The Resentment That Kept Him Sober for 27 Days – Jim P.

Are there going to be any announcements for the A.A.D.U.M. movie? On starting September 8th over at Ufala Group, there's going to быть every Sunday from 3 to 5 a big book study in the history and the big book, why it was written, how it waswritten, and what it means. So everybody's welcome to come over and attend. What's the date of that? It starts September 8, and it'll be 10 consecutive Sundays after that. Again, this is a birthday movie. We've got one of our cultural visitors staying somewhere for seven years. And I'm really exasperated about AA because AA doesn't work. He was the only one that flew when I got here. We've been in and out. We're kicking this time. This has never kicked. But I was asked to go to Udalla. I'm going to introduce Neil, our speaker. I was ask to go Udallas all night and speak. I didn't know this guy, but I got to talk to him. He said hi to me, and when I was nervous for speaking in front of so many total people, you don't know. So I figured out what he was going to say. For me, I'm still trying to plan what I'm gonna say. and this guy too has got those kind of planning things that you have to deliver about. You know what I'm saying? This guy walked up to me and said, Yeah, we record, we put MP3s on the internet for speakers. If it's alright with your mind, go record. And I'm like, well he just increased the pressure. But it was pretty awesome when he looked at his thoughts into it. I don't know if you guys have any, he said he's got it on the website. But all the way back to Eddie, I was checking it out. And this is awesome. Go over there and imagine they've got them up there in New York. So that's pretty awesome. But we're blessed to have you here. So I'm really interested to hear what you guys say. Max said a lot about it. So I welcome Jim. the reason I'm called Georgia Jim is my home group is a central Orlando group in Orlando, Florida and every October through January people go where's Jim and everybody go Georgia because I do a lot of hunting and I wound up buying some property up there, moving there in 2006. I'm an alcoholic. My name is Jim Powers. And my sobriety date is February 18th, 2002. Central Orlando group is my home group even though I'm away from home right now. And had you told me in 98 when I walked in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous that I'd be in Abbeville, Alabama on this night telling my story, I'd have said you're out of your mind. You know, I had no clue what was going to happen on this journey. The book tells me And I'm going to say this And I am not trying to be offensive Or anything I did not know about Alcoholics Anonymous Until I was 44 years old Both my grandfathers died from this disease My family did not talk about it And I wasn't one of those ones That went to treatment Went to detox Went to the sanitarium I didn't know anything about anything Until I came into the room with AlcoholicsAnonymous So anything that I talk about is my experience, and it strictly comes out of this big book right here. This big book has saved my life, and has saved millions of others' lives. It tells me to generally tell you what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like now. So that's what I've been going to do. I was the fifth child of six children in a military family. My father was an Air Force hero. He never liked me calling him a hero, but he was. He was the first B-17 over Berlin during World War II, the first C-49 into Korea, and the oldest forward air controller off of Monkey Mountain in Vietnam. He spent a lot of time other places. And part of my problem when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I found was I didn't get enough attention from my dad. You know, there were five other kids in the family that were vying for attention. And so what I wanted was, I wanted to be with my dad whenever he was home. So whether it was good attention or bad attention, it didn't matter. I was the one in the family they called the black sheep. We moved all over. That had nothing to do with my alcoholism. But every couple of years we were moving to a new Air Force base. I was born in Atlanta. We were stationed at Dobbins Air Force Base. and my mother had a resentment against the Air Force doctor, so I was born at Fort McPherson Army Hospital. So maybe that has something to do with it, but I doubt it. What it was is I was just, I believe, genetically engineered to wind up here. Like I said, we moved all over the place. I'd start to meet friends, and within a couple of years I was moving, and none of that had anything to do mit anything. I was restless, irritable, discontented way before I ever found alcohol. In doing my inventory, I learned that I was a liar, cheater, and a thief by the age of 10 years old. And I had my first drink when I was 11. We were living in the coldest place in the United States of America. It was called Duluth, Minnesota. My dad was the head of the Air National Guard up there, and my oldest sister got married. and at the reception the colonel said that everybody could have one sip of the champagne that came out of the fountain and a lot of people have this thing where they talk about this golden moment this magic moment when they took