Turn the 1918 Penny Over and It Says In Higher Power We Trust — That’s the Whole Third Step – Tim T.

Thank you, John. Thanks, that's quite a welcome. I haven't even done anything yet. Right now I want to thank the people that made it possible for us to be here today, for us to have a weekend to enjoy the fellowship, the fun, and the sobriety. The people that worked a long time to get us to be here today. Let's give them a round of applause. I want to thank my hostess, Ann, who picked me up at the airport. It's not often a pretty woman picks me up at the airport. I come to a lot of these and I get picked up at airports quite often. And you never know who's going to pick you up. You just never know who's going to be there. You get there, you walk down the escalator into baggage, and almost always there's three guys standing there. They've got little black suits on. They have signs in their hands that are printed with names printed on them. I flew into Charlotte a year or two ago. Sure enough, came down the escalator. Standing at the end of the escalator, there's three guys. They've got black suits on, real proper with their little signs. And standing next to them, is a guy in a pair of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. And he's holding a piece of cardboard that doesn't say anything on it. And I knew who was there to pick me up. Now, you know, I'm pretty sure what I'm going to say up here today. I'm just not pretty sure what you all are going to hear. And there's a story I like to tell. It's a story about a state trooper. And that state trooper, he's just sitting on the side of the road waiting for somebody to go by and do something wrong, because that's what state troopers do. And sure enough, on that day, a boy went driving by in a pickup truck. And the back of that pickup truck was full of penguins. And that state trooper picked right up on that. And he said, I'm not going to pick you up. I'm going to pick you up. And he said, I'm not going to pick you up. And he pulled him over. He says, son, where are you going with all those penguins in the back of that pickup truck? He said, well, officer, we're not going anywhere. We're just out for a ride. He said, what's wrong with you? You can't go out for a ride with penguins. You take those penguins to the zoo. And he said, well, yes, sir, I will. The next day, that trooper, he's in the same spot. Here comes that boy one more time, back of that pickup truck, still full of penguins. But on that day, all those penguins are wearing sunglasses. He pulled him over again. He says, son, I thought I told you to take those penguins to the zoo. He said, well, yes, sir, I did. Today, we're going to the beach. Now, we all kind of hear and see things differently, don't we? Oh, we'd be looking at the same person, listening to the same talk. You're going to hear one thing. I'm going to hear one thing. You're going to see one thing. I'm going to see one thing. Let me give you an example. There's a room. It's a big room. There's a table in the middle of the room. Sitting in the middle of the table is a $100 bill. Standing around the table is the perfect man, the perfect woman, Santa Claus, and the Easter bunny. And the lights went out. When those lights came back on, that $100 bill was gone. Now, who do you think took it? We all know it had to be the perfect woman, because those other three things don't exist, do they? My name's Tim Towsley. I'm an alcoholic. And I approve this message. I'm an alcoholic. I'm an alcoholic. And I did not want to be an alcoholic. My daddy was an alcoholic. He was a member of this fellowship. He got sober in 1946. He passed away in 1980. He had 10 years of continuous sobriety put together at that time in his life. And what that did for me at an early age, it gave me an opportunity to see what an alcoholic was all about, to see what alcoholism was all about, and also to see what Alcoholics Anonymous was all about. I came from a family where I had six stepfathers. I had 13 stepmothers. I went to over 20 schools. I never got out of eighth grade. I've been married three times and divorced twice. I left home when I was 14 years old. I had an opportunity in my life to spend time in boys' homes and detention homes, city jails, county jails, workhouses, psych wards, treatment centers, and penitentiaries. I spent 12 years of my adult life either on parole, probation, or locked behind some kind of door somewhere. And you know now that I'm a man, I'm a man of my word. I'm a man of my word. I'm a man of my word. I'm a man of my word. I'm a man of my word. I'm a man of my word. I'm a man of my word. I'm a man of my word. I want to be a man of my word. And one day, I turned as kids the other kids on patrol around my education。」 The big shout out to Paul Bennett,ライour, then that changed. He said, ìI have misconduct. Itís still this thing going on in schools. Itís still a problem. Itís not game over or in my head and in a cell that remixes 을 bil þigëuralî and you know you've been born on ry to資滤rəm 거죠. And then the biggest thing he said to me wasから였 новý navigительně k condiciones conscience já enlighten. My story soda öre ressure어� All the Kinmen� Cause C wingиль And y cuň eit лучше urvor tihža and whoètres taj al be w や ìśvçg á about in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's when you know a loneliness such as few men know. It's when you're at that jumping off place. You're wishing for the end. You can no longer imagine life with or life without alcohol. And that's the bottom. That's not a high bottom. It's not a low bottom either. It's just my bottom. And my bottom is the only bottom I ever need to concern myself with in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't ever want to be in a position of my sobriety where I can sit in a room of Alcoholics Anonymous, listen to a speaker speak, and start thinking things like, you know, maybe I wasn't that bad, huh? Or maybe I was worse. Because as soon as I can sit out there and I can make myself believe I'm different in any way from anybody else in a room of Alcoholics Anonymous, as soon as I can sit out there and I can make myself believe I'm unique in any way from anybody