Well, this guy was one of those people who used to be able to stop at the bar on the way home from work, had two beers and get the hell out of there. There came a time though when he started staying a little bit longer and a little Bit longer. And before you knew it, he was there for as long as we were us alcoholics. And I remember saying to him one time, do you know what? If you don't do something about your drinking, you're going to suffer some serious consequences. Bartender, give me another beer. Well, this guy just kept drinking and it got way out of control. And he drank to a point where I saw him lose it all. I saw him lose that job. I see him lose his wife and his family. I saw him loose his home, and all of his worldly possessions. He just went downhill like a freight train out of control, and I watched it all happen to him. Now this very same type person may have been in your life too if you really get honest with yourself. That person to whom we compare our behavior, that person of whom we say if I ever get as bad as him or her I'll do something about it and how we as alcoholics can rationalize that kind of thinking. Common sense which we're not famous for using would tell us why wait until it gets that bad? Why don't you do something about it right now, but we can't ever bring that kind of thinking to any logical conclusion. So that was the first time God put him in my life when I literally saw this guy lose it all. There came a day at the end after he had lost it all, he spent all day every day in the bar. I mean, he was there if you went in the morning, if you want in the afternoon, if you went into evening, he was there. There came a day when he stopped coming. He just disappeared one day. Nobody knew what happened to him. We thought maybe he had died and we missed the funeral. I mean, he just disappeared into thin air. This is the guy my family called. This was the guy that convinced me to come to Alcoholics Anonymous. The second time God put him in my life, he's sober and he's a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. And my family finally contacted him and told him the condition that I was in and asked him if he thought he could help me. And being a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, of course he agreed to call me. The call came one night, and we renewed our friendship over the telephone, and out of the clear blue, he said to me, are you having a problem with drinking? Which I thought was a rather strange question for that dude to be asking me. But somehow I answered yes. And he said, well, maybe I can help you. I said, what do you mean? He said, I haven't had a drink in seven years. And I said how did you do that? He said I went to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I was like, I don't know. And I asked him, I said no kidding. Spiritual program, you see. I said it got that bad, huh? He said, you could say that. But the people in Alcoholics Anonymous took me by the hand. They taught me some simple things which enabled me to get sober. Some more simple things which showed me how to stay sober. And then some more simple things which led me to understand how I could enjoy sobriety. And he said, the same thing can happen to you. Go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He couldn't take me to Alcoholic Anonymous because he was calling me long distance from North Carolina which is where he was living. I was getting a tiny message of hope through this telephone line from 500 miles away and the message of hope was based on the premise that if this thing worked for him having known the kind of drunk that he was, having seen him lose it all, if this worked for Him, maybe it might work for me. Now that's a tiny strand of hope He shared some things with me that night where I thought it was bad for him the last time I saw him, it got a whole lot worse before it got better. But then he started talking about what his life was like today and how the people in Alcoholics Anonymous helped him and how the simplicity of the program and how he was able to put his family structure back together again. And with everything he shared with me, that tiny strand of hope got reinforced. It got a little bit stronger. I really became interested in what he had to say. I was able to reach that night, what I know to be my moment of truth. Now, I believe that that's what each of us has to reach before any recovery can take place. That moment of Truth for an alcoholic is that moment that we get honest with ourselves about what we are. That moment that denial becomes a thing of the past. If you're new, don't confuse a moment of truth with reaching bottom. And I'll tell you why I say that. I, like many of you, have seen people come to Alcoholics Anonymous and say those very words. I reach bottom and I'm here. And they stick around for a period of time and They go back out and drink again. And if they come back to us, that bottom that was here is now down here somewhere. I believe bottom for an alcoholic is an indefinable term. I don't know where bottom is. What I do know is that each of us has to reach that moment of truth. And here's how it happened for me. As my friend was sharing his story with me, I interrupted him and said, You know I'm not as bad as you were. and he said to me, how bad do you want to get? That became my moment of truth. It was at that moment that I realized that I had gone down as far as I wanted to go. It was a moment of peace It was it that moment that a surrender took place. It was that moment that my recovery began. Now the lights didn't flash and the bells didn't ring and the thunder didn't clap but I know that that became my moment of truth and the reason why I know it is is that I walked over to the sink and I poured out a glass of whiskey and I haven't had a drink since and that's the power of Alcoholics Anonymous that's what can happen when you take