Why the Seventh Step Prayer Defines a Defect – Larry K.

I'm still an alcoholic. Where's Cindy? Somebody's just going to have a heart attack. I want to make sure she doesn't want to do this talk. She told me she was going to do it instead. Connie, I got it wrong. Oh, you don't want too? Okay, sorry. One little holdover note that I thought about at lunch that might be important, so it's sort of an amendment to the fifth step. It's the effects of a fifth step。 If you attend meetings like I have, you hear people who in the course of doing their fifth step get on a spiritual high and you almost have to put lead shoes on to keep them down on the floor. And I've watched two people who near the end of their fifth steps started going into a depression. And the reason I found out was that they had heard people like this and they felt that a good fifth step meant a spiritual hi. It doesn't. different people react differently immediately to medication even though the long range effects may be the same one out of 40 people about have a huge spiritual emotional jolt while they're doing the fifth step and they have never done one before even in treatment one out of 40 People seem to have a reaction I do and that is they walk away from their own fifth step feeling worse than they came in. And I went to a good member of Al-Anon who told me, that just makes sense because I've just been kicking around all the dirt, the mud's in the pond, and don't worry, it'll all clear out now. You'll feel the same. About 38 out of 40 people leave pretty much in a condition that I describe having had a spiritual enema. They're drained, they're exhausted, they're tired, and they just don't know how the hell they feel. Everybody eventually gets the same promises. And the promises aren't the spiritual emotion. The promises aren'T the emotional high. They're the deeper quiet. We're on the sixth step though. Became entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. I've got to tell you, the steps I'm probably most going to enjoy sharing are 6, 7, 8, and 9. So this afternoon and this evening are for my own personal sharing what might just be the high point. I would hope that as I point out the principles for steps 6 and 7, you might see the danger of doing what groups that I belong to again and again and Again have done, and that is studying steps together. 4 has its unique principle and four and five are not the same they have different principles and to mix them together would be like to mix mashed potatoes and cherry pie in a blender two things that might taste good alone that lose when they're blended together four has the principle of self-awareness let me review them, terror, confidence, relief, self-awareness, and openness. Each step designed to produce something else in my life that I need. I'll say, to kind of whet your appetites, that about the last two years, the principle connected with the sixth step has been giving me the deepest spiritual experiences on a continuing basis when I work it of any of the principles of the 12 steps at this moment in my life. I love 6 and 7. I dropped some hints and was taken up by an Overeaters Anonymous group on them, and I gave an entire hour just on the sixth step. I'm not going to do that, of course, today, but there is that much richness to a step that we so often sometimes just pass over. Let me quickly just do something with the terms. Entirely ready. Ready is not eager and it's easy to make that distinction. It simply means I will take the necessary steps. I really don't feel that I can be eager long after the fifth step to have all my defects removed because they're still too important in my life. Now immediately after the fifth step, almost everybody seeing their whole life in a pattern can quickly want God to take it all. But three months later, six months later nine months later most of us kind of start resting as crutches on some of our defects and to be eager to have God remove a crutch that we need to live just isn't a simple thing. So let me point out to you what's important to me. Eager, not willing. I mean, it's not eager. It's ready. And ready is just simply willing. I was three, four years sober and I heard the sixth step for the first time. Up until then, I had heard that the sixth step was entirely ready to have my defects removed. And somebody was reading it and what he Red was entirely ready to have God remove all these defects. I had a step in which I was getting ready to Have Larry remove them all, and there's a world of difference between God removing and Larry removing. I can work out any programs I want to have my defects removed. That's nice, that's good, that's helpful. Personally for me, that has nothing to do with the sixth step. The sixth step is I'm getting ready toHave God remove them, and that means I simply have to be open, because I don't know what defects God wants to remove today. I don' t give Him the shopping list. If I'm entirely ready to have God remove all my defects, I don''t tell Him what we're supposed to be working on today. Not in the spirit of this sixth step. I maybe think that God