else, in a room of Alcoholics Anonymous, then I've got reservations. And there was an old-timer in Bree, Ohio, where I got sober. He used to tell me all the time, he said, Tim, if you've got reservations, son, you must be going somewhere, huh? And I don't want to go anywhere today. I like it here. I know one thing for sure today. I know that God wants me in Alcoholics Anonymous. I had my first drink at 13. I got sick. I blacked out. I passed out. I woke up in the back yard of a lady's house in Rocky River, Ohio. I had my last drink at 30, and I got sick. I passed out. I woke up at home in bed. And that was only really the only real difference in 17 years of use and abuse is where I woke up the next morning. That lady came out of her back door. She found me in her backyard. She took me in her house. She cleaned me up. She found out who I was. She called my mama and let my mama know I was okay. 17 years later, I walked through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was sober about two weeks. I went to a meeting. And that woman was speaking at that meeting. My very first drunk, I found myself in the arms of Alcoholics Anonymous. And she did for me that night all she knew how to do. She was 60 days sober when she found me in her backyard. And what they told her to do at her home group was help a drunk. And they didn't tell her only help the old drunks or the young drunks. The male drunks are the female drunks. The black drunks are the white drunks. They told her to help a drunk. Period. And that's what she did that night. And you know, I still see that woman at meetings today. She's over 80 years old and over 40 years sober, and she's still helping drunks. There's two things I ran from most of my life. I'm not crazy about them today. It seems like I have an awful lot of them today, and I still don't like them. But I don't run from them. I deal with them. And those two things are responsibility and authority. I don't like being responsible. I don't like being responsible. I don't know if you know this, but there's a lot of responsibility involved with being responsible. And I certainly don't like people telling me I'm supposed to be responsible. It seemed like at 13 or 14 years old, everybody had an idea about Tim's life. How long his hair should be. How tight his jeans should be. Come home. Don't come home. Go to school. Don't go to school. Everybody had an idea. No one asked me. I'm at a family gathering. I'm about 14 years old, and I'm listening to people talk. And I heard somebody say this. They said, my daddy, my real daddy was in New Orleans, and he was sober. And with that information, I left home the next day. Because I knew what my problem was then. It wasn't what I was doing or who I was doing it with. My problem was I didn't have my real father in my life. And if I could get my real father in my life, everything would be okay. I made my way to New Orleans. I contacted Alcoholics Anonymous. They found my daddy for me, and they put us together. And all of a sudden, I had a father, and he had a son. And we tried to be those two things, but neither one of us had ever been in either of those two things before. We did the best we could. We just weren't sure what we were doing. And after about three months, I learned something. My daddy started drinking again. And I can remember coming home at 13 or 14 years old, falling into my mother's living room and passing out, and having her scream at me the next morning, saying, son, don't drink. Please don't drink. You'll get what your father has. But you see, I never saw him drink before that. And I didn't know what she was trying to keep me from getting. But I watched him drink. I watched him get drunk. I watched him go into the DTs. I watched the people from Alcoholics Anonymous come into our little house and take him away and put him in a bridge house. And I made a decision on that day. I'm not going to be an alcoholic. I'm not going to end up like my daddy ended up. And I didn't have another drink for the next four years. I really didn't do much of anything for the next four years. I didn't do much of anything for the next four years. I just traveled all around this country. If I woke up in Los Angeles and didn't care for it there, I'd go to Denver. Denver didn't please me. It was off to Miami. I got tired of Miami. I'd go to Atlanta. You see, because all of a sudden, there I was. I'm in a city in New Orleans. I've got no responsibility. I've got no authority. I've got the rest of my life to do whatever it is I think I want to do. And it's 1966. And I guess I was a hippie. But I had four good years. My expectations were met. The big book of Alcoholics Anonymous tells me this. That my expectations are inversely proportional to my serenity level. And if I had a pack of cigarettes, a sleeping bag, and something to eat on that day, it was a good day. My expectations were met. I'm 18 years old. I'm outside Salt Lake City. I don't know where I am. We got dropped off. Me and a buddy of mine. We left Berkeley and we're coming home. Because I don't want to play anymore. All of a sudden, I want some stuff. You know this stuff. The stuff we have to have so we can show each other that we're okay. All of a sudden, I want some of that stuff. I'm seeing people on the other sides of the freeways. They're mowing the grass. They're painting their garage. They're playing with their dog. They're doing it in their backyard. All of a sudden, I want some American dream. We got dropped off at a place in Utah. To this day, I don't know where I was. Some place in the middle of the city. In the middle of the mountains. In the middle of Utah. There were no gas stations. No convenience stores. No houses. No nothing at this off-ramp. And that's where we got dropped off. We slept there that night. Woke up. Froze to death. Walked down to the bottom of the on-ramp. And sitting there, at the bottom of the on-ramp, in the middle of nowhere, Utah, all by itself, is a six-pack of Olympia beer. I know God wants me. I'm an alcoholic synonymous. I drank three beers. He drank three beers. I looked at him. I said, if I ever go back to Cleveland alive, I'm settling down. I'm going to marry