that tiny strand of hope and you bring it to the rooms of Alcoholic Anonymous and let these beautiful people show you how to convert it to use that's exactly what I did I came to Alcoholics Anonymous the next day. My friend said, look them up in the phone book. You'll find them under A. Well, that's not as easy as it sounds. But I tell you what, if you get more than one A, if you gets three As, they'll send you to Alcoholic Anonymous. So I did what my friend told me to do. The next day, I looked them up on the phonebook and I found them and I called. It was Northeastern, a group in Maryland. And a lady answered the phone and I did what my friend told me to do. I said, I want to go to an AA meeting and I don't know where they are. And she said, well, where do you live? And I thought she was getting too damn personal. I say, well I live in Joppa town. And she said well there's a meeting in Joppatown tonight. And I said tonight? How lucky can I get, huh? He probably got one meeting a month, and I picked that day to call Alcoholics Anonymous. So she told me where that meeting was, and then she said, would you like me to send someone to pick you up? And I said, no thank you. I didn't want that big yellow bus showing up out in front of my house with that big AA sign on the side of it. What would the neighbors think, huh? well I'll tell you what the neighbors would have thought they'd have helped me on the damn bus is what they would have done so I went to that meeting that night this is the next day after the telephone call and on the way to the meeting the disease is making one final attempt to keep me away from you the disease is saying stuff to me in my head like maybe you've made an error in judgment here you know you drink too much but with what your friend shared with you, you put that in place and maybe you don't need all this AA crap you don' t have to go to all these damn meetings, you don´t have to get involved with this bunch of losers, the gloom and doom society, you´ll never be able to laugh again, smile again have a good time like I had been having a hell of a lot of fun lately your life is over Joseph, that´s what the disease was trying to tell me on the way to that meeting Thank God the message of hope that my friend left with me was strong enough to help me overcome what the disease was trying to tell me on the way to that meeting. And I walked into that meeting, and I'm looking for the guy, and this is on June 25th, 1980. I'm Looking for the Guy with Two Overcoats and a Brown Paper Bag, the alcoholic, right? And I walk into a room full of people who look just like you all, neat, clean, well-dressed, look like you had some purpose in life. And my first thought was, I wonder where the alcoholics are. And somebody banged on the table and we all sat down and I said, Well, I guess we're all here for the same reason. They're going to start the meeting, bring the drunks in, show us what they look like and say, If you keep drinking, this is what's going to happen. Of course, that isn't what happened. I soon found out that indeed I belonged. There was a guy who spoke that night and he said a lot of things that I didn't understand. I remember clearly there was a lot of God talk which I thought was a little bit strange to be in an AA meeting but he said a lot OF things that I didn' t understand. But after the meeting I walked up to him and I did what my friend told me to do. I stuck out my hand and I said, My name's Joe. I want to stop drinking and I don't know how. He said, Maybe I can help you. I said well what I really want to know is how do you get sober? And he looked me right in the eye and said, Don't drink. And there was this long pause in which I'm waiting for the philosophical ideological analytical explanation of exactly how that's going to happen and he isn't saying a word finally he said that's the way we get sober we don't drink and if you don't drank one day at a time guaranteed sobriety I said well I don't know how to do that he said I will make a suggestion to you that I know will work if you put it in place. This is the very first suggestion that was made to me in Alcoholics Anonymous. He said, if you really want to get sober, what you're going to have to do is make a daily commitment to yourself. And the daily commitment is I'm not going to drink today. And I left. I said, that'll never work. I used to do that all the time. What the hell kind of an answer is that he said i'm glad to hear you say that because you can make that daily commitment to yourself today and if you try to keep it by yourself today you're going to fail today just like you did in the past but here's the difference you must make the daily commitment to yourself i'm not going to drink today you must realize that by yourself you can't keep the commitment that you've made to yourself so you bring that commitment to the rooms of alcoholics anonymous and let these people share their strength with you so that one day at a time, you can become strong enough to keep the commitment that you've made to yourself. And that sounded so simple. And indeed it was simple. And that's how I got sober, making the daily commitment, realizing that by myself I couldn't keep it, but with your help I could. I had a mindset about getting sober. My perception of getting sober was that it was going to be the most difficult thing I ever had to do in my life because I had been trying for a lifetime to do it and never, ever got close. And this was the mindset. This was my perception. The degree of difficulty with getting sober, swimming the English Channel, I can't do that. Getting sober, I can'T do that same degree of difficultly, but that was in my head. That was my perception. What I found out was that our perceptions don't always match reality, which reminds me of a story. Elephant walking down the street and he meets a naked man and he looks him up and down