Told My Sponsor I’m a Self-Made Man — He Said Robert, You Used Unskilled Labor 🤦

Hello everybody. Everybody ready for a meeting? My name is Jeff and I am an alcoholic. Hey everybody. Pleasure to be here tonight. Welcome to the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the Napa Club where a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one year or more sobriety will tell his or her story. My name is Robert Bell. I'm an alcoholic. And this reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each individual in their personal stories describes in their own language and from their own point of view the way they establish their relationship with God. These give a fair cross-section of our membership and clear-cut ideas of what has happened in their lives. We hope no one will consider these self-revealing accounts a bad taste. Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight and listening later on aglugipspeakers.org Desperately in need, we'll hear our speaker. And we believe this is by... Fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded to say, Yes, I am one of them two. I must have this thing. And now I get to introduce our speaker. Pleased that I get to do this. I've known Robert for a while. He's a guy that got sober. He's lived in Atlanta. He's moved other places. He's come back and he's stayed sober. And that tells me that sobriety is portable if you do the things that sober people do and take that stuff with you. And that's a good thing to know if you're new in recovery. I've gotten to know Robert because I had the opportunity to do some service work in Gainesville. And it was early in the morning. It was from AA service work. It was at 7.30. And he was willing to come over to my house and ride up there with me. He gave us a chance to get to know one another. It was a lot of fun. And I'm really looking forward to hearing his AA story tonight. So I give you Robert in. Come on up, Robert. Good evening. My name is Robert and I am an alcoholic. And my home group is the Fifth Tradition Group. And I'd like to say thank you for all the Fifth Tradition Group members that are here tonight. Thank you. I came down to hear me speak. I'd also like to thank Tim and the other members of the Blue Chip Speaker Meeting for inviting me down here to speak tonight. It is always an honor and a privilege to be asked to speak at an AA function. When I do speak, I like to start with a prayer. And where I used to live in, I've lived in a lot of different places in sobriety, but I used to live in Charleston, South Carolina. And. In my home group there, one night we were talking about the 11th step and prayer and meditation. And there was a guy in the group called Shoopy. And Shoopy was one of these guys that was kind of like 50 going on 80. And he had drunk way too much for way too long and was experiencing some wet brain. And even he himself would say that he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer or the brightest bulb in the room. But he had a program. That was just rock solid. I've seen a lot of people that were way too smart to get this program, but I have yet to see anybody that's too dumb. But anyway, we were talking about our prayer and meditation practices and going around the room. And when it was Shoopy's turn, Shoopy said, yeah, I, I pray every day. Every day I get out of bed and I get on my knees and I say, God, don't let me be stupid today. Okay. That prayer has my name written all over it. And I ask God not to let me be stupid up here tonight. We have a spiritual program. That's what Alcoholics Anonymous is. It's a spiritual program of action. There's a difference between spirituality and religion. Religion says that you have to believe certain things in order to belong. And spirituality says, let it be as you believe. AA doesn't teach us what to believe. But it teaches us. It teaches us how to believe, and we've come to our belief by working through the program with a sponsor. Uh, spirituality unites and religion separates. We have a spiritual program. Thank God. When I got here, it was homicide on a good day and suicide on a bad. Uh, I was that lower companion that they talk about in the book. I was a liar, a cheat and a thief, and you wouldn't want to trust me with your dope, your girl and your money. And now it's broccoli I was sexually abused as a child. I was raised in a in a home that had a violent, an abusive, alcoholic, raging father. His name was Frank and Frank didn't like me. He used to beat the hell out of me on a regular basis. In fact, he broke his bones and his hand hit me in the head. He would put me in the car. that he was going to get rid of me, give me away. And I'd plead with him, you know, Daddy, please don't do that. You know, they say child rearing prior to about 1950 was nothing more than ritualized child abuse. And I'm here to tell you that, you know, what my parents did to me probably is actionable in a quarter lot a day. You know, it's like... But as a child growing up under those conditions with the sexual abuse and the beatings and emotional abuse and, you know, the three basic things that a child learns growing up in an alcoholic home are don't trust, don't tell, don't feel. You know, and we learn not to trust anybody, that we have to take care of our own needs, that