The Difference Between an Alcoholic and a Drinking Problem – David D.

My name is David Potts, and I'm an alcoholic. And I lost my American Express card. And my sponsee that was mentioned, he turned around and he said, What did he say? What did you say? As usual, he wasn't listening. First, I want to thank Kathy for asking me tonight. This is a great, great honor. This is probably the second-best home group in Atlanta. And it is quite an honor. I appreciate it. And I'm supposed to tell you that my sobriety date is February 15, 1990, that my home group is the Mount Vernon Group of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my sponsor is Tony Webb. And Tony cannot be here tonight. He and his wife, Toni, are in Destin together. And continue to keep them in your prayers. She was a speaker here, Toni Curry-Webb. And she was diagnosed last summer with pancreatic cancer. And she is one of that lucky, I guess it's like 5%, that has a very, very, sehr positive prognosis. But this is the first time they've been able to go out of town in probably eight or nine months. So keep them in your prayers, and I believe what I'm supposed to do is tell you what I was like, what happened, and what I am like today. And I will not spend a lot of time on what I as like because what I was like is exactly like most of you here. I had a mental obsession and physical addiction to alcohol once I started drinking, I couldn't stop. So let me tell you what happened because it was a real red-letter day in my life. My wife and I and five other couples went down to Calloway Gardens to celebrate a friend's birthday. And we got there late enough on Friday night that I couldn't do a lot of damage, but on Saturday I got up and had a breakfast of probably half a dozen bloody martinis and then we drank throughout the day. I had a cocktail hour that evening before going out to dinner and I don't remember going out for dinner. What I do remember is that sliver of consciousness when I came out of the blackout and I was sitting under the dinner table smoking a cigarette. Now, a normal, normal person would have said, you know, what am I doing? This is crazy. I'm going home and go to bed. What went through my mind is, I don't smoke. what am i doing here the uh the next thing i remember is coming to the next morning and my wife would not speak with me and that was not an unusual occurrence so i got up i got dressed and i went over to the other cabin because that's where my friends were My posse. They understood me. They appreciated me. So I walk in, and about half of them get up and leave. And the other half weren't overwhelmed to see me. So I got a cup of coffee. I went out on the deck and decided to talk to the person most important to me, and that was me. And one of the ladies came out, this wonderful woman. I admire her to this day. And she sat down next to me. And she put her hand over on my hand, and she said, David, you have a problem. And tomorrow when you wake up, I hope you'll find the strength to solve that problem because if you don't, you're going to lose everything you treasure up to and probably including your life. And I'm not telling you this to be judgmental. I'm telling you THIS because I love you. Please get some help. She got up and walked out before I could give her any repartee. But the reason I say that was a red-letter day is because I was out of the closet, so to speak. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I went back to the cabin, promised my wife I would never drink again, threw in some tears just for the effect. And when we went home, we poured all the liquor in the house down the drain. And we had done that before, but we didn't pour all the liqueur in the house. This time we did. And I kind of white-knuckled it for a couple weeks, and I was fixing dinner one night. And seriously, I had not had a drink in probably two weeks. It was two miserable weeks, but I had no idea what to do. not had anything to drink. And I decided to saute some onions, and I said, you know, sherry would probably be pretty good in these onions. And so I found the bottle of cooking sherry. God only knows how long it had been up there. Poured it over the onions, and I says, I wonder if this is any good? The only way to find out is to taste it. And it was good. And we finished that bottle of sherry off, and the next day I replaced it with one of the cute little bottles from Publix and then one big bottle from Greens. And we hid that bottle. And we would take a pull on that occasionally for another couple weeks. And I was getting more miserable and more miserable and more miserable, and I was making my family more miserable. And in early December of 1987, I went to my first AA meeting. And when they give the white chips, you know, they always say, I'm going to put one on the corner here in case somebody wants to steal it. That was me. I went up and I got it. And unfortunately, several people saw me. And as they say back home, they set upon me. And the next day I went back, and they decided to have a meeting dedicated just to me. And I learned all about jail time, broken marriages, lost jobs, a litany of things that had never