The Difference Between a Living Amends and a Real Amends – Paul F.

Go ahead. Is it 830? Okay, good evening everybody. It's about 830. We're going to get the meeting started here. If you could find your way to your seats. Welcome to the Conscious Contact Speaker Group of Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Brian and I am an alcoholic. This is a one-hour speaker meeting that meets every Saturday, St. Paul's Lutheran Church, 301 North Main Street at 830 in Doylestown, PA. The food and the fellowship for this group starts at 8 o'clock. The business meeting for this Group meets here every Saturday at 7 p.m. The purpose of this Group is to provide a consistent message of hope and recovery through God-reliance and service to others through the practice and teachings of the Twelve Steps. We record all speakers so that others can benefit from their message of recovery. If you wish not to be recorded, simply ask. This is an open meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. The group would like to welcome everyone, especially newcomers. If there's anyone that's new or from out of town that would like to introduce themselves on a first-name basis, we can welcome you. Nobody? No newcomers tonight, huh? How about that? That might be a first, actually. anyway the conscious contact speaker group encourages sponsorship but anyone with a working knowledge of the 12 steps and that is willing to sponsor please raise your hands okay so I guess we'll have any newcomers but you know grab one of those people after the meeting if you're looking for a home group if you're going to get into the steps maybe grab one of those feet left in the meeting will be hanging out so does anybody have any announcements for the good of AA nothing from the floor okay a couple of announcements for this group we have meaningless and big books on easy terms please see me or any home group member after the meeting if you cannot afford a big book conscious contact speaker group will give you one at no charge anyone willing to make donations for the purchase of big books or CDs can put their donations in the jar on that back table marked big book and CD donations If you would like a CD of any speaker, past or present, you can see me or Ron before or after the meeting. They are available free of charge. And with that, I think Sherry's going to come up here and read the A.A. Preamble. Hi, I'm Sherry Monacaholic at the A.'s Preample. Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We're self-supporting her own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution. It does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. I have asked Dan to come up and read the A12 Steps of Recovery. I'm Dan, I'm an alcoholic. These are the 12 steps. Step 1, we admitted we were powerless over alcohol that our lives had become unmanageable. 2, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him 4. Made us searching in fearless moral inventory of ourselves 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs 6. We're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings 8. Made lists of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps We try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Okay, seventh tradition, every AA group ought to be fully self-supporting. We'll make sure the basket makes its way around. There are no dues or fees for AA membership, but we do have expenses. Your contributions help us to cover the cost of rent, big books, CDs, refreshments in the back. There's absolutely no smoking on the church property. It's the church's policy, not our policy. If you could just be considerate of that as you're coming and going, just go across the street, make sure your butts end up on the premise here. Please take a moment to silence all cell phones and limit movement during the meeting to avoid distractions. And now to introduce our speaker for tonight, a good friend of the Conscious Contact speaker group come on loan to us from the by the book group of Hollywood Florida please help me welcome Pauly D hello family my name is Paul Valio I'm a recovered alcohol and before I start like to thank my friend Ron for the invitation thank you group for having me that's why I love him always looking out for me my sobriety date September 1st 2002 on that day God saw fit to separate me from alcohol I did not quit drinking I had quit drinking way too many times before that my experience is that when I quit drinking I start drinking again I'm here to share what I was like what happened what I'm like now we're definitely not a Guam lot so I clown around a bit just so that everyone knows i'm a real alcoholic i drank socially for 10 years then i turned 13. at that point i was in the eighth grade i picked up a bottle of boone's farm apple wine drank to oblivion they found me blacked out on a bus in the bus depot got suspended from catholic school i became that guy and i had a reputation i didn't deserve i lived off it for 34 years um and life was just crazy i mean i don't do a drunk a lot life it threw a lot of curveballs in my way i drank a lot it didn't go well you know i mean there's so many war stories uh i don t even bother though when i wanted to stop drinking i didn't have the power to do it i always thought that i could stop i told people i'll stop when i want to stop and that was the problem i never wanted to stop you know i enjoyed alcohol if i were to stand there and tell you i hate alcohol i'm a lawyer i love alcohol um i love the effect produced by alcohol what's happened is and you'll hear about it in my story is i love the effect produce by god a lot more you know because i haven't quit drinking what what i did was um i did not come to hawks anonymous to get sober you're going to hear a lot of stories my story might not agree with your story and that's alright, there'll be another speaker next week the truth of the matter is it's my story and I'm going to tell it if you disagree, that's fine but here's the deal I will not share my opinion from a podium, ever the only opinion that we care about in Outpost Anonymous is the doctor's opinion my opinion, your opinion means nothing so if you're sitting up here sharing your opinion please stop we don't care you know I'm not here to make friends I'm here to carry this message and that's what I try to do and like I said I drank a lot didn't go well you know I am a one-chip wonder I came in on September 1st and I never picked up another white chip but here's the deal I relapsed hundreds of times you know it's anonymous I don't believe that drinking is the