should be working on my celibacy right now, because it upsets me. And God wants me to work on my patience. He sends such jackasses into my life. And if I'm putting all my effort in fighting on the celibasy, I'm in such a turmoil that I lose them both. I lose the opportunities that God is sending into my life, and I've got to be open and just be ready for Him. I was eight years sober, and I heard the worst thing I've ever heard on this step. So bad that I forgot it almost immediately for an entire year and wish I'd never remembered it. Somebody commented on the word remove and said, remove is not suspend. For most people, what they want is for God to suspend their lust So it won't cause them a problem now For God to suspended their anger so it won' t cause them the problem now You ask me to remove your wallet when we're done Remember me and the church funds You'll see what remove is It means it's gone Now supposing you ask God to remove you defects And he removes your anger And some drunk backs into your car and totals it And you reach inside to get angry, and there's no anger there. It has all been removed. Or that right person passes by, and you reach inside for some good old lust, just one last try. And God has removed lust. That's not an easy thing. I want God to take my anger and my lust and lock them up in the closet so they won't cause me great difficulties. But I sure as hell don't want them removed. That's a very, very different thing most of the time. Entirely All my defects are kind of hooked together. They're all an expression of my own personality And if i'm telling god you can have it all but you cannot remove my impatience My impatience is connected to the person that I am and this person is connected To all my other defects and if I insist on never losing one of them Eventually, i'm going to insist upon keeping the package that I have right now What I do like to do for quite a while and now is talk about what our defects of character I have changed so much my understanding of this The first three years I thought the defects of characters were the things that made me an sob My anger What I consider probably my worst defect my efficiency And unfortunately, I keep this now I can use the eighth step and become fully aware of you and your needs, and then all of a sudden I'm in a project. And if I'm on a project, I can walk right over you and never know you were there. And that efficiency in which I just don't see anybody when I'm getting something done, I don't deal with people as having feelings, coupled with the fact that at other times I can be very open, sometimes has me deal with them as being very open. I deal with my people in a really horrible, hot-cold kind of pattern. Well, that isn't neat. And those were the things I first wanted God to remove. Now, will the Al-Anons please listen again to the Al Anonism part of my personality? From the third to the ninth year, the defects I discovered I needed removed were the defects that made me a nice guy. Because I had such a poor self-image, I would allow you to walk all over me and I would consider that good. And as I began gaining in self-respect and understanding that I'm a child of God, that I deserve to be treated with respect, I couldn't play doormat to the world anymore in a healthy way. And I came to realize it is not healthy for you or for me, for me to allow you to walk over me. And so I began standing up for my rights. And if people call me and they set up an appointment for a fifth step and they don't show, I call them up. and I want to know why they didn't show. And if they forgot, I'd chew them out that something this major is your fifth step in your program. If you can forget it, you're in a bad place. And if They deliberately didn't come, I really give it to them. I tell them what it would be like had they driven down to where I am and I'd just not be there, how horrible they would have felt and how I had to set aside a morning and an afternoon just to be there for them. I think I owe that to them because they've done something. If they cancel, that's okay. if they call up at the last moment and say they can't come down, that's okay. But if they just stand me up, I have rights and I'm going to tell people it is wrong for you to violate my rights and it's important for me to stand up for them. This enables me in many ways to keep a sense of my own dignity. Arbutus, who has been very active in Al-Anon in Texas Showed me how valid this is for Al-Ans She said something that I think a lot of people ought to hear She said if a woman joins Al- Anon And everything starts going better at home She's probably not working the Al-ANon program Because she's not standing up for her own rights And when she starts sensing her dignity and really becoming herself, there probably will be certain clashes. If I go to an AA meeting and somebody says something insulting, I don't take it anymore. And I'll pursue them and just let them know, you don't have a right to say that about me in any form at all. So years three through nine, those were the defects that I concentrated on. For the last few