people betray us. We learn don't tell. You know, you don't talk about what's going on in the home, outside the home. There's a lot of guilt. There's a lot of guilt and shame. And we don't want anybody to know what's going on there. And don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. And there was only one guy in the house that I grew up in that was allowed to express his feelings, and it wasn't me. And anybody that did express their feelings paid dearly for it. A child that grows up in that environment, pretty much what you can look forward to is the life of alcoholism, drug abuse, and sexual problems. I mean, you know, it ain't rocket science. I had a lot of issues. I had a lot of issues with pornography and promiscuity, including 13-stepping as much as I could when I was introduced to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I got news for you, you know, alcoholics don't get into relationships, we take emotional hostages. My first drink was at 16 when I started running away from home. I got blind, puking, falling down drunk, and I was drinking vodka and fresca. And to this day, I still can't stand fresca. Not long after that, I started smoking pot, and not so long after that, I was doing heavies and amphetamines, coke, and hallucinogens. By the time I was 22 years old, I had five DUIs and a number of arrests for assault and cultivation. It's California, right? I mean... I like to tell people the Lord got me sober, and that was Judge Lord in El Cajon, California. And I still get a little nervous standing in front of podiums, you know. But my last DUI was like within 30 days of the prior, and the judge recognized me, which is not a good thing in court. And he had my sheet there, and he told me that I was a homicide, looking for a place to happen, and it wasn't going to happen in San Diego County, that I was going to do some time. And he definitely got my attention. And eventually, I had to talk to a probation officer as a condition of release. And they put me in a holding cell, which was like 6x6 or 8x8, a very small cinder block room with a steel door and a steel desk and a steel chair that were chained to the floor. And this guy came in, and he had a piece of paper and a pen. And he said, here's a quick quiz. I'll be back in five minutes. And he left. And so I took this true-false quiz, 20 questions. You know, they had questions like, have you ever been fired for drinking because of your drinking? Have you ever had a relationship that was affected because of your drinking? Do you have financial difficulties because of your drinking? Do you have loss of memory because of your drinking? Do you have loss of memory because of your drinking? Blah, blah, blah, blah. So I get down to the bottom of the page, and it says, if you answered one of these questions, yes, you might have a problem with alcohol. If you answered two of these questions, yes, you definitely have a problem with alcohol. And if you answered three or more of these questions, yes, you're an alcoholic. Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, Baltimore, Maryland. My brain does a lightning quick tally, and I'm hitting 17 out of 20. My first thought was, shit, I did it in 10. Well. This guy came back in the room, and he looked at that sheet for about that long, and he looked me in the eye, and he said, do you need to be on Anabuse? And for those of you who don't know what Anabuse is, Anabuse is a drug that they give to treat chronic alcoholism. And when you ingest alcohol when you're on Anabuse, you get into projectile vomiting. And I worked heavy construction. I worked high steel. And I knew a lot of guys that were on Anabuse. And it really didn't. They didn't cut down on their drinking, but it just made them really messy. And I knew that I did not want to be on Anabuse. And I looked that guy square in the eye, and I lied to him. And I said, no, I don't know. I don't need to be on Anabuse. I didn't know how I was not going to be able to take a drink, but I knew I didn't want to be on Anabuse. After this interviewing process, I signed a document that said that as a condition of release, I would go to like two AA meetings a week for, I forget, six or nine months. Or something. And got out. And I waited until the last possible day before I'd be in violation, before I went to my first AA meeting. And I had a couple of tall coors in the Jeep on the way over. And it was at the War Memorial Building in Balboa Park, San Diego. And it was a once a month speaker meeting. And I had a circuit speaker there. And I didn't know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous. But I expected to see a bunch of homeless people drinking out of brown bags and stuff like that. You know how we look. A lot of people having fun and talking and smoking a lot of cigarettes and drinking a lot of coffee. And I don't remember much about the guy's story, but I remember laughing. And I mean, there were tears on my cheeks from laughing so hard. This guy was a great speaker. And I hadn't laughed in a long time. Life was serious. And here I am, you know, contemplating interstate flight to avoid prosecution. And, you know, knowing that I was just completely insane and didn't know how I was going to get my ass out of the jam that it was in. And laughing. And I also remember