happened to me, and I was beginning to wonder whether or not AA was really what I needed to be involved in. and the next day I went back and a gentleman shared about passing out in the woods and sleeping in his own vomit and waking up the next day and he was covered with pine needles and I said Jesus Christ that's not me and so I remember it was December the 7th Pearl Harbor Day, I stopped on the way home Got a big bottle of vodka, went home. Told my wife, I said, I've got a problem, but I'm not an alcoholic, so I'm going to get bombed. She didn't find the humor in that at all. That set me off on about a little over a two-year period where I tried to figure out why I drank so much. I knew I wasn't an alcoholic I knew I wasn' insane but I did have a drinking problem there's a great passage in the big book where they're trying to determine whether somebody is an alcoholic or has a drinking problem and somebody said well the difference is an alcoholic has to drink every day whereas someone with a drinking problem doesn't have to drink every day but when they do they get bombed drunk and I thought to myself I'm an alcoholic with a drinking problem. That's in the big book. But I started, why? Why was I this way? And so the first people I blamed were my parents. And Mom and Dad never showed any affection to each other, certainly not to us children. But what I found out since then is they grew up during this thing called the Depression. And that toughened you up. And then my dad went off and spent four years in the Pacific in World War II. He was what today would be called a seal. He was a frog man. And he found out World War III was over while he was training for the invasion of Japan. He was underwater. He came up out of the water, and the whistles were blowing, and people are jumping off the ships, and that's how he found out. If they had not ended the war, they estimated that 90% of the frogmen would have been killed during the invasion. So he was very happy the war was over, and I was very glad to be there. I was also very happy that he came home. But that's just the way people were. They didn't spend a lot of time and a lot OF emotion. There was no inner child to heal. And in reflection, I probably had the best parents that anyone on the face of this earth has ever had. My dad had two jobs his entire life just so he could keep food on the table, clothes on us, and maintain a happy home. And I will give you this caveat as we talk. I'm an asthmatic with hay fever. I'm allergic to every single weed, tree, animal in the world. So if I kind of start tearing up, it isn't emotion, it's pollen. But so it couldn't have been my parents. What about my family, the rest of the family? And I've talked with my parents, and as near as we can determine, I am the first drunk in the family. And I had spent my entire life hoping to be number one in something. This is it. So, all right, not the family. It's the town that I grew up in. That's it, this little tiny town in North Carolina. When you go home tonight, don't look up Welcome, North Carolina on a map because it ain't on any maps. You've heard the expression, if you blink, you'll miss it. Welcome, you didn't have to blink. You just missed it. And if you were there, you were there by accident. Nobody ever went there on purpose. I was convinced they were the most backward, redneck hayseeds to walk the face of the earth. And this young lady is laughing. You must be from Welcome. But I went back for my best friend in high school's 50th birthday party. And sitting around, we were all talking and the high school beauty queen came over and sat down and we were talking together. And I always remembered how she was a very, very attractive woman, but she wasn't, she was missing a bulb out of the chandelier outside. And she looked over and she said, you've quit drinking. And I said, what? She said, you have quit drinking. I can sense it. And I said well how did you know I'd ever been drinking? I did not drink until I went away from college. So I mean she'd never seen me take a drink or anything and she said David both my parents are alcoholics. My entire family is made up of alcoholics and I knew you were going to have a problem if you ever started drinking, and thank God you have quit. And I said, well, so much for the ignorant hayseeds in welcome North Carolina. Okay, it's not them. That's where I went to college. Because I'd grown up in this conservative little backwoods town, I wanted to go to a big university, very liberal, very forward, progressive thinking, so I ended up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there was a lot of drinking that went on there and the very first weekend I was there it was a big football weekend I don't remember the game I can promise you we lost the game they only won 13 games in the four years I was there so we probably lost the game but that was my first experience that first weekend and as I say, I got exceedingly drunk and woke up the next day feeling very bad and someone said, you need a hair of the dog that bit you. And so they gave me a drink and in retrospect, I liken that to a guy who's laid out all day long in the sun. He's