and the elephant says to the naked man, how do you breathe through that thing? Now the elephant's perception was such that I don't think I have to explain that. See, our perceptions don't always match reality, drunk or sober. The reality was I found out how to get sober that very first night. Don't drink. That's what happens when you don't drink, you get sober. So I was able to make that daily commitment, bring it to the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and I was unable to stay sober. My perception was it was going to be the most difficult thing I ever had to do. What it turned out to be was a bump in the road that I was able to overcome with the help of people. Now, I don't know where in my alcoholism it became me against the world, but that's the way it was when I came here. I soon discovered that people were going to be important to me. I spent a lifetime building these walls to keep people away from me. Alcoholics Anonymous showed me how to tear those walls down. What I didn't realize as I was building these wall was people couldn't get to me, but I couldn't to them. And now I've got to tear down these walls one brick at a time. And God gave me the opportunity to do that. God put a sponsor in my life. 26 years ago in Maryland, and I'm sure the same story would apply here or any place else in the world. Really, there weren't nearly as many AA meetings as there are today. And every time you went to a meeting, you saw the same nucleus of people because that was where the action was. That was the only show in town. That was where the meeting was, and that's where you went. And every time you got there, it was the same nucleus of people. And after I had been going to meetings for about a week or 10 days, a guy came and said, do you have a sponsor yet? And I said, no. And he said, you do now. And that's how God put my sponsor in my life. And I must tell you that my life hasn't been the same since. I was able to build a sponsored relationship with this guy, which which I will tell you about in a few minutes. But something significant, and that began this sponsored relationship that lasted for a long, long time. Something significant, extremely significant happened to me on the fifth day of sobriety. You know, I'm going to these meetings for four days and I'm hearing a lot of God talk and it's making me very uncomfortable you know i'm one of those who came here knowing that there is a god but having long since lost the ability to communicate with god alcoholism took that away from me the ability to communicate with god you know all of my education was in the catholic religion i had the school sisters of Notre Dame in grade school, the Franciscan fathers in high school, the Jesuits in college. And I survived all of that. But I knew who God was when I came here. The difficulty was and with most alcoholics is the ability to communicate with God. So on the fifth day of sobriety I walk into this room and I sit down at a meeting and a guy pegged me as a newcomer. He sat down maybe it was because I was holding onto the cup of coffee with two hands. I'm trying to hold body and soul together here, hating every day that I'm sober. And it's now been five days because I don't have anything going for me. Anyhow, this guy sat down alongside of me. He pegged me as a newcomer. He said, how do you feel? I said, I feel terrible. He said how long have you been sober? I Said five days. He Said, well, what are you doing to stay sober? And I told him the only thing I knew. I said I clench my fist and grit my teeth. And if I have to say it a thousand times a day. I'm not going to drink today. That's what I do, and it works. He said, sure, it works, but would you like to make it a little easier? And I said, how do you do that? He said、Why don't you ask God to help? Well, that wasn't the answer I wanted to hear. And with as much insufferable arrogance as an alcoholic can get, I said to him, What the hell has God got to do with getting sober? Can you imagine? And he smiled the way an old-timer always will and very gently said to me, you're going to find out that God has everything to do with getting sober. You're goingto find outthat if you do something as simple as I'm going to share with you, that what you're trying to do here will be made a whole lot easier with God's help than it is without. And I couldn't argue with that. And the simple suggestion he made was the alcoholic's prayer. God, please help me stay sober today. It didn't get any more profound than that. that was as simple as he could have made it for me. He said, you say this prayer every day. And then he said three words that changed my life. He said watch what happens. And the reason why those three words are so significantly important to me is that I know that an alcoholic can pray his ass off and if he doesn't watch what happened the miracle can go right over his or her head. so i started saying that simple prayer and what i know now is that now i got more going for me than i'm not going to drink today i'm asking god for help and god has given and god is putting people in my life people that not only are willing to share a message with me but people who are setting an example for me i saw a quality of life in the people that came before me that i became attracted to. I saw a degree of inner peace and patience and tolerance and willingness and serenity in these people that I desperately wanted. You know, I saw the way they seemed to be able to deal with life and get along with people. And I desperately wanted that. And they were setting an example for me. And every one of those people had a two-fold common denominator that they used to explain how they were able to live their life the way they were able to live it. And a two-fold common denominator was, number one, a belief in a higher power, a God of their understanding, and number two was a daily commitment to the