crying. That he talked about the pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. The emotional trauma that he had inflicted on his family because of his alcoholism. And he said that alcoholics weren't bad people trying to get good. They were sick people trying to get well. That alcoholics' bodies process alcohol differently than people that are not alcoholic. That, you know, there is a, it's an allergy. And I just, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I didn't understand allergy at the time. But an allergy is a medical term that means, you know, abnormal and abnormal reaction. So like if, you know, we have an allergy to strawberries, you know, we break out in hives. If we're allergic to certain grasses and pollens and stuff, you know, we'll get hay fever symptoms, runny nose, watery eyes, stuff like that. If you're allergic to bee stings, you get, you know, you swell up. The allergic reaction to bees, you know, you get a lot of the same reaction to the alcoholics craving, you know, that I want more. Well, I think my drug of choice is more, more everything. And, and in addition to the physical allergy, there is a mental obsession. And an obsession is an idea that overcomes all ideas to the contrary, you know, and that he was powerless over the effect of the drug once he put it in his body, just as I am. You know, once I feel like I'm doing this, put alcohol in my body I have absolutely no control over how my body is going to process that alcohol and I get into the medical description of what happens in the lower and the build up of the seed aldehyde and all the rest of that don't make any difference what the effect is is that I have a craving and when human beings also inject alcohol into the in its process through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream and is circulated in the body the organ in the body that uses the most blood is the brain and the first area of the brain affected by alcohol was judgment controls Judgments and when we drank the first thing that was judging her teacher that of this explain why insanity you know because I was doing things that were really stupid and I thought you know anybody that was doing this stuff but I was doing had just the flat crazy I was a blackout I was getting into flights into accidents in my jeep and I'm just lucky I didn't kill anybody and myself included and what it would look like for me that powerlessness is you know like on the weekends I'd be drinking beer and smoking some all day and copping a nice steady buzz and planning on going to a party that night and hopefully get lucky with one of the ladies there and I'd be at the party and kinda overdo it and my speech was slurring and my motor coordination would get off and I'd realize you ain't getting lucky buddy and then I'd switch from beer to the hard stuff and I like tequila and you know I'd pour a nice tumbler of tequila with me. One tequila, two tequila, three tequila floor. And, you know, I'd be really messed up. And I'd look at that glass and I'd wonder, is this the one? Is this the one after which I drink and I'm going to have no memory, that I'll just be completely out of control, this land back? And that's powerlessness for me. That's what it looks like. You know, it's ugly. But what the guy said was, he was an alcoholic. His body processed alcohol differently, that we have a disease, that if I were an alcoholic of his type and continued to drink, it would get worse. That if I were an alcoholic of his type, didn't drink, went to meetings, got a sponsor, worked the steps, things would get better. And when I left that meeting that night, my life had changed. And what had changed is I had hope. That it was like somebody opened a door and I could see that, you know, maybe there's a way out for me. Maybe there's some hope. And I started going to AA meetings. Now, I was a real sharp kid. I, Frank, my father, insisted that I was going to go to college. And he didn't have the money to send me there. So I was either going to make it on an athletic scholarship or an academic scholarship. And if I brought home anything less than an A, I'd get a good beating. And I excelled in both athletics and scholastics and ended up getting a full four-year academic scholarship, full tuition, room and board. This is in 1969, and we were the first wave of longhairs on campus. And the fraternity guys really didn't want to have anything to do with us. And I said, well, I'm going to go to college. So we had to form our own fraternity, and that was tricathacin. And my alcoholism and drug use just took off. And I would have flunked out in my first year. My first semester, I went on an academic probation. I would have flunked out in the second semester, except I won the lottery. And it was the first draft lottery they ever had. And my number was six. And I ended up in the Army and had an injury during basic training and got a medical discharge, went down to the Balboa Naval Hospital, which was the VA hospital at the time, and had my shoulder surgically reconstructed and got into construction. But that all is to say that some of us are educated. We're far beyond our intelligence. And my alcoholism, you know, I was making good money working construction, and I spent every penny I had and more every week on booze, broads, and