sunburned and he gets up the last night and somebody says, well, you ought to go out and lay in the Sun some more. It didn't make a lot of sense to drink after you've been drunk but everybody else was doing it, so I did it, and I actually felt a little better. And I have no idea how many people were in my class or how many People were at Chapel Hill. There were a lot of people that drank, but I didn't drink to excess because I went to school there. So that wasn't the problem. One of the interesting things that did happen to me there was the second semester, I'd never been outside that little cocoon of protection That I grew up in, in my family And in North Carolina So I just kind of went kind of crazy When I got away from home And the second semester I determined that it would make more sense To spend money on beer than on books And it's very, very difficult to make decent grades Not buying books Or going to class So I had two F's, two D's and a C. And I got that C because it was some type of history course that I had in high school and I actually remembered enough to make a C in the course. Back in those days they sent your grades to your parents. When my daughter was in college she got the grades and I had to beg to see them. But dad comes in with this little slip of paper and he said how do you explain that? I said, explain what? He said, two F's, two D's, and a C. And I said well I spent too much time studying for history. Big Andy didn't find any humor in that at all. And his solution was, he said, what we're going to do is I want you to be the first in the family to finish college. So I'm going to continue to pay but you're either going to go to Elon which is a small Baptist college in Elon, North Carolina. Their nickname used to be the Fighting Christians. Is that not a great mascot? Or my other choice was Lenore Rhine which was a Lutheran school in Hickory, North Carolina. And I thought, someone's from Hickry. I thought to myself and I told him a day or two later, I said, no, I'm going to prove something to you and everybody else. I'm gonna go back to Carolina and I'm gunna pass. And so August, September, it's time to go back school. We put everything in this huge trunk. We drive down the, well, we're on the dirt road that I lived on. We go up to the paved road. And then we go down to the highway that went back to Chapel Hill. And he pulls off to the side of the road. He said, give me a hand, and we go back, and we pull this big trunk down, sit it on the side of the road. He stuck his hand out, said good luck, and call your mama, and drove off into the sunset, and fortunately, I had a few dollars saved, but I never got another penny from my dad to pay for my education. I did discover that if you pay for books, You will actually read those books. And if you pay for a class, you'll actually go to that class. And I was able to be on the dean's list the last two years I was there. And I went to my mother the first time and I said, look at this, you know, dean's list. Do you think, Dad? She said, don't even say it. He ain't going to give you a cent. So it wasn't Carolina that caused this problem. It had to be my wife. My beloved, we had our first date. She was a blind date. We had our fist date on December the 3rd. We were engaged on December 19th. We were married six months later. This is a woman that knew what she wanted. next this coming June we'll celebrate 43 years together and I'll tell her you applauded because what she would say right now is the story tells a lot funnier than it lived but But the fact we are still together today is a testimony to her determination, her love, nothing that I had anything to do with. So I spent that two-year period trying to work through all these reasons for my drinking, and I can tell you, I could ask you, what happened to you in 1988 or 1990, 1988 or 1989? What was something of interest that happened to me? And somebody would say, well, I graduated from college or I got married or I had a baby. And I can say on that day I got drunk because that's what I did for a little over two years. I would go home, go down into my basement. I think the term they use now on HGTV is my man cave. and I would sit down there and I would drink until I passed out or until I ran out of vodka I think it was vodka it was clear and it was in a bottle it was called pop off obviously y'all have had some pop off anytime the label says distilled in Albany, Georgia You really need a strainer to get all the leaves and the sticks out. But I would go down into my basement, and I would just drink until I passed out or ran out and stumbled back upstairs. But in February of 1990, my wife asked me a good question. She said, What are you going to do when you get to be like Mr. Kaiser? And Mr. Kaiser was her best friend's father. And he had been a very, very, very high executive with General Motors. And his job was to fly all over the world and convince sheiks and dictators and what have you to drive Cadillacs. And 50 years ago, they all drove Cadillac. They didn't drive Mercedes or Lexus. They drove Cadilacs. And he wined and dined these people and he retired with a wonderful retirement