The Fear of Being Ordinary – Michael L.

All right. Day alcoholic again. Also, just something, Israel and the next gentleman, I use that term loosely, that I'm going to introduce, are involved with something called Taco Tuesday. That is every week, T-A-L-K-O, Taco Tuesday. Oh, what am I? I mean, just I'm not able to go as much as I used to, but it's just, I mean if you are quarantined and have nothing to do and especially if the bedevilments are visiting you go to Taco Tuesday and you will enhance your recovery. It's just wonderful. Let's all take a moment of silence to invite our higher power back in to this. Thank you. And also remember, be on your best behavior. If you have to go to the loo, please turn your camera off. um but as i said this is a meeting of alcoholics anonymous right now so please you know remember if you're going to walk around turn off your cameras it's going to have background noise try to mute yourself or will or or or you may get muted but um anyway um i mean and i did i talked to michael on the phone once we have um we do have we talked about thomas merton um who is just one of my favorite writers um that that isn't a comic book writer for those who know me and that um then um there uh we just talked about that and how zoom has affected our life and the different kind of meetings we have went to. And I heard his lead. I was walking a few weeks ago, and I just really enjoyed it. He told some wonderful stories. I could really relate to his first drink. Not that that was my experience, but that was just, yes, it sounds like that sounds like me though. Michael, I'm going to turn it over to you. Wonderful, wonderful man. gives an awesome message thank you michael and it's all yours now my friend thank you thank you dale thank you for the kind words my name is michael levinson and i'm an alcoholic uh i must tell you that this is probably the most daunting talk i've ever given israel campbell is my sponsor and uh i've never had to speak after him and but i'm grateful and uh I hope that you're going to hear a message of love that I've received in my sponsorship and that I hope you receive in yours. So my AA vitals are as follows. I have a sobriety date. It is October 10th, 2012. I have home group, Connect the Dots of Las Vegas, Nevada. I have sponsors. I've said Yisrael C., and he has a sponsor, Clancy I. And those are very important things to me in my sobriety, and I hope that they're important, that yours are important to you as well. It's an honor and a privilege. I'm not going to repeat Israel too much, I hope, but it is an honor and a pleasure to be able and a honor and privilege to be asked to do anything in Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the first things that I like to do is qualify because I think identification is one of the keys to this program. And I'd like to mention that I was reading with a sponsee who's on this morning. We were reading the forward to the second edition and it says there that a wholesale miracle has occurred. And that wholesale miracle is that there are 109 of us here in this Zoom meeting this morning and we are not drunk. 109 of us that should be drunk right now And the wholesale miracle is that through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and a loving God, we are sober today. We are sober Today. Some of us are sober for many years. Some of Us Are Sober For A Few Days. And I like to identify with the following story about a year ago. My brother came to Las Vegas to visit and he said to me, my wife is coming in tomorrow and I know she's not going to be interested. So would you please come down? I'd like to check out one of the bars at one of the casino hotels. And the book tells me that I can go where I need to go and do what I need to do as long as I have a purpose. And I said, sure, I'll go with you. So we went down to the chandelier bar at the cosmopolitan hotel and we sat down at the bar and I ordered my $7 bottle of water and he ordered a cocktail and two young ladies came at about the same time and they sat down next to us and they each ordered a cocktail. And I watched three adult human beings drink a cocktail for 45 minutes. Now, if anybody here identifies with that kind of drinking, you may go. I said to my brother, you see that bottle of Patron over there across the bar? Bring that over here. Line me up six double shot glasses because I don't want to have to refill, and I'll show you how we drink. And if you identify with that part of the story, welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't understand social drinkers. I think they're weird. I've never understood them. I took my first drink alcoholically when I was 12 years old, and by alcoholic drinking, I mean with purpose. I drank with purpose, and i was 12 years old and I came home from school that day and I had had a bad day. And I'm not sure how bad that day could have been. I'm a white Jewish middle-class kid growing up in Portland, Oregon. How bad a day could it have been? But it had been a bad Day. And my brain tells me that the solution for that bad day is to have a drink of alcohol. That's alcoholism. I am hard wired to drink beverage alcohol. And if it's a bad day, my brain tells me that the drink will make it better. And that's my drinking until I get sober. I do go to high school. I'm not very good at high school because i'm much more interested in in my drinking um i seek out i guess they were lower companions again in my high school i'm not sure how low they could have been but i think i'm drinking like everyone else i'm doing like everybody else right i don't know i'm going to be an alcoholics anonymous one day i'm in high school so if somebody says