their first drink all I can tell you is it did something to me that it doesn't do to normal people immediately I snuck back by that fountain and I got another drink and I kept drinking and I probably had 5 or 6 glasses I didn't sip it. I gulped it, and the next thing you know, I'm spinning around, and they're putting me in bed, and I'm throwing up, and I am starting off right then. I got up the next morning covered in pee and puke. I know we just ate, and it was a delicious dinner, so I am not going to get real gross. I promise you. And I had the worst headache I have ever had in my life. I describe it as a little man in my head with an anvil and a sledgehammer. And normal people would say, I'm never going to do that again. I'm an alcoholic. I'm a real alcoholic. I said, I can't wait to do it again. And I proceeded to try to get alcohol in my system every chance I could from that point forward until I came to these rooms. We moved to Orlando, Florida from Duluth, Minnesota. My dad was a hero then because I went from shoveling six feet of snow every morning to sitting on a beach and a lake and fishing all day. And I thought, okay, he finally did something right. That's where they were from. My mom and my dad both grew up in Orlando and he was getting ready to retire so he moved back there. And I was 13 years old and all I wanted to do was drink. I will tell you that there will be a couple times during this talk where drugs come up I am a big proponent of singleness of purpose in the traditions I believe very strongly we wouldn't be here today had Bill not written those traditions 13 years after the book but it's part of my story and I keep most of that drug talk out of the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous because of the respect that I have for the program I grew up in the late 60s and so as you can imagine there was a bunch of outside issues involved Well, in Orlando, I got with a group of guys that were about four or five years older than me. And they liked to drink like me, which is drink until you pass out or until you get arrested one or the other. I'm not sure which we thought we were going to do first. And I didn't want to work and I didn'T want to go to school. And so what that did for me was to get my alcohol, I became a burglar. And I was 13, 14, and 15. I was in and out of juvenile homes at 16. And then early 17, I was In-N-Out of jails. They never said, you know, he might have a problem with drugs or alcohol. Let's put him in a treatment center. They never did that. I was a criminal, and I deserved everything I got. And I deserved a lot more than I got because I can tell you now that I've been here a little while. The grace of God was in my life way before I even knew about God. My family was not a religious family. My grandmothers were, but my parents weren't. We would go to church maybe on Easter and maybe on Thanksgiving or Christmas. They would dress up the six kids and take them to church. But I had no concept of God whatsoever. All I knew is when I was in trouble, I was always saying, Oh God, oh God, get me out of this. People say they're foxhole prayers. I call them panic prayers. And he would get me Out of things over and over. and I never acknowledged that God was working in my life way before I ever even knew it. I have made most of the amends I could make to the people in Orlando. I mean, I broke into literally thousands of houses to steal people's alcohol. I really didn't care about jewelry and anything else, maybe guns, but I was always trying to get the alcohol. I started robbing drugstores, burglarizing them. When I turned 16, I picked up a gun and I started doing armed robberies. When I turn 17, I was arrested for multiple felonies and they weren't going to let me out. But they granted me bail one last time and I had written my dad a four-page letter and I meant every word of it. You know, I am never going to do this again. And I swear, and I believe to this day where I was sitting in that cell, I meant every word of that from the bottom of my heart. And he finally relented and posted a very large bail. And that night when my mother and he went to sleep, I broke into his gun cabinet and I stole his .45 automatic he carried through three wars, and I took off out the back door, and I take off to California. Some of the things that happened to me, I got hepatitis out in California. And because I had a military ID card and they weren't really as competent as they are today, I checked myself into a military base in Hamilton Air Force Base in California and was treated for serum hepatitis for about eight weeks. And I almost died while I was there when I was 17 years old. I went on a spree around the country doing armed robberies, not getting caught. I came back to Orlando for a party that a friend of mine was having. I snuck back into Orlando. The police department knew I was going to be there. They had an informer. They showed up. I had done some animal tranquilizers that night along with drinking heavily, and I pulled a gun on a police officer, and he pulled one on me, and I cannot tell you today why I'm alive except that God was working in my life. I was arrested, taken to jail, taken before a judge, and was sentenced to 52 years in a state penitentiary. And