spiritual way of life. And that's what made the difference for them. So I started saying that prayer. And this relationship with my sponsor was growing. He was becoming more important to me every day. He was one of those ones that was really setting an up-close and personal power of example for me. I desperately wanted the quality of life that I saw in him. But sponsors, I got to tell you, they can be mean sometimes and they can be nasty sometimes. And they don't always give us the answers we want to hear. Rarely do they give us The Answers That We Want To Hear. I remember a lot of us come here with issues that we want to be resolved or to at least learn how to deal with these issues that we come in here with. And my sponsor and I are having this discussion. Maybe it was a debate. It couldn't have been a debate because I was the only one doing the talking and he was doing the listening. It takes more than one person to have a debate, but we're debating this thing back and forth for a long time, it seemed. And the reason why it took a long time was that he wasn't giving me the answers I wanted to hear so the debate continued until finally one night I said to him you know what Bill you're right and he said to me you're going to get a whole lot more spiritual growth if instead of you telling me that I'm right if you admit to me that you're wrong now I thought that would be the same thing But it really isn't. Not for an alcoholic, it isn't but that's the way he was teaching me, you see. He was the subtle changes that he was sharing with me that made a significant difference in the way I learned how to live my life. We went to meetings every day for a long, long time together and in the early days, very early stages of our relationship between my sponsor and I, I remember he took us to a meeting on the far outskirts of Baltimore and it took about an hour to get there. And when we got there, it was a huge meeting, a couple hundred people. And we walked in and we sat down in the front row which is where we always sat. He called that intensive care. That's where I still sit today by the way. We sat down in the first row in the second row and he got up and went to the bathroom. And while he was gone, the young lady who was the secretary of that meeting came over and said to me, would you like to chair the meeting? And I said, yeah, I can do that. And now my sponsor comes back. And I've got this fear now. I said to him, she asked me to speak at the meeting. He said, what did you tell her? I said I told her I would. He said oh. I said yeah, but now I really don't know what I'm going to talk about. He said, why don't you tell them all you know? That won't take long. A couple months later, we're at a meeting at a Crownsville State Hospital. And he spoke at the meeting and he called on me and I said a few words. And after the meeting, a guy came up to me and said, I really liked what you had to say. You really helped me. And on the way home, I said, Bill, you know, a man who's been in the business and a guy that came up to me after that meeting and said he really enjoyed what I had to say that I really helped him He said, I want to remind you that you just spoke at a mental institution See, that's how we come to love and respect sponsors But let me say a couple words about sponsorship and how important it is I can ask a rhetorical question that I think might give an answer What better way to learn how to do something that we don't know how to do than to ask someone who's already done it, how did you do that? I can give you no better explanation of why you should have a sponsor than that. Sobriety for the new person, living life sober for the new person is uncharted territory. I didn't know what to do. I didn' t know howto live sober. I didn't know how to deal with the unmanageability that that first step talks about. I dragged all of that crap in here with me, and the fear that I had was, how am I going to deal mit all of this stuff without drinking? Alcoholics Anonymous very effectively removed my coping mechanism. I now have to deal wit it sober. That's a scary thought for the new person, and that's why we need a sponsor. who will share with us the simplicity by which we can put things in place that enable us to deal with this crap that we dragged in here with us. The unmanageability doesn't go away just because we stopped drinking. That's what I found out. Over the years, the sponsor relationship, the relationship that I had with my sponsor, grew to a point where a sponsor relationship should take each of us What happens, you know, both parties have to work at a sponsor relationship. If both parties don't work at it, it will never go anyplace. But when both parties, the sponsor and the sponsee, work at this sponsor relationship, here's what happens over a period of time. Over a periodof time, you both develop a mutual feeling of love and respect and trust. and that's when you know a sponsor relationship is working when that trust factor is there my sponsor got me involved in the steps I got involved inthe steps at my reluctance and at his insistence he taught me a common sense approach to applying the 12 steps to the way I live my life everything he shared with me in the implementation of these steps was out of a common sense approach to it. What he shared with me initially was that sobriety without the 12 steps is an endurance contest that an alcoholic will lose and you can take that to the bank and the reason why an alcoholic will lose that endurance contest is that an alcoholist will demand reasons why he should stay sober. the reasons that I stay sober, well, we don't have them here, do we? All the reasons why I stay sober today are the direct result of what the 12 steps have led me to, the way of life that the 12 Steps have led me to. I have more reasons to stay sober today than I ever had excuses to drink. That's a lot of reasons. Bill