the first girl I see. That's all part of the American dream. I got back to Cleveland. My stepfather wasn't home. I was allowed in the house. I took a shower. I changed my clothes. I borrowed my mother's car. I drove to the corner to get a pack of cigarettes. Picked a young lady up hitchhiking, and we got married. We didn't get married that day, but we might have. But you see, in the state of Ohio back then, a male had to be 21 or have a front of consent, and a female had to be 18 or have a front of consent. And when I married my first wife, she was 15 and I was 18. And this was not a marriage that was made in heaven. We didn't know anything about being married. We didn't know anything about being in love. I can't tell you to this day if I loved her. I can tell you this, though. I live in my brother's van in the driveway in my parents' home because I haven't been allowed in their house since I'm 14 years old. She lives wherever she can because there's things going on in her home she doesn't want to go back to. And that brought us together. And we weren't alone anymore. And that was enough. Just not to be alone anymore. And it was a simple marriage. I got up in the morning. I got drunk. And she got up in the morning. She'd get drunk. And then we'd just beat each other up. And we did that one day at a time for about seven years. But out of that seven years, I was away a lot. I traveled a lot. I travel a lot today. I travel a lot then. It seemed like I've been traveling my whole life. But it was funny back then. I'd walk into a room, a big room. There'd be a man sitting in the front. And he'd have a look at me. He'd have a long black coat on. And every time he did this, I went somewhere. I was just always in trouble. I had a bad attitude. I'm a child in the 60s. I wasn't a violent criminal. I was a stupid criminal. I got arrested for stupid stuff. I got arrested for stuff like verbal abuse of a police officer. I was in a little city called Parma, Ohio. I got arrested for obscene finger language to a police officer. And that was in Parma, Ohio. And if y'all don't know anything about Parma, Ohio, I can tell you this. They got no sense of humor in Parma, Ohio. I was at a meeting one night. I was about two years sober. I don't know about anybody else. Two years sober, I was pretty close to the smartest person in the world. I was pretty close to the smartest person in the world. I was the first person in Alcoholics Anonymous. And do you ever go to a meeting and you hear somebody say something? You know you've heard that exact same person say that exact same thing 50 times. But now, all of a sudden, it makes sense, right? And there was a long-timer talking. His name was Vic, and I miss Vic. He was one of those guys. You got one? You probably do. When you get to the meeting, if you see that person in the room, you feel better already. You don't even... He doesn't even have to know you're there. But if you know he's in the room, you already feel better. And Vic talked that night, and I'd heard Vic talk at least 50 times, and he stood up here that night, and he said this. He said, I've been arrested 63 times. I wasn't a good criminal. Man, I picked right up on it. I know I've been charged with 63 crimes. I wasn't a good criminal. People that did what I did and got caught as often as I got caught weren't real good at what they were doing. Now, I learned something else in that verbal abuse case of a police officer. I decided to represent myself in that case. That's not funny. I just knew I saw enough Perry Mason, Judd, for the defense. No, I can do this. I went to court. I called witnesses, cross-examined witnesses, gave my final arguments to the judge. Y'all know what I found out, right? I'm not a very good attorney either. Back to the workhouse. And that's just the way my life was going. In 1975, I stood in front of a judge in the old Lakeside Courthouse in downtown Cleveland, and he sentenced me to 20 to 40 years in the penitentiary. I took a big sigh of relief that day. I felt pretty good on that day. I felt better than I had in a long time on that day. I can hear my wife and my mother in the back of the courtroom. They're crying. They don't think I should go away. They don't think I should go away. They don't want me to go for that long, but they don't know what I know. I know something on that day. I know this. I know there's no way on earth for them to send me anywhere that's going to hurt me as much as I've already hurt myself. And that judge just doesn't get it. He doesn't know. He can't punish me any more than I've already punished myself. And I'm ready to go anywhere where I might have a better chance against the judge. I'm ready to go anywhere where I might have a better chance against the judge. Now in 1976, the laws in Ohio changed. My sentence was reduced to 1 to 10. Went from a 20 to 40 to a 1 to 10 and three years later, they sent me home. When I got home, all my stuff was gone. You know, all the stuff I had to have so you could see me with the stuff and you'd know I was okay and you'd tell me I was okay because I couldn't tell myself I was okay. It was gone. My wife was gone. My car was gone. My motorcycle. My jewelry. My clothes. Everything was gone. That left nothing but me. And I didn't do anything for the next 30 or 40 days but drink. I got as drunk as I could, passed out as I could, blacked out as I could as many times a day as I needed to. I crawled into a bottle. And not once in my life have I ever crawled into a bottle of alcohol to hide from you. Never have I crawled into a bottle of alcohol to hide from them. I got as drunk as I could, passed out as I could, blacked out as I could as many times a day as I needed to. I crawled into that bottle to hide from me. You know, I didn't know if I was going to die, I didn't know if I was going to die, I didn't know if I was going to die, You see, I knew what I was. I was an ex-con. I was an ex-husband. I was an ex-brother. And I was an ex-son. I failed at everything I ever tried to do. But if I was drunk enough, I didn't have to look. Finally, a friend of mine came over. He wasn't going to let me sit there anymore. He says, you're not sitting here. I'm