dope. I was living with dancers, and I just was one of those lower companions. I started going to meetings. I got a place of my own. And I was smart enough that the first time I read those steps on the wall, you know, it took me about three minutes to do them. And from that point on, I decided that I could be my own sponsor. Bad idea. Very bad idea. I ended up with five years in relapse, three years in relapse, one year in relapse, and then three years. Yet again, clean and sober, sitting naked on my bedroom floor with a gun in my mouth. This is after going to AA meetings for 12 years. I did not have a sponsor. I did not, had not worked the steps. I was what you might classify as stark raving sober. And I've tried my life drinking and drugging and acting out, and that didn't work. And I tried life living sober, and that's worse. You know, that's untreated alcoholism. My problem, you know, is that I don't handle stress. Very well, the big book talks about being restless, irritable and discontented. But, you know, nowadays, the medical community likes to look at addiction as a down regulation of the hedonic system, which is a fancy way of saying we don't handle stress very well. When we get stressed, there's things that happen in our brain and we're looking for satiety. We're just looking for something that'll make it okay. They'll fix it. They'll take away that sense of impending doom, the fear. And, uh, and if you don't have something to use, life is just, sucks. And, uh, and I didn't pull, obviously pull the trigger that night, but, uh, I had a lot of guilt and shame behind that. And it's like, here's just one more thing that you can't do, Robert. You know, you can't even do that right. You ain't even got the balls to pull the trigger. But one of the things, but my life did change that night. And what changed is I was given the gift of desperation. And, uh, and I finally became teachable and I decided to ask this guy to be my sponsor and he didn't say yes. He said, uh, come on over to the house and we'll talk about it. And I went over to his house and, uh, and he had one of these pamphlets, Q and a on sponsorship. In fact, he had two of them, one for me and one for him. And, uh, and we started going through the first part of that pamphlet and the first part of the pamphlet has to do with, and it's written for the person seeking a sponsor. That'd be me. There's also another section for the person that wants to be a sponsor. At the time there was a third section that, uh, was for groups that want to be involved in sponsorship activities. And since then, it added a fourth section for service sponsorship. But, uh, we went through the first part of that, uh, pamphlet for the person seeking a sponsor and, uh, and it took about, oh, I don't know. I don't know, an hour and a half, two hours to go through it. And we went through it, you know, word by word. And he would stop periodically and ask me questions and explain stuff to me. And, you know, I thought I was kind of hot shit. And I told Mike, you don't understand. I'm a self-made man. And he said, Robert, you used unskilled labor. And he was right. But, you know, one of the things is that Bill carried the message to Bob. And Mike said, what was the message that he carried? I said, don't drink, go to meetings. He said, well, they didn't have meetings then. And I was like, don't drink. Well, he said that was part of the message. But what he did is he told me a story. And it was the story of how Bill and Bob got together. It was the story of Bill's chronic relapsing behind his alcoholism and how Ebby had come over to him. And he had told him about the Oxford groups. And Ebby also told him about a guy named Roland Hazard. And Roland was kind of like a Rockefeller, a Kennedy, a Rothschild, you know, kind of like a bigwig in the capitalist world. And he was being trained to take over as a CEO of a big pharmaceutical or chemical company. But the family couldn't turn over the business to Roland because he was a practicing alcoholic. And they were sending him to psychiatrists. And it wasn't working. He was chronically relapsing. So they decided to send him to the best psychiatrist in the world that they could find. And they sent him over to see Carl Jung in Switzerland. And Jung treated Roland for 14 months. And at the end of 14 months, he said, you know, you're all well. Go your way. Send no more. So Roland headed back to New York and got as far as Paris before he got blind, puking in the drunk. And turned around and went back to Switzerland and presented himself to Jung and said, I'm ready for phase two. And Jung, to his credit, said, I made a mistake with you. I misdiagnosed you. You know, I thought you had deep lying emotional problems like all alcoholics do. But you're nothing more than a chronic alcoholic scram. And just a chance amount to a death sentence. Prior to, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous, I mean, alcoholism was a chronic, aggressive, fatal disease. And if you have an alcoholic in the family, woe be unto the family. They were like the crack addict of the day. I mean, you never knew when Cousin Billy was going to go off the reservation and show up when you weren't around, steal your shit and go down and pawn it so that he could get his liquor. I mean, there