relapse see the relapsed is when I start lying cheating stealing and abusing my friends my family and when the pain gets great enough I pick up a drink and I go because drinking treats alcoholism I wish someone would have told me that when I got here I don't have a problem with alcohol if you have a probably doubt well god bless you then go home stop drinking you'll be okay i'm a real alcohol i have a problem without alcohol it's when i stop drinking that i become restless irritable discontent pray to misery depression full of remorse and self-pity and a drink is such a good idea because it works i take the first i don't even sip it i put in my hand and i go oh and then i take a drink and it goes down and i overshoot the mark every time i'm gonna have one or two and 36 later when i fall down and they drive me home in an ambulance i overshot the mark again you know alcohol works you know the deal was that like i have no power over alcohol every time i tried to quit drinking even while i was drinking i thought i was choosing to drink like on a Friday night you know I said well I'm just gonna go to meet the guys and have one or two I got work tomorrow and then when I got to the bar my ex-girlfriend was there and I bought her a drink we shot a game of pool and she lost so she bought me a drink then we played a game of darts and I won and I brought her a trip and it's four o'clock in the morning and the cops are there I'm getting arrested again yeah cause my ex girlfriend was married of course that was the way i lived while i was out there and what happened is i had chose to have one or two drinks the drink wasn't the problem lack of power is my dilemma i did not have the power to carry out the choice i made to not drink or just to have two see the deal is when people tell me just don't drink go to meetings that might be the dumbest sentence in the world because if i had the power to not drink I would not drink and not go to meetings when I choose to not dream I drink anyway so that's why I'm here if you could choose to not train and pull that off why would you be here it doesn't make sense you know when I got here and no one in a has ever said anything or done anything to try to intentionally cause me harm but don't believe anything you hear from a podium and I don't what you hear me say from the podium unless I can show it to you in a book this book is Alcoholics Anonymous and when I got here they told me stuff like just don't drink go to meetings you know make 90 and 90 meeting makers make it and I went to 400 meetings in my first first 105 days and on my 105th day i almost committed suicide because i had not treated my alcoholism i just stopped drinking not drinking doesn't treat alcoholism drinking treats alcoholism so once i stopped i was living with untreated alcoholism in the rooms about and they didn't say it to harm me they didn' know better you don't know what you don' know you know so i told everyone that i sponsor first question that you ask someone that makes a statement from a podium is what page is that on and if they can't tell you what page it's on then what usually happens is when i ask someone what pages them they'll say well it's not in the book but and then i stopped and i said wait a minute everything if the butt needs toilet paper because that's just the truth all right here's the deal if it's not in our book it's not all synonymous i'm not going to tell you if it's a good idea or bad idea i don't know 90 and 90 is it a good i did a bad idea i have no idea i couldn't make 99 when they told me to make 99 they only made 88 and i thought i failed so i'll tell people make 99 take them to 90 meetings in 90 days if you got so much belief that 90 take them the 990 if that's what you believe but my experience was that those meetings did not treat my alcoholism I had a hundred five days almost you know sitting in the meeting contemplating suicide I just didn't want my mom to know I killed myself I could have figured out a way I might try to pull it off and I shared that at the meeting and someone grabbed me and I remember like yesterday I actually just spoke to the channelman who helped save my life. What happened was I shared that and the kid that was chairing the meeting said, can I talk to you after the meeting? And I said yeah sure. After the meeting I went up to him and I'll never forget he looked at me straight and he said have you done the work? And I was like well yeah I got a coffee commitment. He said no no but are you in the work. I chaired a Tuesday night meeting and he's like Paul have you done the work in our textbook now i didn't even know he had a textbook you know he he said yeah the big book that you know i said well i read that but i couldn't find step one and step two i found step three he so i bought a 12 and 12. and he left and he he says great book he said but no directions you know and again am i here to knock you if you're doing your steps through 12 and world god bless you but here's the deal this 12 and club has no directions in it there's 12 and 12 is a bunch of stories about the steps there's great information in that book along with the textbook of alcohol synonymous and just for fun to let everybody know it's not really a textbook this is really a storybook i found that out last year um in front of the book it says alcoholics anonymous the story of how many thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism then in the preface it says since this book has become the basic text for alcohol synonymous so it wasn't written as a textbook there were no meetings it was written so that other alcoholics could identify with the stories in the back of the book because they would it was mail order sobriety if you lived in virginia and you wanted to get sober you call new york they send you the book you'd send them three dollars and fifty cents and they would tell you listen you know do what the book asks you to do and in the forward is what it says we'd love to hear from those who are getting results from this book especially those who have started work with other alcoholics so the idea was that the book there were no meetings you couldn't do 90 and 90. there were sponsors so you couldn t get a sponsor to take you through they used the book to get sober so when i sponsor people i never tell anybody what to do because again i'm going to refer to the book a lot the book says if you're an alcoholic who wants to get over this is what happened to me you might already be asking what do i have to do and then when i asked that of the gentleman who helped me he said