I'm 18 years old. And I've got hepatitis again. And I am in an isolation cell. And the only book in that cell was a Bible. And I don't know anything about the Bible. I didn't know any thing about the bible. All I knew is I am facing 52 years at Rayford State Prison. I am going to die. I know I'm going to die and so for two weeks in that cell the only thing I did was hold that Bible and say God please get me out of this somehow and he did two weeks later a judge that same judge called me back and said you might have some redeeming qualities after all I'm gonna put you on a chain gang for 18 months and that's that was right at the end of the chain gang era they had taken the chains off the legs down in Orlando but it was still sun up to sun down six days a week you climbed in a truck and you got in a ditch and you started swinging a blade Paul Newman made a movie called Cool Hand Luke if you ever see it that's what I did and it was the most miserable horrible time in my life and all I could think about is how can I get a drink not how can i not do this anymore how canI get a dream well how cani get a drink is to be the best guy on the chain gang working my way up to be a trustee so I don't have to swing the blades. We didn't have weed eaters and blowers like you see the prisoners on the highway now. They had real manual labor. Some of you know what a swing blade is or a Kaiser blade. And so I became a real good trustee. And then if you're feeding 150 people three meals a day, which we were at the chain gang, I said I want to be in the kitchen. And the reason I wanted to be In The Kitchen is because I know how to make alcohol. It's called butt. That's right. And that's exactly what my goal was in prison, on this chain gang, was how can I proceed to get to the point where I could make my own alcohol? And let me tell you something. When the doctor's opinion, and you read this book and study it, when he says that men and women like us drink essentially because we like the effect produced by alcohol, that's the truth. Because the stuff I made in jail, we fermented it with rotten grapefruit Those gray rot grapefruit that lay on the ground that, you know, they're just nasty. It was the nastiest stuff I've ever drank in my life and I didn't care. You could strain it through a dirty sock after about two weeks of sitting on a shelf. The first couple times I talked, I told you how to make it and I stopped doing that when my sponsor said, don't be telling people how to go out and make alcohol. So I just give you an idea that there was enough ingredients in that kitchen for me to make that stuff. I served my time. I got out of there. I got off of probation. I did not stop stealing. I stopped getting caught, but I didn't steal as much as I used to. And I moved to a little town in Columbus, Mississippi and met my future ex-wife. She was a little girl, 18 years old. I was 24. We fell in love and we got married and we stayed married 21 years. And I was an alcoholic during that entire 21-year marriage. I know we had a lot of good times. I'm sure we had a lot to do. We had a good time. I do not remember a lot about the marriage because I drank to black out. Now, I had reconciled with my father when I was about 26 and I got into the real estate business with him. And I have all these felonies that somehow disappeared from my record. I stand before you today never being convicted of a felony and I can't tell you how that happened because I was convicted of many. But they're not there anymore. And so God, again, is doing for me what I can't do for myself. I got into real estate with my dad and he had two rules. You don't drink during the day and you don't break with your clients. And I said, I can do that. And then I had a very successful real estate career because I did not drink during The Day and I did not drink with my clients. But at 5 o'clock when I was driving home, I was drinking a small liquor and when I got home I had a bottle of the cheapest whiskey I could find and I'd drink until I got blacked out. And this went on for all that marriage we had a little boy she was able to carry a little child when I was 40 years old my son was born and we couldn't agree on a name and we saw the movie Forrest Gump and we thought that was the greatest name in the world so we named him Forrest and you have to watch the movie two or three times until you really understand who Forrest was named after. His great-great-grandfather was the leader of the Ku Klux Klan and he lives in a little town in Mississippi. But she wanted to name him Austin and my last name is Power, so I think he got out with a better name. He likes that cool baby stuff. When we were married about 20 years, I started having some back pain I had a sister, my middle sister I had three older sisters an older brother and a brother that was 10 years younger than me and my middle sister who I always loved dearly came down with multiple myeloma which is a bone marrow cancer and I had some back trouble and she offered me some of her pain medication and I took some of that pain medication along with drinking very heavily and I blacked out and sometime during the middle of the night and my wife woke me up screaming at me that I had been wetting the bed. That's the