was no treatment. I mean, it was dark. And Roland pleaded with Jung. He goes, there's got to be something. And Jung said, well, you know, there's nothing I can do for you. And Roland says, there's nothing in recorded medical history. And Jung said, no, there's plenty of cases where people have had a vital spiritual experience that brought about a personality change sufficient to overcome their alcoholism. And Roland went back to New York City in search of a vital spiritual experience and got hooked up with the Oxford groups. Now, the Oxford groups were originally called the First Century Christian Fellowship and the First Century Christian Fellowship. These were. Church going Bible reading people and they would meet midweek at somebody's house and they would talk about their difficulties and lead with their weakness. The three basic tenets of the First Century Christian Fellowship were confession, restitution and service. And confession isn't going into a closet and getting a, you know, bless me, Father, I have sinned. It was leading with their weakness. And so, you know, with the First Century Christians thought was they were reading in the New Testament. New Testament where the apostles and these other people were performing miracles and having life changing experiences. And they're looking around. They're going, where's the miracle workers? How come we don't see what they what they were able to do today? And they thought if they studied with those first century Christians were doing, it would be less garbling of the message over the centuries and it would be closer to that original message. And the original message was about confession, restitution and service. Our steps. Five, nine and 12 and, and confession, you know, they'd sit around and, and Ernie would say, you know, I'm a rageaholic. Of course, he wouldn't say he was a rageaholic, but he'd say, you know, he had a short temper. And this is, you know, Midwest America, 1930s, there's no unemployment, there's no welfare. Ernie says, you know, I went into work, my boss said something, I got pissed off, hit him in the mouth, knocked him down, fired me on the spot, but then out of work, eight weeks, the landlord's going to evict us, my kids are hungry and my life is like crap because I can't control my temper. And Phyllis would say I'm a glutton. You know, I weigh 400 pounds and I work as a baker. My cousin's niece asked me to bake the wedding cake and, you know, the night before the wedding, I was in the kitchen and I ate the second layer. All of it. And it cast a, it ruined the reception, cast a pall over. The wedding, my family has disowned me. Nobody will talk to me. My life is like crap because of my gluttony. And Bill raised his hand and said, my name is Bill and I'm an alcoholic. You ever wonder where it comes from? It's confession. It's leading with our weaknesses, telling people, you know, who we are and what our difficulty is. Restitution is the restoring of the broken relationship that if we saw the truth is, is that we're spiritual beings living in a spiritual universe governed by spiritual laws, having a human experience. If we saw things the way that God sees things, there would be harmony in the universe. My problem is, is that I show up with my stinking, thinking rotten attitude and bad behavior and leave in my wake this trail of emotional trauma. People hear my name and they want to spit and curse and think, I hope that SOB gets his. I hope somebody takes him out. What I really have done is issued those people an invitation to show up as their worst self because that resentment and anger and fear and everything cut them off from the sun. It's on light of the spirit. And I don't think that God means us to treat each other like that. What I need to do is try and at least restore that broken relationship to the point of neutrality that it had before I showed up with my bad attitude, rotten thinking and bad behavior and then service service to God and our fellows. Now, as part of the Oxford group saying, you know, when you did your service work, you had to go witness to people of like kind. So Ernie had to go find people with short tempers and Phyllis had to go find, you know, Clintons and Evie had to go find Bill. Well, actually, Roland found Evie and then Evie was supposed to be involuntarily committed for alcoholic insanity. But he got him out, took him down to New York and got him involved in the Oxford programs. And then it was Evie that showed up to witness to Bill. Well, apparently, for the first time in the history of man, Bill had the nature of the problem from his stays at Chown's Hospital. That Dr. Silkworth described to him the his theory about alcoholism being an allergy coupled with a mental obsession. And we know what the problem is. Don't drink. You know, but how can the alcoholic not drink? How can we not drink? Just not drink. Just don't do it. Just say no. You know, it's like, no, I'm you don't understand. Alcohol is the solution. That's what allows me to live life on life's terms a day at a time. You know, but then the solution becomes the problem. I hate it when the solution becomes the problem. But Bill knew that he couldn't take the first drink. And Evie gave him the Oxford groups that gave him the spiritual program of action that allowed him to cope with life on life's terms a day at a time without having to resort. To alcohol or other drugs. So that's the message that Bill carried to to Bob and took a long time to answer a very short question. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that where Mike walked me through this pamphlet, you know, and another thing that said is, you know, there's a question in there that says, what if a sponsor's person is unavailable? And the answer is that it's the whole program and not a person sponsor that keeps a person sober. And Mike asked me, if you if I were going to follow you around and you were going to demonstrate to me, I was going to follow you with a video camera and you were going to prove to me that you were working a program of recovery. What would I see you do? Of course, I started telling him all the crap I'd be thinking. He says, I can't tell what you're thinking. And what would I see you do? Got a little tongue tied. And he said, we just read the answer. And it was, you know, what a person can do when a sponsor's. Is unavailable is read some of the literature, go to a meeting, make a phone call and also suggest pray. But Mike said, do you have a phone list? And I whipped it out. He said, do you use it? No. He says, well, look, I've been sober about eight years. And as part of my program, every day I talk to another recovering alcoholic. And I suggest you do the same thing. Liking it is optional. You know what you do? Is you just go down the list. You have to get a live person. There's no leaving messages or anything. You know, you got to get a live one. And you can just tell him, look, our sponsor's an asshole. And he says, I got to make a phone call every day. And today's your lucky day. I started doing that. And I forget what it was, but about two weeks into it, I remember the wheels came off the cart. I picked up the phone and talked to somebody and it was different. You know that. My life. My life was changing. And he asked me, you know, I don't know how many meetings it's going to take for you to stay sober. How many meetings a week? How many? How many meetings a week is it going to take? And I told him three. And he goes, OK, well, you know, if it's your meeting day, by God, you go to your meeting. You can make more meetings than that, but you can't make less. You know, and you can go to a sober clubhouse like the Alano Clubs, Yabba or Triangle or something. We didn't have any. I mean, I don't know about you Davis. But there were some in Sacramento. And I pray. Well, it goes on to say, you know, basically two other kind of rules of thumb or guidelines for sponsorship and one that men should sponsor men and women should sponsor women. Now, there's also something in there that says if you're gay, you might want to get somebody of the opposite gender. The principle being we don't want to try and sponsor somebody in whom we have a romantic interest. Or that they do. Right. do with us it's like no because that just interferes with our ability to carry the message and the other thing is that your sponsor be a year or more away from their last ring and seem to be enjoying sobriety i got news for you if you're not enjoying sobriety you're doing it wrong you know it's about happy joyous and free you read that first sentence in the 12 and 12 under step 12 and it says the joy of living is the theme of aa's 12 steps action is it's key but it's it's about the joy of living and uh i would suggest there's two additional rules of thumb for sponsorship and that is that your sponsor have a sponsor and that they've worked the steps themselves because you can't give away what you ain't got when we got through with that first part mike asked me a question and the question was robert are you willing to go to any length to have a spiritual experience sufficient to bring about recovery from your disease and i said yes and he said fine bring your big book and your 12 and 12 over to the house for the next 12 weeks and we're going to work a step a week and go through the literature as it's written in our books and he pointed out that two things one it says in the big book that what we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition and the question was robert what does the word daily mean to you uh five out of seven with the weekends off and what that tells me is i can't stay sober today on yesterday's program i have to have a program that i can practice every day one day at a time and the other thing was uh i forget now that uh the program as it's written in the big book tells us that it had a 75 percent recovery rate it said that of the early 100 people that came into alcoholics anonymous half of those got sober and stayed sober half of them relapsed and of the half that relapsed half of those came back and got and stayed sober that's a 75 percent recovery rate and i don't think we have anything near a 75 percent recovery rate in most of the meetings in the fellowship today i think the reason is that we hear a lot of group babble a lot of psychobabble group therapy and not much recovery that the recovery as it's written in the book is what works and if we work it this way it'll work so i went over to mike's house for the uh for the next 12 weeks with my big book and my 12 and 12 and at the end of 12 weeks my life was