i don't know and i don' know what any one of you need to do to get sober or stay sober i know what i did and what i continued to do so the book says we will show you what we have done so all i'm going to share with you is what i've done and what i still continue to do because for me to think that i can tell you what to do is total stupidity one more time i can't run my own life what would make me think i could run yours and i love sponsors that run their sponsors lives you better do this you better get out i need you to make 90 and 90 I want to get this meeting, get a coffee commitment. Whoa, you know, I didn't sign up for that. I'm here to share my experience. That's what the book asked me to do. If you don't want it, that's okay. If I want what they got, I'll do what they did. My experience has been that the closer I stay to the clear-cut specific directions in this book, the easier it is to be in a relationship with God. Being in that relationship with God makes it easier to live my life And I don't have to live life on life's terms anymore I live life upon God's terms now And that makes life so simple What does that mean? It means that I'm out of the results business I give the best effort that I possibly can To whatever I'm doing at any given moment And I leave the results up to God They're none of my business If I help someone tonight, great And if I don' t, that's great too God's plan was for me to be here and here i am so let's talk about my story so what 105 days contemplating suicide that gentleman that i spoke to um said let me show you something he opened up this not this book it was his book and he opened it up to page 45 and he read the sentence to me that said lack of power that was our dilemma and i said to him wait a minute i thought alcohol was my problem and he said well how long has it been since you had a drink i said 105 days he said how do you feel please excuse my language i'm going to tell you exactly what i said i felt like is what i said and i'm contemplating suicide how do you think i feel and he told then obviously alcohol's not your problem you haven't had a drink in 105 days and i scratched my head and all of a sudden like i realized what's going on i guess out and i thought it was just if i stopped drinking i thought everything was going to be okay and if you stop drinking and everything's okay god bless you i'm very very happy for you but that probably means you're not an alcoholic you have a problem with alcohol and you stop tricking everything is okay i stopped drinking it doesn't get better it gets worse because living life see my god was the god of reason i use my head i got this i'll figure this out then when something bad would happen that's when god came to life god why'd you do that. God got blamed for every bad thing that ever happened to me in my life I got credit for every good thing that happened to my whole life so we started to read this book you know and like I said there's no right way, there's not wrong way to do the steps. I won't explain that. I don't believe right way or wrong way I don' t believe in the words right and wrong anymore because what's right to one person might be wrong to someone else I don''t believe that this is a bad thing and this is a good thing. It's just a thing and it's going to be what it's supposed to be but I know that I had to find some a new way of life because my way of life was not working so alcoholics anonymous is not something that you do a lot of people seem to think that they can do the steps I've done the 12 steps and then you're already failed because the steps are not something that can be done the steps our way of life and again the book says our way of living has its advantages for all it doesn't say quitting drinking has advantages for rule in Bill's story as a I don't know where it might be but one is one piece of the book talks about a guy that could not or would not see our way of life he committed suicide does it say couldn't stop drinking more alcoholics commits suicide sober than drunk. Because when they start thinking about suicide, they take two or three drinks, Bill talks about it. This is how we know alcohol is not the problem. Bill says, should I kill myself? No, not now. A few tumblers of gin would fix that. So alcohol's not the problem, alcohol is the solution. If alcohol is your problem you're in the wrong spot. Stop drinking, you'll be okay. And there's a lot of people in AA that can do that. It's sad to say not everyone in the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous is an alcoholic and I know that for fact. I've sponsored many that aren't, and I will sponsor people who aren't but I will ask them not to sponsor other alcoholics. I send them off to their own fellowships. They have a lot fellowships that use these 12 steps to help people recover from whatever their problem is and again it's in the book The Spiritual Way of of life will solve all your problems. That's my experience. I haven't had a problem in years, not one. All my problems are on the outside of my eyes. No, sorry, all the problems are on inside my eyes, none of my problems is on the out side of my eye. I look at it and I think it's a problem but it's not. It's how I react that's the problem. The problem is in here because everything on the outside of my head, that's on God, that ain't on me. i've done the best i can okay i didn't have that way of life for many years alcohol did that for me it didn't matter what was going wrong i had three drinks i could solve any problem in the world i was talking around about flying out of fly planes six tanks i could help i could help you sail a boat around the world and i never been on a boat but that's what alcohol It did everything, taught me how to dance, taught me how that have a girlfriend, we won't get there but it told me how to do everything I ever needed to do and it worked really wonderfully until it didn't work anymore. You know and the book talks about that it says you'll come to a place where you can't live with alcohol and you can live without alcohol. I remember that day, I remember the day that I knew I could not take one more drink I was gonna die and alcohol brought me to a lot of drugs and sorry places and you know I did a lot of stuff outside issues I don't talk about them here I do go to other fellowships occasionally but alcohol is my master alcohol was always my master you know Bill talks about that too and so what happened on that day was you know that gentleman explained about step one to me What he said was, do you understand step one? I