Wilson once called the 12 Steps a design for living. And that's really what it's all about for you and I. A design for living. If you're new, please don't let the 12 steps overwhelm you by the magnitude of what you perceive them to be. Believe me when I tell you that each one of those steps has a simple, simple implementation. Especially when taken with the suggestions and the experience that a sponsor will give you. a simple implementation for each one of those steps. The journey of recovery begins with admitting what the problem is. And there's an object lesson learned out of that first step, an object lessen learned in living life. If I have a problem going on in my life today, the only way I can reach for any part of the solution is to first define what the program is and accept what the product is. What the problem means. Admit what the problem is. It is only through that part of the process that I can reach for a solution. And alcoholism, recovery from alcoholism is exactly like that. If we don't accept what the problem is, we have no way to focus on the solution. That's why that first step is so important. That's Why You Will Hear in AA that it is the only step that we have to do perfectly. So my sponsor is explaining this step to me And he said, what does it say? I said, it says we admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. He said, right, but that's not going to be strong enough for you. That's what the step says. Of course, that's what you have to do. But if that step is going to have an impact on your life, you're going to have to take admitting it to the next level. And that's the level of acceptance before it will have an impact on Your Life. You have to accept it to the depths of your very being, to your innermost self that you are powerless over alcohol. There will be another principle applied to that step that will give it an impact on your life and that is surrender. Unconditional surrender to powerlessness and to this unmanageability that is in your life. Uncondicional surrender. There's a story told in AA about a guy who came to his first AA meeting and he was so excited about what he heard. His first AA meeting and he heard so much good stuff that he became a convert to Alcoholics Anonymous at that very first meeting. And he went home that night and he took all the booze that he could find in the house and he poured it into the toilet. And three days later, he flushed it. Now, I would submit to you that that is not unconditional surrender. my sponsor had a common sense way of explaining surrender to me in language that I could understand. He said, the war is over, bozo. Alcohol won and you lost. Any questions? But it was only through total acceptance and unconditional surrender that that first step would have an impact on my life. And when that became a part of the recovery process for me and for you, What happens is that if I am powerless, doesn't it make common sense to find a source of power, plug into it, so that you can overcome this powerlessness? And I was introduced with that. Remember on day number five, that prayer that that guy shared with me? God, please help me stay sober today. well you know when I'm saying that prayer every morning that was 26 years ago I still today said that prayer everyday of my life for the last 26 years it's my implementation of the second step God please help me stay sober today is acknowledging the existence of a power greater than himself and asking for his help I can share with you no simpler implementation of that step on a daily basis than that. My suggestion to you would be to say it on your knees. My sponsor said to me, when you say these prayers, say them on your knees God will hear you better when you're on your knees and of course what he was teaching me was the humility the humbling aspect of what these steps would lead me to He knew what an arrogant SOB I was when I came here I came her as the last angry American, that was me angry at everybody, angry at everything, hating everything. And in a relatively short period of time, all of that turned around thanks to the people in Alcoholics Anonymous who shared this simple message with me. But the significance was that relationship between me and God. That simple prayer that that guy taught me on day number five, here's the impact that it had. alcoholism had long since taken away my ability to communicate with God that simple prayer opened up the channel of communication between me and God what I found out was that that channel was blocked with old ideas and old behavior patterns and character defects and shortcomings and guilt and shame and remorse and it was all of that stuff that blocked the sunlight of the spirit. With this God in my life now I was able to remove those obstacles that blocked the sunlight of the Spirit with the help of my sponsor and the further I got into the steps the wider that channel became and the deeper it became so that the power could flow from God who has it all to me who had none. That's the significance of opening that relationship or that God have our understanding. That's what happens when we do something as simple as that. So that second, that simple prayer became my daily implementation of the second step. The insanity that that step talks about, you know, the crazy things that we did when we drank, the behavior patterns that we had. You know, I was reminded that most of the things I did when I was drinking I wouldn't begin to even think of doing when I were sober. I have a clear recollection of winding up in a hotel room having gone to lunch, wind up in a hotelroom someplace and don't know where I am and I look out the window and I see a damn palm tree and I know I'm not in Baltimore and I scratch around and find a telephone booth and find out I'm in Fort Lauderdale don't Know how I got there. Don't know how long I've been there called my office and told