years, I'm not sure what a defect is. I began to get my first clue from the seven-step prayer which we heard read and I'm not going into the seventh step but I just want to go into the definition there I pray that you now remove from me every defective character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows it doesn't say anything about the things I don't like about me my tendency to overeat and put weight on it makes stands in a way of by being effective to me But it doesn't really stand in the way of my being effective to you. It doesn't necessarily. Most of us, certainly for me, for much of my time in this program, the defects were what I didn't like about me. But the seventh step doesn't define it that way. It says the things that keep me from being effective to God and effective for you. It says nothing about what I don't like about myself. I may not like my sexual problems. That isn't relevant at all in the sixth and seventh steps. The question that is relevant is, do they help me serve you better or do they help me service you more poorly? And so the last few years I'm really in a puzzle over what a defect is because the same thing at the same time can be a defect or a liability in my life. Let me show you. So I've talked about the sexual problems and I've had, you know, just, uh, I don't know where I was going to say this. I talked about how not all alcoholics are the same. You know, the big book in the area of sex says we're not supposed to go to anybody for advice. We go to God. Let me tell you why. Even in sponsoring and listening to someone's fifth step, it's impossible for me to weigh their drives and their hang-ups and their needs clearly enough to give them advice often in a fifth step if i think of it i'll ask guys especially if when they rate themselves they consider themselves above average average or below average in their sexual drive i call it their horniness factor and the reason for that is if a man thinks he's not horny enough that's a put down and then i'll asked him in their ability to satisfy a woman but when i ask them if they're average in their drive, I found out that's not an objective question. I next want to know how strong their drives really are. And so I'll ask them sort of at the peak of their performance, somewhere about 20 to 25 years old, how often did they have intercourse and or masturbate? And over a period of time, I'm just going to give you two people who both said they felt they had an average sexual drive. One man had intercourse or masturbated twice a year the other man had it twice a day supposing saying they were average one started giving advice to the other obviously their urges in their needs were so wildly different that they damage each other and somebody says do whatever you can and they may be able to live with that other people can't live doing almost anything because of some hang-ups my mother passed on down anything in the area of sex brings in a lot of guilt for me. That doesn't mean I don't do it, it just means I walk with a lot or guilt at times. I have found that my drives are rather strong and they continue rather strong. That wasn't part of the midlife crisis, not the drives. When I'm upset sexually and when I find myself falling back into patterns that have upset me before, you know I've discovered that that helps me most of the time be a better sponsor because I have found myself not wanting it doing everything I can praying asking God and three months later back in the same damn sexual mess when someone comes to me locked in a problem in the area of sex I'm not as intolerant as some sponsors and a lot of clergymen are, who obviously I think just don't have the same strong drives. I understand somebody who finds himself in an affair almost innocently and who does whatever they can to get out of the affair. I understand them and I can just be there in love. It helps me listen and it helps me share. Under those circumstances, my sexual drives are not a defect according to the definition of the seventh step when you apply it back to the sixth. They don't keep me from being effective to you. They make me more effective. Now, those same defects can be and have been a real liability. I've been in my sexual world, and people I sponsor call, and I've just pretended to listen to them because I wasn't going to break out of some activity or fantasy. Then it's been a real reliability, depending upon whether it helps me be more functional or less functional to God and to you. That's the way it's defined, and that can be across the board with anything. You find yourself getting angry? I'll bet you you're more understanding with someone you sponsor who has anger if you're really working through this program well. Under those circumstances, the defects aren't what we think they are. Incidentally, I'm going to wait until the eighth step to make one more major comment on defects, And that's my huge reservation, if not anger, at lists of defects and liabilities as you find them in different clubhouses. And what I think is really solidly at root wrong with all those lists, according