said, yeah. I can't drink no matter what. Because that's what they had been telling me for three and a half months. He said, well, if that was the first step, we'd have a one-step program. Don't drink, no matter why. He says, let's look at your life. And he said, do You drink when it's nice weather? And I said yes. Do You drink while it's raining? Yeah. He said Do You Drink When You've Got Money? Yeah. Do You Drink When You Have No Money? I said If I Can. He said do You Drink when You're With A Beautiful Woman? And I said, yeah. Hey, you drink when you're with an ugly woman? I said twice as much. I'm honest. But the truth is we look back at my life. I drink. It's what I do. I don't need a reason. I drank because it was Tuesday. I drank before the day ended in Hawaii. It didn't matter. Thursday, Wednesday. It made no difference. I got up in the morning. it was my way of life so he explained step one and he made it real simple he said step one says you're gonna drink no matter what if you don't have a new solution you will drink again step one says you will dream it doesn't say you can't drink and the second half is step one i did not understand i thought palace was the bad part and he said no your life's unmanageable i know whenever I'm drunk, I'm getting arrested, I am getting in fights, hospitals and he said no no that's not unmanageability. He said that would happen to any idiot that drank the way you drank whether he's alcoholic or not. He says the most unmanagable thing you've ever done you've done sober and I said you don't know me. He didn't know I do know you he said how many times have you picked up the first drink again saying it'll be different this time? That's the unmanaged ability. I can't manage life with or without rapport. My life is unmanageable today if I try to manage it. I needed a new manager. That's what AA is about. Me running my life doesn't work. I had to give up the management position and give it to God. So he asked me if I understood step two, and I thought I did. And he said, Paul, let me explain. And it took me years to finally actually understand it. You don't have to do step two. If you read step two, it doesn't tell you what to do. It tells you what happened to them after they did the steps. We came to believe that a power greater than us could restore us to sanity. That happened after they did the stops. So you don't do step three when you're at step two step two happened to me around step nine or 10. That's just my experience. So step two is something that you concede to I'm willing to do this and with the attitude of willingness from step two forward God provides everything else see willingness is an action word if you say you're willing to help clean up after this meeting but you don't help us clean up you lied just that simple I didn't know that willing was an action work so he asked me some stuff about God and I had beliefs in god i always believed in god but that god wasn't going to work because i had a couple of different gods i had to god that was going to get me you know when i was a kid god's got a book he's marking he saw that you got a red mark and i thought there was like 17 pages with my name and red marks not one black mark on it just red marks i should have been blind by the time i was 13. You know, the nuns told me, you know, God saw that, you know, and then my parents didn't help. God's watching you. And then like I'd fall down and I'd scratch my leg and I get some stitches or something to say, God gotcha. That's what they did. They didn't know better. They just didn't. I didn't want nothing to do with that. God saw goodbye. Eighth grade, I had a fight, got in a lot of trouble. I hit a nun. Uh, I hit priest i got thrown out of catholic school way too long of a story to get into but the truth was at that point the next day was my first real drunk 13 years old on a bus with a bottle of boob spawn apple wine um and it took me years in sobriety before i realized my first drunk was the day after i put god out of my life so what happened was that god wasn't going to work and then as life went on um again every time something i'm in handcuffs on friday night I said, God, please get me out of this one. So I always believed God was there. And then if he would get me up, I'd do the same thing I did the week before again. I swear I was never going to do it again. But lack of power was my dilemma. I did not have the power to pull that off. So we made a decision to kneel down and do a third step prayer. Probably 35 minutes, 25, 35 minutes after he started talking to me. And we knelt down, we said the third step of prayer and we got up. I said amen. He said, don't say amen. I said, why? Oh, he said, don't saying amen, there's no amen at the end of the third step prayer. And I said why not? He said you'll find out later. And so will you when I get to it. But um, so I didn't say amen. And then I got up off my knees and I said I did the third steps. He said no, you did the third-step prayer. And he said the third is a decision. I said... I just decided. He said Paul if we just... I was living in New York at the time. He says if we decide to go to Florida, do you think we'll ever get there? I said yes. He say no. I say why not? He said, Paul, we've got to call the airline, buy a ticket, pack a suitcase, go to the airport and get on the plane. If we don't take those actions, we never made a decision. We thought about going to Florida. So if you don't take the actions in steps four through nine, you thought about turning your will and your life over to God, but you never did it. You didn't make a decision to complete a decision requires action so I said okay it sounds interesting I said but I'm not sure about this fourth and fifth step thing I'm not sure I want to write all the bad stuff and you know see what kind of a person I was no he's we're not gonna do the fourth step to see what kinda person you were he said we know what you were you were an alcoholic he said well then I do the four steps so we could see what you weren't and I got again baffled I was baffling a lot you know I got baffles again like what do you mean when I wasn't and he said well were you a good son oh he said were you a good brother who and he kept asking where your good friend we were good employee the answer was no he said will God intended you to be all of those things let's see if we could find out why you weren't able to be what God intended you to be I said I could do that I could do that so I started writing a four-step inventory um again there's no right way or wrong way to do it my