nicest way to say it, but apparently my brain and my bladder were no longer communicating and I wasn't getting up to go to the bathroom. I was just doing it where I was. That was told to my father and my stepmother. My stepmother worked for the Hillsborough County, which is Tampa, court system for 20-something years, and she was the lady that DUI drivers went to to find out how many meetings they had to go to AA to get their paper signed. I had no clue what she did for a living. I just knew that she was retired and she looked at me and said, you need to go To Alcoholics Anonymous and your wife needs to go Al-Anon and I said, I don't have a problem. I'm not an alcoholic. I'm under a bridge. I don' t have a trench coat which is what I thought an alcoholic was and my former wife said she doesn't have a problem. She's not going to Al-Anon. It would have helped, but that's on her side of the table. I walked into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, which was really kind of amazing because I would drive by this building right on the main drag in downtown Orlando to go to my office and I would arrive in early in the morning and I'd see all these people standing on the porch and I'd go, what a strange place to put a labor pool. You know, that property is probably real valuable and they got a labor pull because everybody's standing outside drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes at 7 o'clock in the morning while they have a 6 a.m. meeting at that building. And so a friend of mine committed suicide. He got tough loved out of his house and at his funeral I was so overwhelmed, I believe it was the hand of God, that I called somebody and I said, where can I go for a meeting? and he said, they're waiting for you right across the street at that labor pool. That's an AA group, and it's a Central Orlando Group of Alcoholics Anonymous. So I walked across the Street. I promised myself I would go to one AA meeting and tell you all that if you didn't stop drinking that you were going to kill yourself. And I walked in that room, and there was probably about 40 or 50 people in there, and I burst out in tears, and I said that, and I can't tell you how foolish I feel now because there's people there with 35 years of sobriety and I'm there to tell them if they don't quit drinking, they can ruin their lives. And I can stop drinking. And I don't know it because I never have tried. Never. And so a gentleman came up to me after the end of that meeting and he said, why don't you not drink today and come back tomorrow? And I went, I'm not coming back. I came to my 1AA meeting. I don't have a problem with alcohol. And I went home that night and I tried not to drink and I couldn't do it. And I Went Back the Next Day and I Burst Out in Tears and I Can't Quit Drinking. I Became an Alcoholic the Second Day and I Did That for 27 Days. And there was a man there that had survived the concentration camps, a man named Leo. And he had 33 years sobriety at the time and he came up to me on a Friday after I burst out in tears again, knowing I was going to go home and get drunk. And he said, why don't you drink a bottle of arsenic and kill yourself quickly because I'm tired of seeing you kill yourself slowly. And I didn't know this old man had done this to hundreds of other people. I thought he was just picking on me. And I got so mad at him and so resentful that for the first time in almost 37 years, I went home and I didnít take a drink that night. and I went back the next day and I picked up a white shift now I can tell you if you start recovery on a resentment you won't stay in recovery and for the next three and a half years I kept saying I'm not crazy so step two can't possibly apply to me and so I don't I'm that crazy and I would go back and start drinking I would be blacked out during that period of time my wife came to me and said she wanted a divorce. And I said, what do you want? She said everything. And I says, take it. Including my five-year-old son which was my dream. I gave him away because I was drunk and I signed the papers for her to go live wherever she wanted. And she had already found a man on the internet and moved to Columbus, Mississippi. And he is the greatest stepfather of my son. He turned out to be the greatest man that I couldn't have picked a better man. And I told him that. My son's 19, almost 19. He has gone to thousands of AA meetings with me because when I'm in Orlando, I'm at two meetings a day. When I'm on my way to work, when I come in Georgia, I'm going to Albany or there's a meeting in Custard, there's one over in Eufaula. I'm doing the AA because the AA saved my life. During that three and a half period, my drinking got progressively worse. I would get 60, 90 days. Somebody would say, do you have a sponsor? I'd say, yes, I do. No, I didn't. I was sponsoring myself, you know, and it's really kind of hard to stay sober if you're sponsoring yourself to two sick people working with each other. And what happened was I came to a Friday night speaker meeting and a guy got up there who I'd never met before and he told my story. I mean, he told me my story and I was just sitting there just nodding the entire time and the guy who had taken me said, you Know, go up and shake his