not going to let you sit in this chair and die. You're out of prison. It's time to start living again. And he took me down to a little place called The Flats in Cleveland. And The Flats used to be a really nice place to go get drunk. That's what you did in The Flats. You got drunk. And then they ruined The Flats. They yuppied it all up. You never went to The Flats to have dinner. You didn't take your boat to The Flats. You certainly never went to The Flats to drink something that came from something called a microbrewery. You drank Jim Beam bourbon and Pascal Ribbon beer, and you got drunk. You got drunk. We walked into a little bar called The Pirate's Cove. My cousin's band was playing that night. They were playing a Marshall Tucker song. I'm about half in the bag, and this pretty little girl walked past me. She smiled at me. You know, I smiled right back at her. And that was her. That was my future ex-wife. Who shall heretofore be known as the plaintiff? One of my goals in life is just once, once in my life, I'd like to be the plaintiff. All I ever get to be is a defendant. I want to tell you about my second wife, because when she came into my house, she had some stuff with her. She had some stuff with her. She had some things I think I had, I just don't know where they were. She had things with her like honesty. She had unselfishness. She had purity. And she had love. And these are the things she came with. Four years later, she left. And the only thing she had left to take was the disease of alcoholism. It stripped every decent thing that woman had. I am not the only one I hurt when I pick up a drink. I touch a lot of lives, and I know that today. I tried for a couple years to be a good citizen. I got a job. I went to work. I never called in sick. I was never late. I worked any overtime they wanted me to work. I had a parole officer that didn't bother me too much. I did that for two years. And one night, after doing the right thing for two years, I'm sitting in my living room drunk, and I'm surveying my dynasty. Do you know after two years, I don't have a house on the lake? I don't have a Porsche in the driveway. I'm not running around with the right kind of people, and I don't belong to the right kind of clubs. So sitting there drunk, I came up with a decision, and I came up with a conclusion, and I made a decision that those things are for other people. And no matter what I do, I'm just one of the people that's not supposed to have those things. And I got up the next morning, called my boss, and quit my job. There's just no reason to work that hard if I'm not going to have them things anyway. And the last two years of my drinking aren't too exciting. I got up, I got drunk. If I got up again, I got drunk again. My wife lasted for almost two years, and then she had to go. And this is my life at 30 years old. You know those family gatherings we have? Maybe it's Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, whatever it might be. We're going to go somewhere, right? We'll sit at a table, we'll hold hands, we'll say grace. We'll share a meal with each other. When we're done eating, we'll just hang out and share what's going on in each other's lives. We'll share a meal with each other. When we're done eating, we'll just hang out and share what's going on in each other's lives. This is the way it works at my house. I pull into my parents' driveway and I blow the horn. And when they hear the horn inside, my little brother comes out of the back door with a paper plate in his hand and it's wrapped in tin foil. And I'm allowed to sit in my car and eat my holiday meal off a paper plate with a plastic knife and a plastic fork. I can't sit at their table. I can't have a real napkin. And they certainly don't want me to share anything with them that's going on in my life at that time. But I don't want you to think they stopped loving me. Not even this much. Did their love diminish for me at that time in my life? They simply realized every time they reached down and stopped me from hitting my bottom, every time they allowed me not to be responsible for my own actions, they were killing me. You see, my parents loved me so much, they let me go. I don't have any children. I can only imagine. How much love that must take. June 23, 1982, I woke up at that bottom I told you about. And I didn't know what to do. I don't know what to do in my life. I always did the same thing. I made a phone call. It was a simple phone call. I don't know if I made it a hundred or a thousand times. It was, Mom, help. And my mom came. Just like she always would. She walked into my little house. I'm kneeling on the living room floor. I'm shaking apart. I'm crying uncontrollably. I have hepatitis. And I weigh 112 pounds. And the first words out of my mother's mouth were, I'll kill her for doing this to you. Alcoholism. This is a family disease. Blaming others is a big part of this disease. And my mother has it too. We made some phone calls. I found myself in an emergency room. I got a doctor playing with my liver. He says, Son, you're going to die. He says, Son, you have an alcohol problem. And I said, No, no, no, no, no, no. No. I don't want to be an alcoholic. I told you all that. I'm ready to be anything else he picks. It just doesn't make any difference to me. But I don't want to be an alcoholic. He said, I don't care what you want to be. If you don't quit drinking, you're going to die. And I heard him say that. And I spent the next ten days in a psych ward on the east side of Cleveland. The first three in restraints. I'm powerless over alcohol. My life had become unmanageable. I sounded a little bit like Step 1, didn't I? Just a little. Now, I got a psychiatrist in my psych ward. I have the happiest psychiatrist on earth in my psych ward. And he comes to visit me every morning about 7 o'clock in the morning. Just happy. Tim, good to see you. How you doing? Isn't it a marvelous day, huh? See, I don't know about the rest of you. 7 o'clock in the morning? In a psych ward? On the east side of Cleveland? Tied to the bed? I'm not real spiritual. I'm just not. And then he just did what psychiatrists do. You all know what they do, right? They