experience is the closer I stated the directions in the book the easier it is I'm not going to go into a whole fourth step with you but I am gonna share this for many years I wrote a four column inventory and there is no four column inventory and I'm all synonymous. There's a three column inventory. Who am I mad at? Why? What did they do and what does it affect? That's what it says and I was told well you need that fourth column, what was your part? That's a lie. It's not in our book anywhere ever that you should write a fourth column what was you apart ever because here's the deal who else has a to put my inventory nobody and it says so right in the book you know I used to know older stuff by heart but I have a lot of senior senior moments but on page 67 what it says referring to our list again putting out of our minds the wrongs others have done. We resolutely looked for our own mistakes, not for my part. See I had been writing. Mom was first on my list. Threw me out, called me a junkie, changed the locks. What was my part? Well she told me to be in before midnight or she was changing the locks! I got home 12-15. I'm 15 minutes late and And she changed the locks. She changed the lock. I can't and I'm like, but it didn't help me to get any satisfaction. But then when about five and a half years over I got a new teacher he said you don't have a part. He said what mistakes did you make with your mom? He said forget about the resentment and that's what the book says set aside the wrongs others have done. So I had lied to my mother stole from my mother abused my mother disrespected my mother worried my mother we can go on and when i saw all the mistakes i had made with my mother through my life nothing to do with that resentment i was like oh my gosh you should have told me out 10 years ago see i got some some understanding when i started doing what the book told me to do not what a sponsor told me today what the books told me this sponsor was book related he's told me page and paragraph in the book and my experience has been the closer i stayed at the easier it is to recover from alcoholism so i um i did this fourth step and you know i wrote it all out there's a couple of other inventories one's not really an inventory there is no fear inventory uh people writing four column five column theory inventory the book says we reviewed our fears we put them on paper even though we had no resentment we asked ourselves why we had them wasn't it because self-reliance failed self-reliance was good as far as it went it didn't go far enough so the idea of the fear is and it tells me you know we trust and rely on infinite god rather than our finite self and it gives me a prayer it says when they crop up we ask god at once to remove them and we turn our thoughts to someone we can help you know i mean the directions are in the book and then there's a sex inventory it has nothing to do with sex the sex inventory has nothing do with that it has to do with my morals around sex it says what it says in the books it doesn't say never said we reviewed our conduct over the years past six years in when i did this when i finally got a new teacher now Now, like I said, I wasn't doing it wrong. I was doing it different for the first five years. When I did sex imagery, he explained to me my favorite story with a girl that I was attracted to. She was a little younger than me, but her brother was about my age. Now, I didn't really, I was in her circle. I didn' t really like her brother. He hung out with my little brother. But I befriended her brother and made him think I loved him. I took him out. I had a car. he didn't took him driving boredom drinks and he finally invited me over for a barbecue and a pool party at his house so now i met his sister and his family and then i started dating his sister and the minute i stopped dating his sister i dropped him like a hot rock he's on my inventory see because i was dishonest toward him i was inconsiderate toward him and those are the questions it asks just sort of maybe I could have sex with his sister so it's not about the sex it's about my conduct how did I let sex change the way I live and it was horrible some of the stuff I did to my friends and their families so that I could get involved with someone else that was in Derek's wife Derek's girlfriend whoever it was but but our conduct is what we're reviewing I I thought it was about all the girls I had sex with. And I was going to make that 400-page list because I thought I was gonna write the best inventory ever. Not a great idea. But I did that, and then I shared it with someone in five because a solitary self-appraisal is usually insufficient. You know, that's what the book says. And after the fifth step, I love the fifth-step promises. When I sponsor people, once they get through that... do five six and seven in one day once we do that fifth step and by the end of that night we've been through seven um it's time for me to send them out you know and start looking for prospects and stuff like that and the reason i say that because on page 76 i love what our book says well first let me go back to 75. the promise is in the fifth step so once we've taken this step with holding nothing we are delighted we can look the world in the eye we can be alone perfect peace and ease fears fall from us we begin to feel the nearness of our creator here it is we may have had certain spiritual beliefs but now we begin to have a spiritual experience this is the beginning of the spiritual experience the book says you can't give away something you haven't got at this point if you've done everything you've begun to have spiritual experience go start helping people why are you're gonna wait why are you gonna wait and then when say it doesn't mean to go home for an hour sit quietly it gives me these great directions you know find a place where you can be alone thank God from the bottom of your heart that you know him better now most people I don't own do that I think it's a great idea to actually say thank you God thank you for allowing me to know you better the book says I should do it I do it why I don' t know because the book says I should do it and I believe that if I do the book is divinely inspired and I try to do what it asked me to do then on page 76 it says if we can answer to our satisfaction then we look at step six whose satisfaction I'm sitting home alone reviewing the first five proposals so it's me and God it's not me and my sponsor it's not me and my home group it's me and god this is the point where i should be letting go of my