would you like to drink this yes would you like to smoke this yes Would You Like To Snort This Yes What is it about alcoholics and snorting things? I don't know. But I like it. I just, I don t care. Just up, down, just let me know what direction we re going. And I graduate from high school, and I don T understand why people are paying a state college to go away and drink. So six or eight of us just got an apartment, got jobs, and we got down to our lives, which was to be professional drinkers. Now, what s interesting about that story is of the eight of US, six of us went on with their lives and either became or were the entire time what the book describes as a hard drinker right at some point they went to college they got married they started their careers they had children and they either stopped or controlled their drinking i don't understand that the two of us that are alcoholics one of us is dead he died more than 20 years ago He went to the doctor, and the doctor said, Donnie, if you don't stop drinking, you're going to die. Your liver is about to fail. And Donnie couldn't stop drinkin'. And he died on a barstool. Now, isn't it interesting? Our death certificates never say alcoholism. They say things like cirrhosis of the liver. They see things like contusion of the brain. I had another friend die after banging his head on a sink in a motel bathroom with his second ex-wife. And he had gone to the hospital. They had checked him out and released him. He died later that night. That's alcoholic death. And it's a difficult choice for us, as the book points out. So I want to speed through until I was 30 because that's really when my alcoholism progressed. And I know what happened. And again, I was clueless at the time, right? All I knew was that I had a job that was stressing me out. I had wife and five children and a mortgage, and my anxiety levels were through the roof. So what did I do? I went to the doctor. Of course I did. And the doctor gave me a prescription. He said, Mr. Levinson, I have a solution for your anxiety. And he wrote me a subscription for Valium. Of course he did. and what I discovered was that Valium in bourbon was better than bourbon. Why shouldn't I? Because what I want you to understand is that any drug use that I may talk about is simply managing my alcoholism. I don't know that at the time, I know that today and I'm grateful to have found myself in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous and I hope that you have all found yourselves in the books of Alcoholic Anonymous. I find myself on every page and I'm a year I just want to describe the year before I got sober the year I got the year Before I Got Sober in the winter of 2011 I came home one Friday afternoon and I went to my bedroom and I closed the door and nobody saw me for 25 hours I was in my bedroom with a bottle of bourbon and a bottle boxy and I just wanted to be left alone And somewhere in Saturday afternoon, I realized that I was going to run out of what I needed. And we were living in a foreign country at that time. The country closes down from Friday night to Saturday night. And on Saturday night, as soon as the buses were running, it's winter, it snowing, and I get dressed to take an hour-long bus ride to get what I need. And as I'm approaching the front door of my apartment, my eight-year-old daughter stops me. And she says to me, Daddy, where are you going? And I said, Daddy's got to go out. You see, I will put everything behind me. Don't get in front of my drinking. Beautiful wife, seven children, a million dollar apartment. And I can't stop drinking. And in May of 2012, I shut the only business. I shut a business down. It was the only бизнес I had. It was a business that supported my family. I had no plan for how I was going to continue to support them. My eldest son was getting married that month. My oldest daughter was going to get engaged later that summer. And I was done. I was gone. And here's the first time that I appear in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the doctor's opinion on XXI, It says, the patient had made his own diagnosis. I had decided that the world was a dark and ugly place and deciding his situation hopeless had hidden in a deserted barn determined to die. Now for me, it was not a deserted bar. It was a luxury apartment, but it doesn't matter. I had separated myself from everybody, from God, from my family, from our family. From my friends. He was rescued by a searching party and in desperate condition brought to me. In early October of 2012, I was thrown out of my own house by my ex-wife, now ex- wife, and my own father. I did not see it as a rescue party at that time. Having done a proper fourth and fifth step with a sponsor, I see it that way today, and I'm grateful. I'm thankful for what those people did for me when I couldn't do anything for myself. And it was the only way they knew how to help me or to save me. And so I ended up in a lockdown rehab. And I was introduced in that rehab to a word that I had never heard before. It was not a word in my vocabulary. I did not understand it. And that word was powerlessness. Powerlessness? I don't have any idea what you're talking about I am all powerful I am God that's why I see myself in every in 60 to 63 and that's got to be a strange position for a person to be because I was a religious man I was believed in God and yet I was playing God and that is worth a drink I realize today I had a prayer life then but my prayer life really it was really a series of demands. It was not communication with a higher power. My prayer looked like this I'm following all your laws. I'm doing all the rules now do for me. This is what I want. It