write in their charts. They nod their heads. That's what they do. Then they go away. Pretty soon they make you take that test, don't they? Now, I like to have a nickel for every test. I like to have a nickel for every test. I like to have a nickel for every test. I like to have a nickel for every time I took the test. Every time they sent me somewhere, they made me take that test. The MMPI test. It's got over 600 questions on it, huh? You know there's only one question on the MMPI test I can't answer? It's my favorite question. It says, Do you urinate more than most people? I don't know. Now, on the third day, that psychiatrist came into my room, and I don't want to forget this day ever. He put his chart in a window sill. He undid the straps. He sat on my bed. He said, Tim, I can't make your wife come home. I don't have a job to give you. I'm not going to make a house payment for you. But if you never want to take another drink as long as you live, I can tell you how to do that. One day at a time. This psychiatrist was a recovering member of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. I know that God wants me here. He shared a little bit of his story with me. And then I shared a little bit of my story with him. And all of a sudden, it was no longer I'm powerless over alcohol, that my life had become unmanageable. All of a sudden, it became we. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable, and that's step one. And I know today, without the we, I don't have a chance, man. Seven days later, he sent me home. He gave me my prescription, the most valuable thing anybody's ever given me in my whole life. He gave me a meeting schedule to Alcoholics Anonymous. He said, when you get home, I want you to do two things. I want you to go to a meeting. When you get to the meeting, you get a sponsor. And I got home, and I didn't know what to do. And I told you all what I do when I don't know what to do. I called my mama. I said, Ma, I got to go to an AA meeting. She said, I'll come get you. See, my mom knows all about Alcoholics Anonymous. She went to meetings with my daddy in the 40s and the 50s. There's been a big book in my house as long as I can remember. And she dropped me on your doorstep on July 4th, 1982. She left me with a little bit of advice I want to share with you. She said, I'm not coming back to get you. You go to the front table. You tell the people at the front table you're new. You don't have a car. You don't have a driver's license. You need a ride home. And you stay away from the women in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I paid attention to just about half of my mama's advice. But I got a sponsor that night. He gave me stuff to do. His wife was a chairperson. She handed me the traditions, asked me if I'd read, and I backed up. I said, gee, I don't know, honey. They just took the straps off me. You might want to find someone else to do that. And he just looked at me. You know how they look at you. He says, here's your first lesson in A.H.M. You never say no to Alcoholics Anonymous. No matter what the request is, the answer is yes. That's all you're ever going to need to know about that. And then he said, if you sit in a chair, you put it away. If you've got a coffee cup, you throw it away. If you used an ashtray. Now, this is a long time ago when A.A. was civilized. He said, you empty it. He said, I want you to read one page of the big book every day. Don't turn that page until tomorrow. Read that page as many times as you want to. Think you know it. If you need to, do not turn the page until tomorrow. And maybe, just maybe in 164 days, you might know something about the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. He said, if you're not praying, this is how you start. You're going to take three words your mother taught you when you were a little boy. You're going to get up in the morning and kneel down. And you'll say, please. You get up, you go about your day. At the end of that day, you're going to kneel back down and you'll say, thank you. Please and thank you. You know, my mother did teach me those words when I was a little boy. Do you know what she called them? The magic words, huh? What's the magic word, Timmy? No matter what I wanted, it was what's the magic word. I had no idea how much magic those words held until I came here to you and you showed me how to use them. My sponsor got me busy. I came to believe by watching you, my life would change. If I did what you did, and that's what I did. And then he asked me that question. You know, I don't know. I don't have a lot of opinions, but this is one. I think newcomers come in here and we ask them some really silly stuff sometimes. You know, a newcomer is going to come in here and we're going to say there's no such thing as a stupid question. Then we're going to ask them two or three stupid questions. I don't know if your sponsor asked you, but my sponsor asked me, he said, do you want what I have? I said, I don't know, buddy. What do you got? My sponsor had a brand new Tornado. He wore a Rolex watch. His wife was a stewardess. She had the prettiest green eyes I ever saw in my life. Do I want what you got? What page is that on? That's what I want to know. See? I didn't know what he was trying to offer me. And I'll tell you what, when I got here, I did not want what you had. The only thing I knew for sure is that I didn't want what I had. That I knew for sure. And God loved me so much, equal people, just like you on my path to show me another way. We got to the third step. I knelt down with my sponsor and I said, now, I don't know what you all thought about third step. First time you saw it, first time you read it. First thing you saw it, you saw it. And the only thing that went through my mind was, what if it works? You know, then what? So I said, we're going to kneel down and I'm going to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. He said, that's right. And I said, then what? He said, we don't know. I said, you don't know? Come on, you got to give me something here. And he did. He gave me, if you got one, you can understand the third step too. He gave me a penny. I always have a penny