sponsor's hand just a little bit and grabbing onto god's hand a little bit tighter i need to start relying on god this is not a sponsor reliant program it is a god reliant program so i still do not understand with quite a few 24s under my belt why i I hear so many people with double digit ears still say they don't do anything without checking with their sponsor. It makes zero sense to me. My sponsor's just a drunk. My sponsor is just another drunk. We commend shoulder to shoulder, my sponsor is no better than me. I'm no better that anyone I sponsor. They're exactly the same. They're as close to God as I'll ever be. She asked the difference. I just might be a little more awake than them. But the truth of the matter is, I don't get closer to God. Deep down within every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God. He's here. I don' t have to get rid of all this stuff to let God in. God was there before I drew my first breath. I got to get all this out of the way so that God can come out. So that I can act more like God would have me. It's not about letting him in. And I had to learn that. And it took me time. so after step five you know six and seven one paragraph each but they're two of the most important steps in my life just step six how do i show god that i'm entirely ready to have him remove these defects well the chapter is called into action what action will i take i found out that i am dishonest i am selfish you know i am self seeking a lot of other stuff but if i find that I'm selfish, God's just not going to remove my selfishness. God will do for me what I cannot do for myself. In step six, the way I show God that I would like him to remove my selflessness is by starting to do some selfless acts. Act selfless. God, please remove my dishonesty. Nothing happens if I start acting honest. God would remove my dishonesty as he sees fit. So there's a lot of work for me to do in step six. Step six god needs me step seven i need god because in step seven we say a prayer the prayer says god my creator on that will you have all of me the good and the bad i don't know what's good or what's bad if it feels good doesn't mean it's good if it feel bad does not mean it is bad like i said it just is um i pray to you now remove me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows not every defect of character the ones that stand in the way see God uses defects to move me where he needs me to be and that's personal experience early recovering it's one of my favorite stories one of my worst defects I had many many lost issues and with five and a half years sober with my new teacher I was praying and working so hard asking God to help me please remove this please remove it but yet I went to a meeting and there was a flyer and the fly had a picture of a girl laying on a coffee table on the telephone I said let me grab that so I grabbed that fly and I went to that meeting and it was a cute girl at that meeting she sounded like she might have been in the book and I saw her looking at me while I was speaking she's nodding her head I said I think I'm gonna come back here next week get her number and I'm going back there next week she didn't want to give me her number but she said I would love it if you would take me through the book so I agreed to take this with a book and she started to get better and what happened was her sister noticed they're getting better her sister asked her if she could have my number she gave her sister my number her sister asked me to take her to the book her sister had more time than I did she just wanted a new experience and now she's my wife see God used my loss to move me to that meeting to that girl to her sister and we went through this book together what happened was we fell in love with the god that we found inside of each other and we got engaged we got married and we've been together 13 years and we do this we work for god together that's what we do you know so step six i do a lot step seven i say the prayer and at the end of the prayer it says amen that's why we didn't say amen in the third step breath because you're staying, you're living in prayer from three all the way to seven. I'm living in prayer. Don't say the prayer, be the prayer. Saying a prayer doesn't change a lot. You know, I don't pray so God can hear me. I used to think I prayed, God knows the prayers I'm going to say tonight when I go home. I pray so that I can hear them. God knows my prayers. I play so I can be reminded that God's got this. I don't pray for me so that God can get me stuff. I pray that I can remember that God's there. God's in charge. I love to say, well, God's my co-pilot. You better change seats. Yes. God was my co pilot for a long time. I kept crashing. Now God's my pilot. I drive anymore, you know, and it works a lot better. So at the end of seven, I say to prayer, this is now we need more, more work. Faith without works is dead and step eight and step nine and step basis we had a list we made it when we took inventory so you don't have to make an eight-step list it should be from your fourth step my experience i had to add some names to it there were people we we call it the people that i work with my lineage we call the harms other than people we harmed other than the people on our inventory i mean i stole a bicycle from the kid that lived next door to me three times he wasn't on my inventory i had no resentment it wasn't not my second but i harmed him you know so i had to make a list of people i hurt and we become willing to make amends to them all step eight is a complete step i struggled for a long time separating eight nine they are not the same they are totally different my freedom came in step eight once i became willing to to make amends to them all. It does not mean I have to make amends for them all, I have be willing to make amends of them all if it's possible as long as Step 9 will tell me when not to do that. But once I became willing to make the amends and more I heard a gentleman, some of you might know him, Don P. Don P has passed. I heard Don speak and he talked about he was in jail possibly for life and when he went through the steps he said to his sponsor well how am I gonna do these amends? response told him, sit in a chair, make believe the person's on the other chair in front of you and do the best you can. He said, if you ever get out of jail, go look for these people. And what Don said was he was freer in that six by eight cell than he had ever been in his life. And I get it. I get It. I didn't have to take a different route home. Didn't have to cross