wasn't more a relationship. God was my butler and I had to change that relationship and by the grace of a loving God I did. They took me to a meeting of AA about six weeks into that rehab. And it was a very small meeting, about six people, but they had about 100 years of sobriety between them. And It was a big book study. And we read the book line by line, paragraph by paragraph. And I don't think it was the first meeting that I was at. I was very foggy when I first came into AA. And they used to give me the ninth step promises. I was a crier, I was a sobber, I still can be but then it was uncontrollable they'd give me the ninth step promises to read every week and every week I would sob. I didn't find out until my second birthday in AA that they had all bet against me when I first came in but the first time I know I was paying attention at that meeting was on page 53, on page 53 it says when we became alcoholics. Crushed by a self-imposed crisis, we could not postpone or evade. That was certainly my experience. We had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else he is nothing. God either is or he isn't. What was our choice to be? Now, we know that we have 164 pages of our basic text, but we also know that really after page 103, very few of us actually read those chapters. So we're about halfway through our basic text, and now we're being told when we became alcoholics. What does that mean? I did not understand that at first. I mean, I told you a little bit about how I drank. I think I identified as an alcoholic. What Does This Mean When We Became Alcoholics? And here I'm going to have to, you'll forgive me, but repeat something you heard from Yisrael because I love it so dearly. As Scott Redmond of Blessed Memory used to say, alcoholism is contagious. We catch it through our ears. And that's how I became an alcoholic. I caught alcoholism in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous because I heard you share how you drank and how you felt. And I said to myself, if that's the way you felt and that's what you did, if that was the way that you drank, I must be an alcoholic and I had a first step experience. and then we come to the second step came to believe this is came you know everyone talks about trouble with the third step let's talk about the second stuff for a second right because I believed in a God he was the creator of the universe and the creator world but he gave it to me to run that's what I believed as an active alcoholic so came to believed that a power greater than me could restore me to sanity that was a much larger ask a much bigger ask for this alcoholic than the third step right a power greater than me that took me some time that took me some and I heard a speaker share a story recently and I love it so I'm gonna share it myself there was a funeral once and there was very famous actor there so the presiding priest asked this actor would you like to share a psalm that you loved and the actor said yes I would like to share Psalm 23 and the actor recited the prayer and everybody was moved and then the presiding priest asked a visiting priest would you like to share a psalam that you loved and the priest said yes actually I would like to share also Psalm 23 and the priest recited the psalms and there was an uneasy silence a silence that went on just a bit too long and finally the actor got up and he said father i think i understand what's happened here you see i can recite the psalm beautifully but you know the author and that's what has to happen for us in the second step and then i can go on to step three step three is to make a decision right it doesn't say we actually take the third step in the third step. It says we make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the loving God. I'm still working that step today. It's taken me years to give certain things over, certain things that I've kept myself. And we'll touch on that a little bit as we talk about six and seven, because I believe three is directly related to six and seven. Four and five, my first sponsor, God bless him, said to me, Michael, four and five is not going to be your problem. six and seven may kill you. And that's because I was 46 years old when I got sober. There was nothing, I was not surprised by anything on my fourth step. I knew my major defects of character. I knew I was arrogant and prideful and entitled and vain. Those were not surprises to me. The surprise to me was six and 7 And I think they're the greatest secrets kept in Alcoholics Anonymous. For me, six and seven are the engine that run my program today. And of course it relates to 10 and 11 and 12 because that's where I live. But in taking that constant inventory and finding new defects or not necessarily new defects. But as defects crop up, we'll talk about that a little later, to throw them back into six and seven. And in six and seven, the greatest thing I learned was I can't fix myself. I had tried for years to fix myself, it was one of the reasons I became religious. It was one of the reason that I chose the sect within Judaism that I choose because humility was one of their basic tenets. And I knew I needed humility, but I thought I could get humility. I thought it was something I could achieve like I had achieved many things in my life. I'm an achiever, but i was never able to get humility and today by the grace of a loving God in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, my experience is that I don't get to achieve humility. My experience is, is that if I'm practicing gratitude, if I am living in gratitude, gratitude to this loving God who is either everything or he is nothing, what was my choice to be? If I'm in gratitude