with me. This is a special penny. This penny is from 1918. That's the year my mother was born. And if you look at the back of the penny, it says one cent. But do you know what happens as soon as you turn it over? On the front of the penny it says, in God we trust. And that's the third step. Step's not about God's will, it's about mine. Am I willing to trust God with it? I can tell you that today I am. And once you can do that, there's another word on the front of that penny. And that word's liberty. The freedom you can have just by trusting God a day at a time. I started on that fourth step, but that's not one you all want to rush right into, right? You all know that. No, really, you got to read all them books, man. You got to take your time. If we don't got nothing in Alcoholics Anonymous, we got books, don't we? Huh? We got blue books, blue and blue books, little blue books, little black books, little red books, little green books. We got lists, we got guides. And if you don't read all them books, talk to every single one of them. Talk to every old timer in the world, you're going to mess the fourth step up, aren't you? You see, there's only one way to do the fourth step wrong. Don't do it. That's the only way to do it wrong. I read all those books. I talked to every old timer in Cleveland. I'm sober 30 years. And I'm still not 100% sure what Mr. Jones' problem really is. . . I'm sitting at home one night, my phone rings, it's my sponsor. He said, how's that fourth step coming? I said, it's coming right along. . And then he gave me something. He shouldn't give you a newcomer too much. He gave me information. He said, it'll get done in God's time. And you know, that's exactly what I was thinking too about that fourth step getting done. . And I hung the phone up. Five minutes later, the phone rang. It's my sponsor. He said, how's that fourth step coming, Tim? But I got something now, right? I got information. Gave it right back to him too. I said, it's going to get done in God's time. He said, that's a good thing because God's time is tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock. . . That's just the kind of guy my sponsor was. He was always helping. I did a fourth step and I did a fifth step. I put down what was wrong. I shared with another human being and my God why it was wrong. And then I had to become entirely ready for those things to go away. The big book, Hold the Directions to a New Way of Life. . Do you know I have a pair of pink socks at home? Do you know I never wanted a pair of pink socks? . I never bought a pair of pink socks, but I have a pair of pink socks at home. I used to have a brand new red T-shirt. . . And a pair of white socks. . Y'all have done this, huh? . I don't like to wear anything new. I always wash everything before I wear it. . So I had a brand new red T-shirt, threw it in the wash. Didn't want to wash it all by itself, so I got the rest of my laundry, threw it all in there, washed it all up, dried it all up. Y'all know what I got, right? Pink socks. . So I'm folding my new red T-shirt with a mild resentment. . And I noticed something. I don't know if y'all ever saw this before. There's a little tag on the back of your T-shirt. It's got writing on it. . You know what it says? It says, washing instructions. . Underneath that it says, wash separately. . I never took time to read the directions. If you never take time to read the directions laid down in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, you can never hope to have what it promises you. But you know what happens if you read the directions and you don't follow them? You get pink socks, man. . . I became entirely ready and I humbly asked for help. I went to my eight-step list at my sponsor's request. And he's coming over and we're going to talk about this and we're going to get this handled. And I'm looking at this guy over here now. I did that to him. I don't dispute it. Guilty. Did it. But you know, he did this to me. Right? I scratched him off the list. That's a push. . No, we're even. And I'm steady scratching people off the list waiting for my sponsor to get over there. By the time he gets there, there's only one person on my list. That's my mama. And I'm really trying to get a reason to get her off the list. . He said, Tim, you don't understand this, do you? I said, I think I do. He says, no, you don't. . He said, it's steps about forgiveness first. And it tells us their faults will not be discussed. This is about you. This is not about them. And you need to learn to forgive. Once you can forgive everybody that ever wronged you, then and only then will you have the right to ask anybody else for any kind of forgiveness. . I'm telling you that right now. I'm telling you that right now. I'm telling you that right now. And you know, before I was halfway through, those promises started coming true, just like the book says. . I have that Porsche in the driveway today. I keep it disguised as a Toyota. You know that? . . That's just a no on a stealing. . . someday you might come to Ohio and see it. And you'll think, well, that's not a Porsche. That's a Toyota. But you've got to remember this, see. There's only one person right now, here, that's looking out of your eyes. And that's the only person that's ever going to be responsible for what you see. You can see good or you can see bad. But you're the one looking. Because when I get home, back to the airport on Sunday, I'm getting inside my car. Alcoholics Anonymous is an inside job. I spent most of my life believing if the outside looked good enough, the inside would feel better. And I had to come here to you and showed me how to work from the inside. And I'm going to get inside my car and I'm not going to see Toyota. I'm going to see Porsche. Carrera. It's triple black with a moonroof. It's got a Bose CD system and it would a twelve disc changer. And I'm going to hit those power windows. On Monday, I'll drive to my job. You know the job I didn't used to have when I was drinking? And there I'll see my friends. Those would be the friends I didn't used to have when I was drinking. I don't know who my friends are. You don't know who has your message, do