my secretary I'm going to be a little late this morning see I thought that was the insanity that kind of behavior there was a lot of that stuff like putting out that fire in a trash can for instance but the real insanity for you and I would be for you or I to pick up a drink today when we know full well what it will do to us that's the insanity of alcoholism I believe that in sobriety and I think this is in the chapter to the agnostic that once we get sober we have a choice to make and it's a relatively simple choice live life based on spiritual principles or die an alcoholic death take your pick The insanity of this disease is that not all of us make the right choice. When the parameters of that choice are that far apart, who in their right mind would pick an alcoholic death? And yet the alcoholic in addiction and in the insanity of alcoholism will say to himself, well, are those the two choices? Nothing in the middle? How bad is an alcoholic death? Give me some more information before I make that decision Alcoholic thinking You know about it and so do I But the truth is That that is the choice that we have to make The difficulty with a new person Is understanding that I will tell you this Living life based on spiritual principles Does not mean you're going to have to get your head shaved and go to the airport and sell flowers. That's not what it means. Living life based on spiritual principles means trying to be a decent human being, trying to do good things, trying to become kind to other people, sensitive to the needs and feelings of others, removing the bondage of self, being concerned about other people. You know, these are all spiritual qualities that we learn to put in place which lead us to understand that this is a whole lot better way of life than what I just came away from. My sponsor got me involved in the third step. That was interesting. He said, tomorrow we're going to do the third step. I'm three weeks sober, two weeks sober. He said we're going to go to bed. We're going to do it at my house and we're going to do it on our knees. What does the third step say? I said made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. He said that's it. I said, wait a minute. Just last week you told me not to make any major decisions in the first year of recovery. And now I've got to make a major decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God? That is a major division for the new person in Alcoholics Anonymous because we don't understand the simplicity by which we learn to do that. There is a formal third-step prayer in the big book of Alcoholics Aanonymous. There is much simpler prayer that my sponsor taught me. he said on your knees when you're saying that second step prayer every morning why don't you just add this god please direct my will today it didn't get any more profound than that that was as simple as he could have made it for me and what does that do for me in the morning when i make that a part of my morning prayer i am making that decision today to turn my will over to the care of God. We try to complicate the hell out of that step. There it's as simple as it can be for us. See, it's the reaffirmation of that decision on a daily basis that has made a difference in my life in the years that I have been sober. What happened in the beginning when I started to say that prayer in the morning, my will started getting channeled in some spiritual direction that I didn't understand but I started to see the evidence of it. It enabled me to remove some of the obstacles and the objections that I had. You know, the first three steps provide for us the three ingredients that I... Well, first of all, let me back up a minute. You will hear, if you're new, you'll hear many times someone like me stand up at a place like this and say, I am sober today through the grace of God. Well, indeed, I believe that. But let me tell you what I think the grace of God is based on my own experience. This is not my opinion. This is based on my own experiences. The grace of god for an alcoholic is when god gives us the gift of honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness. The three ingredients that the big book on page 568 will describe to you as being indispensable to recovery. None of us come here with those three things in place. If you're in this room today, God has already given you that gift. You now have that choice to make. You can accept it or you can reject it. Those of us who have been around here for a while know the difference between accepting it and rejecting it. So God gives us those gifts. What we then have to do is learn how to use them so that we can apply them and get the benefits from them. But the grace of God for an alcoholic is when he becomes willing. And I looked at those steps in the beginning and said, you know, there are a lot of those steps that I'm not going to be willing to do. Like the fourth step and the fifth step, I mean. The exact nature of my wrongs to another human being? Give me a break. The eighth step and the ninth step, making amends to the people I harmed? Jeez, I came here to get sober. I'm not going to be willing to do that. The miracle happens as we apply these first three steps to our lives and what we get in return is we become willing to do what in the beginning we were unwilling to do that's the simplicity of the miracle that happens to us in Alcoholics Anonymous we become willingness to do what inthe beginning we were unwilling to do it takes an enormous amount of courage and strength and courage and conviction and honesty and willingness to do what the rest of these steps will demand of us where do we get all of that stuff out of that relationship with a God of our understanding That's where I got it, and that's where the people that taught it to me got it. And that's what I try to share with the new person today, that God has given you his grace. We'll teach