plan. They had a beautiful home up in Helen, Georgia. And every morning he would get up and fix a gin and tonic in these huge cups. And he went to bed one night, and he did not wake up. He died very, very, really early, and left a bitter wife and two bitter children. And she said, what are you going to do when you get to be like Mr. Kaiser? And I said, well, I'll kill myself. and I hadn't really thought about that and it just kept echoing over and over in my head I couldn't sleep that night I kept thinking about that that's not the way when I was born I'm pretty sure my mama didn't rock me in her arms and say this is a boy that's going to kill himself one day and so the next day I got up I went back to 8111 and I picked up another I actually walked up and picked up the white chip and contrary to that first time I actually heard things that I could identify with and there was a wonderful movie years ago called Forrest Dump and Forrest took his girlfriend Jenny back to the home where she grew up and where she was abused by her father and when they went back she reached down and she picked up a rock and she threw it at the house and then she picked up another rock and another rock until she finally collapsed and was crying and Forrest said sometimes you just run out of rocks and I had run out of rocks I was whooped, I was beaten and I think about the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche probably don't have a lot of people quoting Nietzsch up here He said, nothing is so sad as a man of great potential who falls short and misses the mark. And that was me. I had fallen short. I had missed the mark, uh, Nietzsche also said women make the highs higher and the lows more frequent. Just a joke, ladies. It's just a joke. Blame Nietzsche, not me. As I say, my mind was open, and I was so lucky. Someone grabbed me at that meeting, and he said, you need to go to Skyland this Thursday night. And I did, and no, I'm sorry, not Skyland, Mount Vernon. And I did, and I heard more about, you know, people were laughing. I could understand what they were saying. And I'd waited until the very last second to rush in. And this guy grabs me as I'm walking in, and he said, You're new, aren't you? And I said, Well, yeah, more or less. And he said、Well, you need a big book. And I Said、I've got a big look. I've got two of them, King James and the New International Version. And he said, you are new. And I'll buy you a big book. And my pride said, no, I'll buy it myself. And I've still got that big book, but I began a journey that I'm still continuing today. And I got a sponsor and he started walking me through the big steps. The steps. And he was perfect. He was absolutely the perfect person for me. I don't like to be told what to do. A friend of mine one time said, I'll follow you anywhere but don't tell me where to go. And I said, that's me. And so we started through the steps and number one was not a problem. I was powerless and my life was unmanageable. Two, I had a little bit of a problem there. not that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. The God that I believe in created the universe, so he could solve any problem I would have. I just didn't think I was insane. And every single thing I would tell my sponsor, he would look at me and he'd say, David, the reason you feel that way is because you're crazy. and eventually i i came out of this fog and i realized i was insane i was i mean i had a really warped view of the world and uh then number three came along and i didn't have too much of a problem with half of that he said now you know we're going to talk about turning your will and your life over to god and i said well 1982 i turned my life overto god i bowed i prayed my sins were washed away by the blood of Jesus. Hallelujah and amen. He said, you're pathetic. Fool. Now let's talk about your will. And I said, what do you mean, the will? He said it's right there. Life and your will and we worked on that for a while and we finally read in the big book it's a chapter on acceptance and it says that my serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations of you. And so we got down on our knees and we said the third step prayer and I let go of every single thing that I was trying to hold on to. I was no longer responsible for my wife's happiness or my daughter's happiness or your happiness. I'm responsible for my happiness. And people talk about white light experiences and the freedom that they get from step five. Well, this was my white light and this was me. This was my freeing moment. Step four and step five, it took a while, but it wasn't the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life. Then we got to six and seven, and this is where I realized things had been misrepresented to me. I was told that all I had to do was go to AA meetings and quit drinking. Nobody told me about shortcomings or character defects. I liked lying. I enjoy self-pity. I can wallow in that with the best of them. And today, it's 20 years later, I'm still working on 6 and 7 every day some days are better than others and thank God it's a program of progress and not perfection 8 and 9 were a little more difficult and probably the hardest amends I've ever had to make was to my dad and we sat down one night and I'd like to say I looked him right in the eye but I couldn't do that I had to look down at the floor, but I kind of mumbled, Dad, I'm very sorry. I put you through something that was totally unfair. And you taught me the greatest lesson I've ever known in my life, and that is there's consequences for your actions. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. But I'm thankful that my children didn't do the same to me, and I'm sorry. And I looked up, and he was crying. There were tears running down his eyes. He made Attila the Hun look like a nice man. He was tough. He was a tough, tough guy. And this was the first time I'd ever seen him cry. And he said, I just wanted to be a good dad. And I said, well, you were. And it was just a great moment, a great moment, as were all of the amends. I just recently made an amends to my high school sweetheart. I dated this lady, or young lady, all the way through high school, and then we went our separate ways. And as I said, I made the decision to go to a big school where I was an extremely small fish, and she went to a small school. And she was a cheerleader, and in my mind, she was, you know, going to be dating the captain of the football team and the president of Phi Beta Kappa. So I wrote her a letter one day and just said, you Know, go your own way. I know that you're having a lot better time than I am and you're going to find somebody better than me, and good luck. And I was taking Spanish at the time, And I said, P.S., vaya al infierno. Roughly translated, that's go to hell. And I says, have someone from your Spanish department translate that if you have a Spanish department. I ain't proud of it. Back in January, I got word that one of my good friends in high school had a brain aneurysm. And so we kind of, through the Internet, started communicating with each other. And out of the blue, one night I got an e-mail from her and said, Have you heard about Jim and how are you doing? And I wrote her a long letter. And I said, here's where we are today, and I want you to know that you played an important part in my sobriety. I did something wrong 50 years ago that I still feel bad about today, and I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry. Sorry to say, did you have a Spanish department? But what was amazing is one of her daughters saw the e-mail, and she said, you know, what kind of a guy apologizes after 50 years? I mean, that's water way, way over the dam. And she wrote back, and She said, You know, I'm thrilled for you. Do you still go to meetings? And since then we've been, what do you call it, texting. Texting each other. I'm not on the cutting edge. But for those of you that haven't done the eight and nine yet, all I can tell you is the best is yet to come. I still do a daily inventory at the end of every day, and every now and then is a good day where I don't have any amends to make. Step 11, I don' t claim to pray a lot, but I do pray every day. I pray a couple of times every day. If you sponsored Matt, you'd have to pray a couple times. And that brings us to step number 12. And I am truly, truly, truly blessed. I get to work with nine men that I get the chance to talk to on a regular basis. And I have to tell you, I get more from them than I give. And again, for those of you that aren't sponsoring somebody yet, hang in there. The best is yet to come. When I say that, I think about the little town I grew up in, and we used to have what they called dinner on the grounds. And there would be this big table laid out with the greatest food you've ever seen in your life. And when everybody had eaten, the women would come around and they'd take up all the stuff off the table and they say, keep your fork, the best is Yet to Come. And that's when they'd bring the desserts out. What is my life like today? I asked my wife recently, I said, have I changed in the past 20 years? She said, are you sure you want this answer? And I said absolutely. I'm tough. I can take it. She said you are a better person. I didn't say you were a better husband I said you were a better person but today my wife can trust me if I say I'm going to be home at 6.30 and I'm late it's for a good reason I'm not in a bar or in a ditch I have to tell you that the first time I saw her when she opened the door my heart skipped a beat and I still feel that way about her today. My son, my daughter, they pretty well ignored me when I was in the throes of my drinking because they never knew which dad was going to come home or which dad was going to come up out of the man cave. But back in 1996, when my son was getting ready to get married, he had asked this young lady to marry him. And he came to me and he said, Dad, I'd like you to be my best man. And I said, well, what about Pat? You've known him since you were five years old. Or what about, you know, whatever their names were, John and Bill. They were in your company at the Citadel. I mean, you guys went through hell together. He said, Dad, it's best man and you're the best man that I know. My dad, as I told you, I had