to that loving God, I get to experience humility as a byproduct of that gratitude I get to experience humility I do not get to own it or achieve it and in six and seven I also learned something very important and this is a recent this is happening right now within COVID I made a decision on March 15th to surrender and make a decision to change the way I eat and exercise. And it's the same process. I surrender, I make a decisio n, and then I have to take action. and having taken those actions I can report that today I'm 21 pounds lighter than I was on March 15th now the reason I'm doing that is for health benefits right the doctor in early March put me on a bunch of medicine that I don't want to be on heart medication cholesterol pre-diabetic all these pills that I don't want to be taking. And the doctor said to me, no problem, Michael, everything that's wrong with you today and everything that is going to be wrong with you today is related to your weight. And if you can take the weight off, I will let you stop taking the medication. So I am making these decisions and I am taking these actions because I would like to live today, right? But let's be really honest. If I'm really honest, and I must be honest with you. The real reason that I'm losing weight is because I'm vain. Vanity is what drives me to lose weight. And I can tell you everything about the health benefits, but it's vanity that's driving this for me. And so what I understand today, and this is why we say in the seventh step prayer. I give God everything, good and bad, because I don't know anymore. I don'T KNOW what defects of character God is going to use for my benefit. What if God had removed the defect of character or vanity from me? Would I be losing that weight? I'M NOT SURE. I'M GRATEFUL THAT I DON'T HAVE TO FIND OUT BECAUSE I TRUST A LOVING GOD WHO KNOWS WHAT HE'S DOING much better than I do. Eight and nine are beautiful steps. A lot of people share beautiful ninth step stories. I would like to share an eighth step story with you because the eighth step is often overlooked as just a step towards nine, but eight is truly a step within itself And I really didn't understand it until two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, on a Saturday night, I found a willingness that I've not had for the previous seven years. I'm unemployed right now, as many of us are. And my unemployment has been delayed. They don't give you much information. They just say payment delayed. And I was patient and I knew God was working in my life, but this went on for weeks, months. and on a saturday night two weeks ago i had the willingness to text my sponsor and say there are some financial amends that i have not made and there are some financial amendments that i did not put on my first first eighth step list with my first sponsor and these things are weighing heavily on my heart And so tomorrow, I'll text and send it to you. And on Sunday morning, I wrote that eight-step list, and I texted it to him. Now, he's a busy man, and he has a family and a life, and I love him. It took us a week to go over that eight step list. But that's not what's important. On Monday morning, I logged into unemployment, and all the money was there. now you can say that's a coincidence i like to say that god and it's not that god was withholding the money from me he was not punishing me by withholding the money i was blocking myself i block myself from a loving god he does not block himself from me and in being willing to make the eighth step list. I have not started to make those amends yet. I will. I will in the ninth step, but it was the willingness to make the list. It was the willingness to share it with another person who I know is going to hold me responsible now that I've made the list and that unblocked me from the love and the blessing that God wants to give. And so we move on to 10, 11, and 12. You know, I had gone through this process once before in my life of becoming a religious man. Now it's not the steps, but it's similar to one through nine. I'd gone through this kind of a process before. And I remember going through this practice before and I had the same reaction. Okay, I've done the mechanics Right, I've Done all the rules All the suggestions Right, now what Now what And again the book speaks to me And again The book tells me And I love this on page 77 Our real Purpose, just in case Anybody was wondering Book tells me Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us. Wow, that was news to me. I was always willing to be a maximum service to God, and myself, but maximum service to God in the people about us? And I love the language of Wilson. Wilson was very careful with his language. It says that I have to fit myself to be of maximum service. And I don't know about you, but see, to me, fit implies, you know, it doesn't just slide like a Gucci loafer. I have to fit myself. To me, there's a sense of discomfort there. I Have to Fit Myself. There's work involved to be of maximum service to God and the people about us. And we talk about this being a spiritual program of action. That confused me when I first came into these rooms. I knew what a spiritual program was, that was my religion. And I knew what action was, that was me running the world. But what was this spiritual program of action. And again, I am so grateful that in step 10, we're told exactly the action to take as a spiritual program. On page 84, it says, we have entered the world of the spirit. Well, doesn't that mean I should just sit down? Right? Find me on my mountaintop. Sponsees, hey, find me on my mountaintop. No, no, no. I learned from my sponsor, I call you. I call You because somebody called