you? Are you waiting for somebody with seventy years of sobriety? Because just maybe, today, the person God sent with your message isn't even going to get sober for seventy more minutes. I don't know who has my message. I know this. I know there's somebody talking and I can hear them. God wants me to listen. I got a message on that first step about eighteen years ago. I was invited to speak in Indiana. And my wife couldn't go with me that weekend. So I took one of my new guys with me. And I didn't want to take my car because I didn't think my car would make it to Indiana, quite frankly. So I took my wife's car. My wife was driving a Honda Civic back then. And you all know in a Honda Civic, what do you get in a Honda Civic? Three, four hundred miles to a gallon in a Honda Civic, right? No, really, you drive a Honda Civic pretty much from now on. Never had to put gas in a Honda Civic. So me and my new guy jumped in my car. Brun jumped in a Honda Civic. We had it for Valparaiso, Indiana. We went underneath the sign and said my exit was about five acres away. And I looked down. And the gas gate said empty. And I thought, well yeah, empty like in a real car, right? But in a Honda Civic, empty, you gotta have a hundred miles left. I never gave it another thought. Until we went underneath the sign and said my exit was two hundred miles away. That's two miles. And as soon as we went underneath that sign, I ran out of gas. If you got a Honda Civic and it says empty, they're dead serious about that. Now that's exactly what they mean. Now I coasted for another mile, pulled over to the other side of the road, and there I was, in the middle of Indiana, on the side of the road. I was driving a Honda Civic, and I was driving a Honda Civic, and I was driving a Honda Civic, out of gas. Got a new guy sitting next to me. You know, I don't even want to turn to look at him. I just spent the better part of about four hours telling him all about responsibility and stuff like that. But I had to do something. I couldn't sit in Indiana the rest of my life. So I turned and I looked at him. And he just grinned. You know how they are, right? They'll stay sober a long time waiting for you to do something wrong. And he looked up at me and he said, We're powerless, ain't we? I said oh my God. I said get up, or got you back in here. You said you'd been deception to happen to me for a hundred years. Are you crazy? And he said why travel and get in this little- You're looking pretty. There's a little- and he said don't will soon. I flip him over, he looked at me like instead of him getting away, he just<|hi|> walked back down the hill. Yeah. Listening. I take one word out of the last three steps. That's how I live my life today. Continue. Improve. And practice. Now each one of those words is an action word. You've got to do something if you want something. My book tells me half measures avail me nothing. It doesn't say half measures avail me half. It says nothing. And I don't know about you. I've had much more nothing in my life than I want. I want no more nothing. I want everything my God wants me to have. And do you know I don't even know what that is. But if he wants it for me, I want it too. There's a difference in my life today I want to share with you. I go to the prisons and I talk to the guys in the penitentiaries. For a long time I did it pretty regular and then I didn't do it for a long time. I got sick. I had hepatitis C. Went through interferon treatment for it. That liked to kill me. I lost 30 pounds. I lost 25 pounds and a bunch of my hair and every bit of my energy. And I just wasn't well enough to go. And then in Ohio they changed the rules in Ohio. If you want to go into the penitentiaries now in Ohio, you have to fill an application out. I have never had to fill an application out to get into a penitentiary before. I was always pre-approved when I got there. I gave a little talk in the Allen Correctional Institute about 25 years ago in Ohio. And after the meeting a guy came up to me after the meeting and said, Can I call you? I said, Well, yeah, you call me. He said, I forgot. You want to call somebody from the penitentiary, you've got to call Collect. But I'll accept the Collect phone call in my life today. I want to tell you why. Because on April 10th, 1980, 1989, I went to a meeting. There was a young lady speaking at the meeting that night. And I don't know what your sponsor told you. My sponsor told me this a lot. He said, Tim, if you go to a meeting and you hear something you like, take it home. And on October 16th, 1993 we got married. I married a young lady in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous her name's Mary. I married a very intelligent woman in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous very educated woman in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. And a lot of her friends didn't think she was so smart when she said she'd marry me. But my wife is very educated. She's got more letters after her name than I've got in my name. She's got a B.A. got an MA. She got an MACT. She was ABD. Now she has a PhD. Then she got my personal favorite, and that would be a J-O-B. One of my friends asked me once, he said, doesn't that intimidate you? That your wife's so educated, your wife's so intelligent, doesn't that intimidate you? I had to stop and think about it for a minute because I never had before. And I said, no, no. Doesn't intimidate me. It makes me proud as hell. I'm proud as hell of my wife's accomplishments. Because 24 years ago, she came through that door, and she didn't have any letters after her name. But because of a book called Alcoholics Anonymous, the women in her home group and a God of her understanding that told her, once you come through that door, you're going to be a. And because she came through that door, you can be anything you want to be if you're willing to work for it. She trusted God, she worked hard and she accomplished . I can't be intimidated, only proud. I'm proud just to be a member of something that can make that happen . I'm so proud, I got a new license plate for my car. . You know like those vanity plates, they come in my greed for a part of