hand after the meeting. And I said, well, I've got nine months sobriety. Really what I had was nine months without a drink. I hadn't done one thing this book asked me to do, but I hadn'T drank for nine months. I was praying. I went to meetings every day and I walked up to this guy and I shook his hand and I said you really told my story. And, I didn't know that the guy who brought me had set all this up. And he said, Joe, this is my friend Jim. He really needs a sponsor and Joe said are you done drinking and I said yeah and he said okay and I took out my business card and on the back side on the white side I wrote down my phone number I handed it to Joe and I asked call me Monday if you want to sponsor me not how it works Joe took out his card on the backside he wrote down his phone number and said call me monday if you wanted to sponsor me and we turned those two cards over and we worked for the same real estate company in two different divisions and I never met the man. There was a sign in my life that something was happening. I stopped believing in coincidences right then. The next morning, I went to a 10 o'clock meeting. It was a great meeting. On the way home, my car pulled into an ABC parking lot and I bought a half gallon of whiskey because I'm going to have one drink and prove I can drink like a gentleman. I'm gonna buy a half-gallon of whiskey to have only one drink. Now, only an alcoholic will think that way. You know, normal people would buy those one little ounce things and have one drink. I thought maybe I'll have one drinking maybe five years from now. I'll be able to have another drink. Might as well have the bottle in the house. I don't know what I was thinking. All I was saying is I want a drink. And I remember pouring that drink. And I remembered drinking one drink and the next morning when I came to on my kitchen floor, half that bottle was gone. I was covered head to toe in blood and vomit and pee, and I didn't know who I killed because I was a driver. And I still love to drive, but I was an drunk driver for many years. And I was arrested four times for drunk driving. I was never convicted for drunk diving. Back in the 60s, you didn't blow the machine. You lost your license for 30 days. Second time, 90 days. Third time, 90 days Fourth time, I got an attorney because I knew I was going somewhere with that one but you know I had four of them before I was 21 years old but never had another one after that and when I'm laying on that floor covered in blood I'm thinking who did I kill last night and I am really worried what's going to happen and I picked up the phone after about 15 minutes I got up and I realized that blood was mine as I was passing out I hit my head on the corner of the kitchen table and I could have bled to death and I didn't I know friends that I have personally watched get into recovery relapse fall and hit their head on a kitchen table and die this is really a deadly disease and I know it for a fact I called Joe and said I need help and he said that's what I needed to hear you're ready and so he said pour out the rest of that whiskey meet me at the noon meeting and we'll start working the steps and that was on February 18, 2002 and I have not found it necessary or desirable to put something in my body that's going to change the way I feel I have thought occasionally over that period of time a drink might fix this but that thought is so fleeting because I've worked these steps into my life The 12 Steps to Alcoholics Anonymous, to me, and this is coming from my sponsor also, have to be lived. You don't just work them and say, okay, I'm done. The bad joke is a sponsor, he asked the sponsor, what do I do when I get done working the steps? And he says, you lie very, very still because you're dead. You know, you don't ever stop working these 12 steps. And I found that recovery, no matter where I am, is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. I don't have hepatitis in my body at all. I got a GED on a chain gang that should not be legal because the minimum score was 70 and my highest score was 62. But it's a certified GED from the state of Florida and miracles upon miracles have happened to me and to many other people. I love seeing new people. I love seen people cry like me. It makes me feel good that somebody else has got some tears in them and I always tell them you don't ever have to live that way again. You don't never have to drink again if you follow the clear-cut directions outlined in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. I started working with Joe. We started doing these steps and my life started changing. Great things started happening. Because I didn't drink during the day, I got a lot of accolades in the real estate business, Realtor of the Year, things like that. I'm not bragging. It's just things that happened. But when I got sober, my son challenged me to become an EMT. And I got to tell you today is I went to the classes, I did the studying and my God took the test because I'm not qualified to pass tests like that. I can't hardly spell anything over four letters and some of those words in your physical body are about that long. I'm a nationally registered emergency medical technician today. I carry a concealed weapons permit