me. Our next function, here we go, if you've worked one through nine, our next function is to grow. That's an action in understanding and effectiveness. this. I am still not as effective as I would like to be in my life, and we'll talk about that a little bit in 12. This is not an overnight matter. It should continue for our lifetime. I love that Wilson was finally honest about this program. We talk about one day at a time, and yes, I'm sober by the grace of a loving God one dayatatime, but in step 10, he finally points out that this is going to continue for our lifetime. Continue, continue to what? Continue to watch. There's an action. For what? For selfishness, dishonesty, resentment and fear. Wait a second I thought I got rid of those in six and seven. No no no. When these crop up they're gonna crop up so what do I do? When my selfishness crops up, what do I do? We ask. There's an action. God at once to remove them. That's what we do. When a defective character comes up, I ask God to remove them. That's the shortest prayer in the book and I think it's one of the most effective. Please help me. We discuss them with someone immediately, right? I call my sponsor. I have a network of sober friends who have spiritual license in my life and make amends quickly if we have harmed anyone. Quickly sometimes gets me. Define quickly. Then we resolutely turn our thoughts to someone we can help. love and tolerance of others is our code i want to speak for a moment about love and tolerance so one of the benefits for me of these zoom meetings is that i get to be on in meetings with my sponsor who's 10 10 time zones away from me and we were at a meeting a couple weeks back and somebody was sharing and i must admit i was judging them and i did not like what they were sharing. And I'll even admit that I picked up my phone and I'm texting my sponsor, blah, blah. Now my sponsor is not replying, not repying. And I finally say to him, I could use a few words from my sponsor and I get a text back and it says love and tolerance. And And I texted back and I said, well, yeah, that's a few words. Love and tolerance is our code. And I'm not perfect at it. But I progress. I'm on a journey. And 11, I love step 11 because I've practiced prayer and meditation. It's been a part of my life for a long, long time. But what I love about the 11th step is this. At the end of the 11st step, and you'll forgive me, I know it, but I like to read it. Sought through prayer and meditation, seeking, right? It's a program of seeking to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand him. praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out. What? What is this power? Ten steps ago, we were talking about powerlessness. Lack of power is my dilemma. What isthis power that now we're talking about in the 11th step? It's because lack of poweris my dilemma, but in working the steps I have connected to a power greater than I am and if I connect into him if I improve my conscious contact to him he will provide me with the power regardless of what happens in my life not my life has not become all rainbows and unicorns and sobriety that marriage did not survive sobriety my ex-wife remarried very quickly after I got sober to another guy who looked like me I have seven children two of them speak to me today but I have I am connected to a power to a loving God who I trust and he gets me through whatever calamity that I see as a calamity. He doesn't, I do. And in step 12, well, we're doing step 12 right now. I've heard it said that this is the purest form of step 12. Alcoholics speaking to other alcoholics. But more importantly, is how do I practice these principles in all my affairs? How do I, you know, it's easy enough to be nice to you, especially at live meetings, right? I love being in the greeter line at live meetings. Welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. Welcome to alcoholics anonymous. I can be nice in a meeting. I can do that. I can feel happy, joyous and free in a meeting. But how do I behave outside of this fellowship? How do I treat my family? How do i treat my friends? How doI treat my boss? How doi treat the bank teller? How do I treat the guy who just cut me off on the freeway? These are the actions that I must take in order to fulfill step 12. About a year and a half ago, it was a fantastic job. A younger man than I had started a company, got it going, started a second company got more interested in the second and he had kind of let the first kind of hobble along and he hired me a year and a half ago to run that company for him and he said take 90 days to write a strategy you can recreate the company in any way you like you have 90 days to create a strategy excellent and there were only two of us in that company at the time So I made a decision that I did not speak to my sponsor about, that I joined the second company's weekly management meeting. Now, my motives were good. I wanted to be part of a larger body and I wanted to get to know my boss better. So my motives Were good. And in the 90 days that it took me to write this corporate strategy, I got involved in the bondage of self. You see, I wake up in the Bondage of Self, And that's why I have to pray the third, seventh, and eleventh step prayer every day. Relieve me of the bondage of self. I pray that because I wake up that way. And in this business, in this daily planning of this strategy, which I love, I love that work, I love the creative aspect of it, and I get wrapped up in the bondages of self, and towards the end of the 90 days, I need to make one more point. this boss who was working at this other company in another building in another part of town used to come every