my car and go home in my carof- You know those vanity plates? You got those in Florida? I got some. I think they're stupid, but I got some. You know what my plates say? They say, Ph.D. G.E.D. I got letters after my name, too. We had an AA wedding. It started with a serenity prayer and ended with the Lord's Prayer. There was a reading from the 12 and 12 in between. I was reminded on that day of the chance I got to make a collect phone call in 1975 from that old reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. And they walked me into the bullpen and they told me to call anybody I wanted to call anywhere in the world, but I had to call collect and I had this much time to do it. And I started to call. And I stood there and dialed and I dialed and I dialed. Do you know I couldn't find one person on earth that would accept a collect phone call from me at that time? My life not one. We invited 320 people to that wedding. Do you know how many came? About 350. Do you see the difference? From then to now, there's a difference in my life, but there's a difference in me. About 10 years ago, I had to start taking care of my stepfather. He had Alzheimer's disease and it's a terrible thing to watch. And Al-Anon once told me it's kind of like them. They watch us deteriorate in front of their eyes and the hopelessness and the helplessness they feel because there's really nothing they can do about it but watch. My mother just couldn't do it by herself anymore and there weren't two people on earth that hated each other more than me and my stepfather. And he was escaping from the house and stealing the car and the police were bringing him home and he's taken apart refrigerators. You know, it was just a terrible and dangerous thing. So we find a nice place for him out in Sandusky in the veterans' home. They have one in Ohio that's just gorgeous on beautiful grounds. It's just a wonderful place. And it's about an hour from my house. So that's where we took him out there and they took really good care of him. And on the weekends, my mother and I would go out and visit. And after eight or nine months, he passed away. And that left me with an 82-year-old mother at home. And Mom did real good for a long time. She broke her hip once or twice. Her mind was pretty clear and she had a couple of mild strokes. But Mom didn't want to go into any kind of a home. And we had that talk. And I said, Mom, look, the first few years of my life, you fed me, you cleaned up my messes, you changed my diapers. If I have to do something, if I have to do that for you, the last few years of your life, I would be more than happy to do that. And she looked at me and she said, as only a mother could say, she said, the first few years of your life, the first 30 years of your life, is because of me. And I was in a position because of my business partners and you people and loving God that Mom didn't have to leave her home. I went over there after work. I had a woman, took care of her during the day. And after work, I'd get her dinner ready and get her cleaned up, put her pajamas on and get her to bed and we'd talk and chat and catch up. And that's what I did after work. I didn't need to do anything. I didn't need to do anything. I haven't played in a long time. I got sick, I told you. And I just never picked it back up again. But I used to like to play a lot of golf, and I had a friend that called me once, and he said, we have an opening in the foursome on Sunday. Would you like to play? I said, I'd love to play on Sunday, but I'll be with my mom on Sunday. He said, do you have to be with your mom on Sunday? I said, no. No. I do not have to be with my mom on Sunday. I get to be with my mom. I get to be there. Thank you. I want to tell you something. My mom said to me, I think it's the most valuable thing she's ever said to me, the most valuable thing anybody's ever said to me. It would be time for a meeting after I'd get her in bed, and I'd give her a kiss on her forehead, tuck her in, make sure she had the right television station on, give her a kiss on her forehead, and I'd say, Mom, I love you. I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to a meeting. And isn't it when we tell somebody we love them, wouldn't we like them to say, I love you, too? Isn't that what we're looking for, I love you, too? I went back one particular night. I gave my mom a kiss on her forehead. I said, I'm going to a meeting, Mom, I love you. And she didn't say, I love you, too. She said something much, much more important than that. She said, I know you do. I know you do. People should know we love them long before we have to tell them. Is there somebody in your life right now that's going through your mind, I should check on them, I should call them, I should see how they're doing? Quit thinking about it and do it. It's hard to make amends at the funeral home. On June 1, 2005, I was kneeling next to a man. I was in my mother's bed, and I was holding her hand. And at 4.45 on that day, the angels came. They took her hand from mine, and they put it in God's. And I was able to do something that day you taught me. You taught me to let go and to let God. On Saturdays when I'm in town, I go to the cemetery, and I put... flowers on my mother's grave. You see, this is the big difference in me. This is the really big difference in me. And I'd like to think she sees me. I don't know. But I'd like to think she does. Do you know why I put flowers on my mother's grave? Because I said I would. And that's the big difference in me. I said... I said I would. We have a lot of purposes in Alcoholics Anonymous. We have a primary purpose. We've got a singleness of purpose. My favorite's always been my main purpose. And that's to fit myself to be of maximum use to my God. And to those about me, not just here. Not just here everywhere. Remember, what you're doing today, between the serenity prayer and the Lord's prayer, remember, it's not as important as what you're gonna do today between the Lord's prayer and the serenity prayer. Thank you so much for having me this afternoon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good day. Good day. Good day. Good day. Good day. Good day.