you how to put it in place. We'll teaching you how put it so that you can derive the same benefits from it that we were able to derive. The first three steps gave me the basic spiritual foundation that I needed in order to do a meaningful fourth step. A meaningful fourth step. I don't believe you can do a Meaningful Fourth Step without spiritual preparation. That's why it has a four in front of it. If you're new and you want to get started in the steps, it's not a good idea to start with step four because the first three steps help us to put in place, the degree of willingness as our relationship with God increases, the degree of readiness increases. We become indeed willing to go to any length which we may have said we were willing in the beginning but really weren't. The degree of wilderness increases as the relationship with God decreases. So a meaningful fourth step led to a meaningful fifth step. And if you flip that coin over, I can tell you that a less than meaningful fourth step will lead to a less-than-meaningful fifth step, and the impact of that is that it will travel down through the rest of the steps because the fourth step is what sets up the healing from within. Now, I got caught up in the trap that many alcoholics do. First three steps? Man, this is a whole lot better life than I had. Who the hell needs the rest of those steps? Complacency. There's a killer for an alcoholic. The good is oftentimes the enemy of the best. And somehow we don't get that willingness that we need, the degree of willingness that мы need because we're not focusing on it strong enough maybe in those first three steps. But that degree of willing as it increases will help us to overcome that complacency I didn't do my fourth step I believe Marianne said it last night until I was almost a year and a half sober because I procrastinated the hell out of it every time I would see my sponsor he would say to me how are you doing with the fourth step and I would say I'm working on it and a week later the same question and the same answer and that went on for a long time until finally he said to me one day, you know, you don't suffer from complacency. You suffer from a severe case of the, expletive deleted, lazies. You got to get off your ass and do it. The Nike slogan, just do it, so I was able to do a meaningful fourth step which led to a meaningful fifth step. What I found out in the fifth step was that the fourth step was the process of discovery. The simple explanation of the fourth step to the new person can be something like this. If you go to a doctor, what's the first question they ask? Well, the first questions will be do you have insurance? But the first question a doctor will ask is what's wrong with you? Take your car in to get it fixed. What's the first question I ask you? What's wrong with it? That's the question that the fourth-step asks an alcoholic. What's wronk with me? What' inside? What are these feelings inside? What are these difficulties that I have inside. The healing from within, I have to discover what needs to be healed. And as I started writing this stuff in the fourth step, the interesting part was that I started to realize that everything I wrote in that fourth step was the direct result of a character defect. Isn't that interesting? It wasn't the things that I did, it was more the reasons why I did them, the causes and the conditions. You know, when I take that fourth step and apply it to the fifth step, and I'm going to admit the exact nature of my wrongs to another human being, it wasn't all so much about all the crap that I did and the circumstances. It was the causes and the condition. And the interesting part of that is that when you take that to the next two steps, next four steps, six, seven, eight, and nine, it's fixing all of the stuff that we discovered in the fourth step and admit it in the fifth step. This was the common sense approach that my sponsor shared with me that finally got me off my butt, and I was able to do a fourth step, and I will tell you that once I did that fourth step I couldn't wait to do the fifth step. The fourth step is nothing more than a process of discovery. These are the things that need to be addressed. These are the things that need to be fixed. Father Martin has eight words that he uses to describe what the 12 steps are all about. Eight simple words. Get sober, seek God, clean house, help others. If we can find a way to put those eight words through the 12 Steps into the way we live our lives we will experience the result of what the 12 steps are supposed to do for us the 12 Steps are designed to help you and I recover from the symptoms of this disease and to put in place a way of life that will be more meaningful to us than a drink ever was that's what the 12 step are designed to do, that's that design for living that Bill Wilson talked about no better description of the 12 Steps than those three words a design for living. When I was about nine months sober, my wife discovered Alanoid, um, Alan, Al-Anon. And she went to a number of meetings and she came home speaking a language that I didn't understand. It was kind of like detaching with love. Well, when you somehow sense that you are the detachee, it starts to get your attention. I went through about three months of the sniff test every time I came home from work. You know what that is? They get close enough to you not to kiss you, but to give you one of those. Came home from work one day and said to Dottie, what's for dinner? She said, we're having an Al-Anon dinner. I said, what's that? She said, fix it yourself. But I'll tell you what, when I got here, I had a wife that didn't love me. It is through Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon that we were able to put that relationship back together again and make it stronger than it's ever been. I love my wife more than breath today. And you know, Alcoholics