to make amends to him and my mom and both my parents died very suddenly, very unexpectedly. But because of this program, the last thing I told both of them when I saw them the last time was I hugged them and gave them a kiss and said, I love you. Now Big Andy kind of drew back at the kiss but they he gave me my 10-year chip he said son I love you and I'm proud of you I waited a long long long time to hear my dad say he was proud of me but it's because of this probe that that could happen. My job today, I'm still doing the same thing I've done for 40 years. I think they just keep me around as a relic, just to say, this is what you can become. I get to go to church where I'm a respected member of the church. I wouldn't call myself a pillar, kind of a window maybe of the church. And now we're going to get to the best part of the story because I left my daughter out. In February of 2004 I came home from an AA meeting and my daughter and my wife were sitting there in each other's arms crying. And you know my first thought was oh gosh somebody has died. and my daughter looked up and she said the three words that a father does not want to hear Daddy, I'm pregnant and I said but you're not married and she said but I've talked to my boss and she's going to let me bring the baby to work and I'm going to go to a little apartment and everything is going to be just fine. I said okay, that's cool, great. You have a grandchild right here in town. And then about a month later she found out she was going to have twins. And the boss said you ain't bringing two kids to work. And suddenly she was going to be living with me in my house. And I was not happy. I went down to Rock Eagle and I spent a lot of time walking around with one of the men that I sponsor that's here tonight. And, uh, I had a terrible resentment starting up because I had not planned on spending my golden years changing diapers. And I guess a month or something later, she asked me to take her to the OBGYN. He was a client of mine. So I went and I made the mistake of going in and they did, I think you call it a sonogram. And I saw two little hearts beating. I was dead in the water. Everything was okay from that point forward. We would get by. It wouldn't be fun, it wouldn't be easy, but we could get by, and then we found out that she had something called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. Never heard of it. Didn't mean a thing to me until they told me that what it means is that one of the babies is getting all or most of the blood and therefore all the nourishment. And the end result is the donor baby will eventually starve to death. It will die, and the moment that occurs, the body will abort the second baby. So it was at one time a death sentence for both of the children. And obviously it upset my daughter and my wife, but he said there may be some help. There's four doctors in the world that can perform this surgical procedure where they go in with a laser and they somehow, if I don't know how to use a cell phone, I certainly don't know how to explain what's going to happen but they go in and somehow or the other they make the blood go back to the donor baby and she picked this doctor down in Tampa to fly down to. And before she could get on the airplane, she had so much fluid in her body that they had to drain some fluid off and they took a two liter, you know one of these big two liter Coke bottles, that's how much fluid they took out of her. And she got down, they did all the tests, and they said when they took the fluid, they perforated the amnionic sac, I think it's called, and therefore we can't do the procedure. But like you hear on the Pupil commercials late at night, but wait! This procedure is considered to be experimental, so it is not covered by health insurance. He did not accept Medicare, Medicaid, or anything but cash. So I had dug into the retirement account, and we had the money to go forward on this thing. But he said, I am doing an additional experiment. I will inject this glop, and that's what I call it, this glap, into the amniotic sac. If we're lucky, it will congeal, it will go over and it'll patch the tear just like you'd patch up a tire. And he said, that'll be another $10,000. And the wife calls up and one of the things we hear is we intuitively knew what used to baffle us. And she said, you know, here's what can happen. And I said, do it. Do it. There's no reason not to do it, and so he injected this glop, and two weeks later she was to fly back down, and it had worked, and so they did the procedure, and he told my wife, he said, this is the worst, most difficult case I've ever done, and he said in approximately a month you'll know if it's worked the emphasis on the word was if he said there's a 50-50 chance that one of the babies will live so we that was on like a Friday the following Wednesday she had to go back to the she's no longer going to an OBGYN and she's going to a something, perinatologist. And I always thought perinotologist. That's because they're twins. There's two of them. I told you I was still sick. But we go in. They grease up this enormous, enormous belly she had then. and the doctor runs