the street when I saw people walking toward me. The freedom came in step eight. Step nine says we'll know a new freedom and a new happiness. See, there's no cap. It goes as eyes you wanted to how free do you want to be you know so step eight i become willing to make amends to them all then step nine um we make amends wherever possible not whenever i love you to say whenever possible no not whenever possible wherever possible big difference in those two words if it's possible you need to make that amends it says some people cannot be seen we write them an honest letter you know there's a lot of different ways to do this and i'm not here to do your ninth step but the truth of the matter is i love you can talk about you know well i made indirect demands or i make i'm making a living amends what page is that on there's no such thing as living amens do you think that living right now makes amends for all the things you did while you're out there drink no let's go ask the people we heard about that you know what does it mean to make amends i didn't know i thought it meant you know and the other part I love. Well, we don't say we're sorry. Yes, we do. The book says we let them know we are sorry. It's in the book. But it says a simple I'm sorry just won't fill the bill. See, to amend is to change. We amend our Constitution. Hopefully when we change it, we change it for the better. So if I am going to make amends, I need to be a changed person. If I'm the same person that walked in here and I come to you say look I'm sorry I stole $100 use your money back and I go steal $100 from somebody else next week that was not an amends that was an apology to make amends means to change so I need to be a changed person the book also talks about we have to set right the wrong see there's two parts to step 9 making amends is only one part that means I don't live that way anymore I don' do those things I don´t lie steal, cheat on my wife. I don't abuse people. I don't disrespect people. But that's not the only piece because later it says we have to set right the wrong. That's the direct amends. The amends is that I've changed. There were some people I can't see but I've made amends because I don''t steal from anyone anymore. I mean if I steal a pencil I think about it for two weeks, I got to bring it back. It's horrible. It is a good way to be horrible but the truth of the matter is, I also have to set right the wrong to the best of my ability and I've been taught to ask. I know I harmed you because I did steal that $100 you accused me of stealing. Is there anything else I did wrong that has affected you and how can I make that right?" You know what she said when I asked her that? She said, I think you owe my daughter in amends. I said, your daughter? She was three. She said yeah. She said but that hundred dollars was for her birthday gift that year and she didn't get a gift because you stole every penny I had. See so I think I know what I did. I think I knew what I did.I don't. So I owed her daughter in amends and the privilege that god allows me to have is that i got the child was 13 because it was 10 years later when i went made them and from 13 to 18 i went visited them every year on that kid's birthday and i got to bring her a birthday gift every year and it was a privilege wasn't the amends the amends was the first year and the amens was that i don't live that way anymore but setting it right i gave her mother 100 i bought the kid a gift but i got the privilege of being in their life for like another five years yeah and that's so cool that's what we get to do I don't have to do any of this stuff I get to do this I don' t have to be here speaking I don''t have to go to meetings I don´t have sponsor people I get you what a privilege so I start making these amends in step nine you know and we got all these great promises new freedom new happiness funny part is like if you read the promises and you had ascended anyone that's heard joe and charlie probably knows this because when i take a few drinks i'll know a new freedom and a new happiness when i take the few drinks life will take on new meaning yeah i mean everything that's in those promises came true when i drank because alcohol was a power greater than me i will not worry about the past regret none of it because alcohol worked but now i get those promises without drinking so after the promises it said they will always materialize if we work for them so there's no gift in alcoholics and anonymous for some reason people are confused they think that they get the gift of sobriety thank god for the giftof sobriete so what are you saying that god would give me the gift of sobrietty but not the rest of his children i don't know it doesn't make a lot of sense to me and I can, again I'm going to back it up with the book a gift is something given freely on page 14 in our book it says simple not easy a price must be paid there goes the gift it meant the destruction of self-centeredness I must turn in all things to the father of life who presides over us all so if I'm not willing to turn in all things not just my own all my life is none of my business and thank God for that because when my life was my business I bankrupted it so when I paid that price then I get sobriety now here's the deal I'm not talking about being sober being sober is horrible I have an allergic reaction to being sober i need a drink but sobriety is different sobrieta is a way of life i live happy joyous and free 24 7 365 days a year without problems because the problems are none of my business everything is perfect in god's world whether i think so or not yeah and what happens is usually when things don't go the way i think they should my wife says it all the time god is good all the time even when i don't think so especially when i don''t think so because what usually happens is like six months later after i get mad at god for something that didn't go my way like oh my god thank god that didn''t go the way i wanted to do that's what usually happens you know like i wanted to do this and didn't work out that way i mean i shouldn't even be here right now i'm supposed to be in an rv camp or somewhere my truck broke down you know what here we are god's plan perfect you know and all of that happens if i work for it and then uh we're going to step 10. i love step 10 it says this thought brings us to step ten so i can't even get the step 10 on my own i need the thought the thought is that i have to work for the promises and step 10 is not something you do at night and it's it's not a nightly inventory