Anonymous has taken that relationship from having a wife that didn't love me to a wife that I know loves me today because she tells me so. And I take the time to tell her that I love her and what a big difference that is. We've been married 35 years. And I will tell you that without Alcoholics Anonymous and without Al-Anon, that just never would have happened. I want to tell you my favorite golf story. I retired a couple of years ago and someone said to me shortly after I retired, what are you going to do with all of your time? And I said, well, maybe I'll become a golf bum. He said, you already are a golf bump. I said well I'll become an even bigger golf bump I play a lot of golf with the guys that I sponsor and a number of years ago I was playing a course up in Elkton, Maryland with a young man that I sponsored and the 17th hole at this golf course is a par 3 about 158 yards over water tree on the left green on the right and Tommy teed the ball up and he hit it into the tree and it bounced into the water. I teed to ball up I hit it under the same tree it bounced to the right on the green about three feet from the pin. He said, I don't understand this. I hit in the tree it's in the water you hit the same tree you're on the green three feet from the pen. I looked him right in the eye and said don't drink and go to meetings and the same good stuff might happen to you. And then I missed a putt. So needless to say, based on what I've shared with you this morning, you can see that Alcoholics Anonymous has been good to me. I have enjoyed this weekend so much, I just can't tell you. The hospitality that I have been shown by the folks in Duluth, Minnesota. You know, when I said to some of my friends that I was going to go to Duluth to speak at an AA conference, they all kind of stuck their nose up in the air like, Duluth? People don't go to Diluth. They go away from Duluth. Obviously, they have never been here. What I have discovered here is that Alcoholics Anonymous in Duluth, Minnesota is alive and it's well and it'S dynamic. I will take that message back to those people in Baltimore who stuck their nose up in the air when I told them I was going to Duluth so one of the most difficult things I have to do on a daily basis is put into practice one of the important principles of Alcoholics Anonymous called humility and it's I have to focus on that really on a regular and a daily basis, really. You know, when God has given a gift like he has given to me with the ability to express myself to other people and the simplicity by which I can share the AA message with other people, especially the newcomer, you can get all caught up in yourself if you're not careful. And I really have to focus on humility. It really is something that in the seventh step, I want to tell you something about humility. See, that seventh step is only seven words, which would lead maybe the new person to think maybe that's not as important a step as the rest of them. But let me tell you something about that seventh set. Seven words, seven steps, shortest by number of words in all the 12. If you look in the 12 and 12, you will discover that it takes seven pages to explain the significance of those seven words in the seventh step. And all of that writing in the twelve and twelve is about humility and how important it is for us to be humble. Sometimes in order to understand the significance of something, you have to take a look at what the opposite is. And an opposite of humility certainly could be arrogance. I know a lot about arrogance. I knew it when I got here and it took me a long time to put that behind me and to become indeed a more humble person. But I find that, you know, the seventh step like the sixth step says that God removes that stuff. And God is always helping me to become a little bit more humble than I was the day before or maybe even an hour ago. And I'll tell you a story about how God works in my life in that direction. last year I was at I was invited to speak at the St. Cloud Roundup and it was a marvelous marvelous roundup it really was a lot of people you could feel like you can hear the love in the room and I gave the talk and like all talks at a gathering like this when the talk is over when the talk is over, people want to line up on the stage and they want to shake your hand. They want to give you a hug and tell you what a great message it was. I mean, it happens all the time. It's hard to be humble when that crap's going on, I'm here to tell you. So I'm at St. Cloud and I give this talk and sure enough, when the talk was over, the line formed on the stage. And about 30 people deep into that line was this elderly lady. And when she got up to me, she said, that was the best AA talk I ever heard. And I took her hand in mine and I said, well, you got to understand that what you heard was God talking to you. God put those words in my mouth. She said, it wasn't that good. Thank you, Lord. I think the theme of this conference, of this roundup, is about as meaningful as it can get for an alcoholic because what I know about passing it on is that my continuing recovery, and yours too, I might add, is dependent upon my willingness to help another person. And that's what Pass It On is really all about. And I think I have been thinking since I got here and found out what the theme was of how to close this talk, and I want to close it with something that will point out to each of you as it has to me the significance of what PassItOn is all about And what I came up with was a line that I heard from a Broadway play. I think it was called The Fantastics. Don't quote me on the source, but I know it was from a Broadway play, and the line is simply this. A bell is not a bell until you ring it. A song is not a song until you sing it. The love that's in your heart will surely stay because love is not love until you give it away. Pass it on. God bless you.