from the state of Georgia. I'm a certified Class A Tanker driver All these things came about Because of recovery Because of Alcoholics Anonymous Showing me Number one that yes I'm powerless over alcohol I'm also powerless over everything else Because I can't manage my life I read that as My life's unmanageable when I'm drinking That's not what it says it says my life is unmanageable by me and after that last time I took a drink I realized I was crazy when it comes to alcohol I am strangely insane and so the second step applied to me the third step when I turned my will in my life my sponsor told me it's your thoughts and your actions and they didn't take a long time from where I come from most of the people are not most of the sponsors are not the people that say take your time with the steps they are get into the steps right now let's get into this book let's start reading this book let's do this let's just start doing these steps because you've got to get to your spiritual awakening in step 12 and you've gotta start carrying this message because if we don't have young people coming in here getting sober and staying sober alcohol is not and this is not going to be here when my son, if my son or grandson comes around. I absolutely love the program. I love the people in Alcoholics Anonymous. I probably only have two friends that I grew up with still alive. All the rest of my friends are in Alcoholic Anonymous Five years ago, I got a phone call. I was living up on the land in Randolph County, Georgia and I got an email from somebody I'd never met before And they said, your little brother's in a coma in Orlando. And I went, well, we're kind of estranged after his 50 UI. I kind of tough-loved him out of the family. My dad died when I was seven days sober, and I became the trustee of the Family Funds and the administrator. And I didn't cut him off financially. I just cut him all from my life. I said, you've got to do something. You don't want AA. You're going to prison. and what happened was he developed massive tumors on his liver, his brain and I drove down to Orlando I wasn't going to but this person who called me said I'm a friend of Bill W's and I've heard you speak and we'd never met so I got in the car and I droved to Orlando I got with my little brother's doctors I got him released from probation they gave him 6 months to 2 years to live, we made a bucket list we were going to do all kinds of fun things and the first thing he wanted to do, he hadn't had a drink in over a year the first think he wanted to do was just let's go have lunch and I'm going to order a small glass of wine and on the way home from lunch he said would you mind stopping by the ABC I just want to buy something so I can have something to drink every now and then and I'm like this is a real bad idea based on what I've seen all the people I've seen die in Alcoholics Anonymous. Why don't you not do this? So we've got at least six months, maybe two years to do these things. And 30 days later, I got a call to come back that he was in intensive care. He was on life support. And that night, God, I had a conversation that he had said he didn't want to live on life's support. And the nurse said, well, you have to wait until the morning because this is the way he came in. And I said, not if God is listening. And 30 minutes later, he flatlined and died, and he was 44 years old. That really thrust me back into the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. It got me super involved. I moved back to Orlando, started getting back real heavy into my AA meetings and the sponsorship, into doing workshops and studies. I love carrying the message. I really do. And I found that the book Without Drinking describes me to a T, that I'm selfish and self-centered. That's the root of my problem. Alcohol was just a symptom that I'm still a selfish and self-centered person if I don't ask God to help me every day. I found a God of my understanding, a loving and caring God in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I have seen miracles that he has performed in my life and other people's lives. I did all these different career changes. I tried to be a truck driver, and God thought that was funny. I was going to AA meetings all over the United States driving a truck and then I don't think God wanted me driving a truck because he said here's a kidney stone and here's another kidney stone and here is another kidneystone and after I passed my sixth kidney stone in the back of a moving truck I went to my doctor and he says you can't drive a truck anymore if you want to keep using the thing that you're destroying and I went okay so I got out of the trucking business got back into the real estate business and almost five years to the day I came up last November to go hunting and I found my older brother dead of alcoholism you know it is a deadly disease and neither of my parents ever drank I mean, I saw my dad drink a couple times at cocktail parties he had. They were not alcoholics. My sisters weren't alcoholics My two brothers and myself were definitely alcoholics And I'm the only one that came in the room And I can't explain that except God had something for me to do He's got something in my life today I have a sponsor who's got 28 years