day at five o'clock and sit quietly with me for a half an hour and answer any questions that i might have he was generous with his time and he was generous with money and as we get closer to the end of the 90 days i have the brilliant idea that i should present this plan this new strategy to the management team of the second company Again, I do not ask my sponsor if this is a good idea. And so I make this presentation to this management team of the second company without getting into too much detail because it takes up too much time. You'll just have to trust me. I created pandemonium after that meeting. And I caused my boss grief and backlash and fear in his other management team that he did not deserve. And so the following week, I was confronted with a boss who was very different than the previous 90 days. He was mean. He was nasty verbally. He pushed my buttons, and I said to my proud self, I don't have to take this, and then I called my sponsor. And I was so excited to tell my sponsor, it was him. It was him seven years sober and I finally found a case where it's him. And all my sponsors said to me, as he often says, the book speaks of resentment. And when my sponsor says that to me I know what I have to do and I don't like it. so i inventory i inventoried my boss but i take my inventory not my bosses and it takes me a couple of weeks because when i do an inventory i'm looking for my defective character and more importantly i'm working on my own looking for the fear behind that defect because i want to take them both to god I don't want to have the defect, nor do I want to have the fear. So I take them both to God. And it took me a couple of weeks and it was actually in a conversation with my roommate who thank God is an active sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous and it wasn't a conversation with him that I discovered the defect of character that had led me to these actions and that defect of character is grandiosity. i suffer from the defect of grandiosity and what is the what is the fear behind that defective character the fear of being ordinary anybody identifying isn't it interesting how far we've gotten from drinking but here's the important thing the reason that i need to send these back to six and seven, and ask God to humbly ask him to remove my defects is because if I don't, I will drink. And to drink is to die for me, right? Defects of character are not exclusive to alcoholics. They're a human condition. My father and I share many of the same defects of character. That's not surprising. Some of them are learned. Some of them are genetic possibly right but when my father acts out in anger and I hit it hard so I must must ask God to remove I must identify these defects and and I must humbly ask God to remove them. And that's a step 12. That's part of step 12, practicing these principles in all my affairs. Now what's embarrassing is I found the answer to what happened, of course, in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's not what's embarrassed me. What's embarrassing is that it's on page 20. It's not hidden in the secret chapters to employers. It's not hidden in the family afterwards. It's on page 20. I've read page 20 a few times, and I was actually going through it with a sponsee. And it says on page 21, page 20, our very lives as ex-problem drinkers depend upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs. If I had taken five minutes to think about my boss, to think about the fact that he came to my office every day at 5 o'clock to quietly spend a half an hour with me. It says constant thought of others, not intermittent, not sometimes, constant, and how we may help meet their needs. If I had taken five minutes to think about my Boss and how He wanted me to present the strategy, not how I wanted, how he wanted. If I had taken five minutes to understand that what he wanted was to sit quietly in my office and have me explain the strategy I guarantee you I would have that job today. The answers are here. The answers were here. It means destruction of self-centeredness. that's how I must grow in effectiveness and in understanding I would just like to close with the fifth step promises as my sponsor says I like to go to the ones that aren't talked about much it's pride, I know but the fifth set of promises I think are very apropos to the life that we're living today in these days of COVID. On page 75, once we have taken this step withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the world in the eye. That's true for me today. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. I spend more time alone today than I've spent in a long, long time. but I'm at peace and ease. Our fears fall from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our creator. My trust in a loving God has done nothing but get stronger in these days. We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, as I described in my religious life, but now we begin to have a spiritual experience. And that's what I love most about my sponsor. my sponsor very rarely tells me what to do he suggests that whatever i'm going through i have a spiritual experience and it has to be my experience not his and when i work with sponsees i am there to help them have an experience clancy said about 30 years ago i heard it from someone else. He once described sponsorship as this, we amuse the baby until AA works. The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly. We feel we are on the broad highway walking hand in hand with the spirit of the universe and I invite you all to walk with me hand in hands with the Spirit of the Universe. Thank you for my life. Wonderful. Thank you, Michael. Thank you.