completely different and it wasn't that things had changed so much on the outside but what i had was a way of living life on life's terms a day at a time without wanting to drink or use and uh and when i got done mike said service is not an option these 12 steps is not multiple choice you know if we could stay sober on 11 that'd only be 11. if we could stay sober on five that'd only be five we're addicts alcoholics we're not going to work one more frequent step than the absolute minimum that it takes to stay sober service is not an option and there's two kinds of service work there's the service work and there's the non-service work you do for your group because if your group doesn't survive neither will you and two there's the face-to-face carrying the message and uh and he said i suggest you do something for the group you know do it all not all at once robert and my group made me the chairman which in my case meant that i get to set up the chairs and take them down after the meeting and over the years i've done pretty much it all but the one thing that i've done consistently is corrections work and i've been taking a meeting into either a state or federal penitentiary or jail you know once a month for the last 28 years now those guys are doing my time and i always feel tremendous gratitude when i leave and i've seen a lot of great recovery on the inside you know if you if you give them the tools you know um the other thing is uh sponsorship you know mike said go out there and find someone that you can pass it on to you know find someone sicker than you are i know that's going to be tough for you robert but if you go to enough meetings you'll find someone and i've been working a step a week with guys ever since and i've heard i've taken more than well over 100 men through the steps i've heard more than 105 steps and it keeps getting better it never grows old and i'm almost out of time but i'm going to share something with you i went to a uh and one of the absolute advantages of working a step a week in the literature is every week my nose is back in the basics back into fundamentals back in the big book back in the 12 and 12. and and it's just incredible a couple years ago i went to a conference and there was a md phd neurologist there that was given a presentation for the fellowship and he talked about a medical theory that there is a god drug and i sat right up and said you know i wonder what this is and uh and he said that uh you know we're traveling to america and he goes are you a phd i don't even think of what a metal religious been practicing the spiritual program. Now, the medical theory is that, you know, as human beings meditate and pray and engage in spiritual exercises, meditations and so forth, there's a certain area of the brain that lights up. And what they think is that by stimulating this part of the brain, that it secretes some kind of chemical into the neurological suit that goes over here and heals this other part of the brain that's all effed up, you know, it's all inflamed. And that makes me more excited today about my recovery than I've ever been in my life. And prayer and meditation has been a regular part of my life for a long time, many years. And I can't recommend it tonight. If you do it exactly as it says in our literature, I mean, it's phenomenal what happens. Our life just gets better in so many ways. There's harmony and peace and strength and serenity. And, uh, I think I'm just about out of time. I'm going to close with a reading from the big book. And it's from Dr. Bob's Nightmare. It says, It is a most wonderful blessing to be relieved of the terrible curse with which I was afflicted. My health is good and I've regained my self-respect and the respect of my colleagues. My home life is ideal and my business is successful. My business is as good as can be expected in these uncertain times. I spend a great deal of time passing on what I learned to others who want it and need it badly. And I do it for four reasons. One, a sense of duty. Two, it is a pleasure. Three, because in so doing I am paying my debt to the man who took the time to pass it on to me. And four, because every time I do it, I take out a little more insurance for myself against a possible slip. So, let me thank you all for letting me talk to you tonight. Thank you, Robert, for sharing your experience, strengths and hope with us tonight. Tinsley is going to do our chips this evening. My name is Tinsley. I'm an alcoholic. And thank you very much, Robert. I really enjoyed that a lot. I didn't want it to end, but I hope I'll be able to retain some of it. But, uh, here at this meeting, we have a chip system to, uh, mark our time away from our last drink. If you'd like to try this way of life one day at a time, we offer a white chip. If you'd like to free yourself, come on up. Anybody else want a white chip? After 30 days, we have a silver chip. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you enjoyed this. So, thank you, Robert. Thank you, Robert. over chip? Anybody else have 30 days? How about 90 days for a red chip? How about six months for a yellow chip? We have a green chip for nine months. Anybody got nine months? How about any birthdays, one year or multiples? Anybody want to reconsider on a white chip? Big hand for the chips you hold.