sobriety his name is Wee Willie and he got sober in the west of Scotland and in the west of scotland when he got sober they did not want to hear about the big book or God at AA meetings and so he would send over to the United States he and a couple guys got some money together and they would send over for some speaker tapes and he'd get Joe and Charlie and he couldn't drive because he was banned from driving in Scotland. And he would sit there and record these speaker tapes and go around to different AA groups and give them. And that's what started him on his career in Alcoholics Anonymous. The website has over 25,000 speakers. And it does go back to Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob, Ebby Thatcher. We have all kinds of workshops, conventions. He spends about 14 hours a day in front of a computer uploading and downloading free speaker tapes. And if you get with me after the meeting, I'll give you a card that's got the website. It's amazing what that man has done and what he has shown me to do. We talk almost every day right now and I can tell you that there are some days where his computer is not working and it makes my life crazy because if it's not working, he's not happy. If he'snot happy, I'm not happy so it's a long way around but I can tell you this, there are people in every country right now they get a speaker talk every morning. There's a lady who's a doctor in Alcoholics Anonymous in South Africa whose mother lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and her mother heard her talk on the website and has flown to Tanzania I think it is to reunite with her daughter. You know, it's things like that. Things like give away freely what is freely given to you. I know people make money counseling people that's not 12 step work it says in our traditions that's one alcoholic talking to another alcoholic not expecting anything in return and at the end of the third forward to the third edition it talks it says that every day somewhere in the world recovery begins when one alcoholic shares with another their experience strength and hope. And that's exactly what it is. It's one alcoholic working with another alcoholic using the book called Alcoholics Anonymous. The second to last talk that Bill Wilson gave, he talked about how the 12 steps are not just to be worked. They're to be lived every day in our lives because we don't know if we have another day. Nobody in that book, in the Bible and the Koran and other books nothing in any of them says if you do good today you're guaranteed to wake up tomorrow. We don't know when our time is up. And so the one day at a time that Dr. Bob talked about is exactly correct. We can only do this program one day and a time. I can't project where I'm going to be next month. I can plan but if it doesn't work out it's because God's got me doing something different. He moved me up here in April to move back on the property in Randolph County and put it up for sale and my job was to turn the property over to God and say God you sell the property when you're ready and I'm supposed to go out and find places where I can carry the message of Alcoholics Anonymous record speakers in rural America my sponsor started doing something about 4 or 5 years ago he started videotaping long time AlcoholicsAnonymous members for the archives at GSO in New York he sent me his video camera and I'll be recording some man in Bainbridge, Georgia the 1st of September who's got 45 years. There's a lady you can follow up I'm going to record this guy's 45 years and nobody sees this stuff. It goes into the archives for research but these are some of the things that I do that I get to meet some of the most wonderful people in the world because I live the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know it's not what I'm doing between the serenity prayer and the Lord's Prayer what am I doing between the Lord's prayer and the serenity prayer you know what am i doing when i leave here if you follow me around and i don't know it am i carrying myself as maybe the only big book that somebody might see i certainly hope so i certainly hope so i try and that's all the book asks us to do is each day try to let God lead us and try to follow his direction i don' t know what God's will is for me today all I know is what his will is not for me today and that's to be a drunk because that didn't work very good I'm going to read something it's a talk that Bill gave about 13 years I guess it was 16 years ago and it comes from a pamphlet called A Member of the Eye's View of Alcoholics Anonymous and it's right towards the end and it says More than 16 years ago, four men My boss, my physician My pastor And the one friend I had left Working singularly and together Maneuvered me into AA Tonight If they were to ask me Tell us what did you find And it says I'd say to them what I say to you now I can tell you only what I've heard and seen it seems the blind do see, the lame do walk the lepers are cleansed the deaf hear, the dead rise and over and over again in the middle of the longest day or the darkest night the poor in spirit have the good news told to them God grant that it might always be so and I can say this I really appreciate you all having me here tonight and thank you very much