there is no nightly inventory step 10 says we continue to watch for selfishness dishonesty resentment fear watch being the key word when they crop up we ask god at once to remove them so when do i do step ten at once right here right now i'm about to park my car and i'm in the middle of two spots because i'm late and i notice i'm admitted do i go back to the car and move over so someone else can park where i say i don't worry about it they'll find another parking spot and i just stay selfish instead i go back to the car i move it over i was watching i wasn't selfish girl hands me change of a 20 i give her a 10 do i keep the 10 dollars and write about it tonight or do i say excuse me i think you gave me too much money i don'T want to be dishonest i DON'T want TO BE SELFISH i am watching if i'm doing step 10 properly i won't have a lot of writing to do because i watch for these things same way I watch for puddles I try to avoid them I hit a few now and then same thing with this I had a few now and that I'm not perfect you know there is so much more I don't have enough time but what step tens about now you know and it was so much warming step 10 pause when agitated or doubtful if I'm agitated it's coming from my emotions if I'm doubtful coming from my mind. Two places I don't belong. Two places I don' t belong. When God's running my life, I'm not agitated or doubtful. If I'm agitated or doubtfull I'm running my own life again. And I need to look at that. Pause. It saved me more times than I can tell you. And then step 11 says I love step 11. One of my favorite steps. I mean I guess they're all my favorite steps. But it says we're now at step 11. Better men than us are using. It suggests prayer and meditation. Better man than us is using it works if we have the proper attitude and work at it. What is the proper attitude? Prayer is prayer, right? Well no, my teacher said to me how's your prayer life? I said the first thing I do is I get up in the morning I say God please keep me sober today and he looked at me so why who are you? Why should God keep you sober? Does He work for you? And I was like he said Paul you're supposed to be working for God, maybe you should ask God what you can do for him instead of telling him what you think he should do for you. And I started praying with a different attitude and I had to work at it. And when I had the proper attitude and started to work at it, prayer started to worked, you know, and it's just my experience. Um, there is so much more I got a few minutes but you know my life today is an amazing life I haven't had a problem in years I very rarely worry I mean I'm not gonna say I never worry very rare because people ask me do you trust God I said yes he said well then what are you worrying from the minute I start to worry means I'm not trusting God I don't worry much anymore I know God I worry about who president is I know the king it doesn't matter president you know and the truth of the matter is when you get to live this way there is a freedom that is beyond my explanation that's what this book promises me doesn't promise me now about drinking but there's no directions I stopped drinking promises me a freedom and that's where I have today I can go anywhere do anything when we got married that's quite a few years ago but when we got married we had 160 people 80 of them were from ai and 80 were family and there was alcohol on every table one person relapsed brand new person it just wasn't doing what we do everybody alcohol is not the problem and it's so important that i make people know that i mean not drinking is important but not drinking as a side effect of living a god-centered life I don't have the power to not drink and then step 12 you know without step 12 I have nothing because the truth of the matter is the first 11 steps are not the work I thought doing the steps was the work I told y'all I've been through the work but I never sponsored anybody see the first eleven steps of the process page 25 says these in it these things are required for the successful consummation of the process and then the work begins it says bill says that you set to work frantically upon other alcoholics so the word is when i start taking others through the steps and that's what keeps me sober there's a sentence in this book and it's only recently a few months back i read it and god just like struck me and it was like the book says he might be convinced that he can't do this alone and i thought that meant that he needed a sponsor but that's a lie you don't need a sponsor it's a lot easier with a sponsor, but you don t need a sponsor what you need to sponsor if you don' t got someone to help you'll never stay sober never that's what Bill didn't go to help Dr. Bob please understand that Bill was going to drink and when Bob said what do you think you're going to say that's going to help me I'm a doctor I'm a religious man. Bill said, I didn't come here to help you. Bill was thinking about drinking. He knew he needed to help another uncle so he would not drink. My sponsorship is perfect. I haven't had a drink in 19 years. It doesn't matter if they drink. I don't sponsor them to get them sober. If they get sober, it's between them and God. But without step 12, the rest of it chooses. And on page 14 in Bill's story again, what he says is my friend promised when these things were done I would have a new relationship with my creator and then later on it says it was imperative to work with others as he had worked with me faith without works is dead and for us it's just like that thanks for having me guys Yeah, let's take a second to thank Paulie again. All our speakers come here at their own time and expense. You came all the way up from Florida just for you guys. It's customary for us to form a line afterwards and thank our speakers. They always like to hear from everybody here. What else have we got to do? Don't forget the meeting after the meeting. Hang out with us if you're struggling. See anybody in this group. just about everybody cares our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety so that's truly what this group does anyway, Allen B. next week we've got a nice way of closing if you care to join us and that's a wrap great job take a moment of silence do with it what you like and if you dare to join as one with the Lord's Prayer Our Father Our Father Who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses and forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil and lead the people of power and the glory forever and ever Amen Good job Thank you You got it.