the thing over. And this is like six days later. Runs whatever it is, sonogram over and he looks up and he jumps up and he said, it has worked. That baby is getting blood. So here's one doctor out of four that she picked. This one doctor was doing this experiment with this clot. that's a miracle absolute miracle and three months later I got a phone call she's at the hospital they're going to take the babies I resented that what do you mean you're going to take my babies and so I went rushing over to Northside I don't know how many of you ever been to North side the birthing side of that hospital It's like a city. I mean, they have thousands of babies there every year. And so I go running down this hall, and I'm looking up another hallway, and there's my wife in scrubs, I think they're called, getting on the elevator. And I go runnin' down the hall, and this big nurse, big nurse jumps up and says, Stop! You're not sterile. And I said, I've had a vasectomy. I still didn't get on the elevator. But just a few hours later, two of the most beautiful babies you have ever seen were born. And they were tiny. They were tiny, tiny. The donor was the smaller of the two, and his arms were literally like that. I mean tiny, but beautiful. God, they were pretty. I've got something here. A lot of people say that I exaggerate about how beautiful these babies are. The last time I did this, a woman stole it. I'm holding on to this get your own grandchildren but probably the best the best thing that's happened in this program is me I like me today I'm no longer this unique character that walks in a room and am concerned about whether or not anybody's noticed me I used to think that nobody noticed me, or everybody noticed me. I don't have that anymore. I've gotten rid of the self-pity. I used to think every single thing that happened bad happened just to me. I've learned that there are bumps in the road. Life is life, as they say. Your parents die. Your dog dies. A lot of things happen and you don't have to drink about it. I've gotten rid of all my I've got rid of a lot of my fears the first time I ever had to speak in front of a group was in the 8th grade that was a long time ago and I still remember to this day we had to give oral book reports and I hid behind guys sitting in front of me because I didn't want the teacher to call i was so scared to get up in front of that class and uh finally i mean he looks over his pots your last and i went up and i was i mean i was shaking like a leaf and i threw up fortunately in the trash can right beside him and i started back to my seat and he said where are you going i said i don't feel good he said i dont care get up here youre gonna finish this. And I can say I haven't thrown up tonight. Yet. As I was standing outside getting ready to come in, a young lady walked up. She had a baby in her arms and someone said are you looking for the nursery? She said no, this is the speaker. So I have no problems with humility anymore. the greatest thing though that I've gotten the greatest gift that I have gotten is sitting right in this room I've got friends that I can call 24 hours a day and ask for anything and they will be there when I was running in the bars in Atlanta Georgia and every other city where they had a bar and I was there those people wouldn't walk across the street to help me But I have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful group of friends today. Let me almost close and tell you about a church that my wife and I visited in France. Our daughter, prior to having babies, was a flight attendant, so we got to fly free all over the world. And right outside of Paris is a little town called Chartres. A few people from Tennessee, it's charters. But in Chartres is what is supposed to be the first Gothic cathedral. And it is a magnificent structure. It's built on a slight hill. You can see it probably from 20 miles away. It is spectacular. And what's interesting about Chartres is there's no record of who built it. There's no report of the architect, The brick mason, the glazers that put in the magnificent stained glass, not one record. But there is a legend that says the bishop would walk around every day and inspect. And one day he had two masons working side by side. And he asked the first mason what are you doing? And he said I'm building a wall. And he Asked the second mason 10 feet away doing exactly the same thing. What are you Doing? He said I am building a monument to God. This program is a gift to you from God. Take your life and make it a monument to God. Let me close by reading a short passage from the big book. It says, I am rated as a modestly successful man. My stock of material goods isn't great, but I have a fortune in friendships, courage, self-assurance, and honest appraisal of my own ability. Above all, I have gained the greatest things accorded to any man, the love and understanding of a gracious God who has lifted me from the alcoholic scrap heap to a position of trust where I've been able to reap the rich rewards that come from showing a little love for others and from serving them as I can. Thank you for letting me serve you tonight. Thank you.