to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I just say this until somebody will be here tonight. I'm not going to talk about it at all. But you won't remember. it can make me then a healthy sponsor that makes it an asset in god's plan and that's how i've been seeing defects for quite a while now and looking at different areas of my life i don't know what my defects are i really can't say therefore i don'T KNOW WHAT I SHOULD ASK GOD TO REMOVE AND THIS IS ANOTHER REASON WHY THE STEP IS SO MUCH BETTER WHEN IT SAYS ENTIRELY READY TO HAVE GOD REMOVED RATHER THAN ENTIRLY READIY to have Larry removed. Because I can't tell what today God needs. I know this, see, if I were totally filled with self-love, not in a bad way, but I could allow God and you to love everything that I am and off that to love Everything I was. And therefore I was completely loving and accepting because that's acceptance. You accept me. That's what I call love. God accepts me. So I'll accept you. If I were totally filled With acceptance, I wouldn't need any of the defects to make me accepting. So when I become perfected in God loving me and you're loving me and I therefore can love you without the defects, they're going to go. I know at that point God won't need them in my life to keep me human, to keep me humble. See, I know what an ego I've got. I'm aware of that. And if I didn't have these defects, these things that I don't like about me, the Goodyear blimp wouldn't be big enough for a hat for me and I'd be intolerable in Alcoholics Anonymous you couldn't stand me nor could I be of any use to you because as I was intolerable to myself I'd equally intolerable with you and expect the same perfection of you now I've done that up until very recently this is the first or second time I'm taking the next step recently in Oklahoma City someone I sponsor heard somebody share something on defects and shortcomings passed it on to me and I've never don't know why I've ever heard it before the person looked in the in a dictionary and saw that a defect much like a shortcoming is a shortness of something something that should be there and isn't and he thought about it and he said in his life he has never had too little anger and fear and and greed, and lust, and laziness, and possessiveness. Nor have I. So these aren't defects. What he was defective in was being filled with love and being able to love. Patience, understanding, kindness, courtesy. These were the things he was deceptive in. And it was this that he had to be ready to have God remove. And what I like about this is I have this big thing, and I think it's going to be shared either this step or the next step on the outline, that if I work on something and get rid of it, I may be producing a vacuum with rather bad results. I just stopped smoking when smoking was still needed for me. At that particular point, I'm going to have to bring something else into my life to do for me what smoking used to do and most of the time in most of us what we bring in is worse than what we've substituted when love comes in it pushes out the defects and you don't have that vacuum so boy that really solidly makes sense for me for me the principle of the sixth step Love is wholeness. My God is love. If I'm going to be entirely ready, now love, I've got to tell you this, because sometimes as Christians you hear this, and if you've heard it like me, love sounds like a big glump. You know, there is God, a lump of love over there. My God, I think like Alcoholics Anonymous, is an active love, an acceptance that comes out to me. I come to you when you immediately want to accept me and better understood even, we want to go out and find the suffering alcoholic and accept him before he even asks. This is the kind of love my God is. Now if I'm going to be entirely ready to have God remove my defects and God is love, God removes by what He is. God removes my defects by loving. And that simply tells me I'm gonna be entirely ready to have God love me entirely as I am. And you know, it took me a long, long time to understand that God loves Larry. He doesn't love patience and hate impatience. God loves larry. He doesn' t love kindness and reject rudeness. God loves Larry. He doesn''t love love and hate hate. First, let's take Alcoholics Anonymous. We don't deal with traits. AA is always my door to God, to understand God. we deal with people. And when I began seeing that, I started looking at my own relationship and most of your relationships. You don't deal with traits except maybe for those one or two people closest to you in your life. You deal with the truth. You deal a lot with people You may, listening to me, think I do a lot of dumb things but you're either going to accept me or reject me and if you accept me, you accept it and you almost feel sorry that I do some dumb things but you don't reject parts of me you accept ME or you reject me and it's really sad that the one person that we fragment is ourselves. I think almost every one of us are schizophrenic in this sense. I go before God, I come before you, and I stand before my sponsor, and i want all of you to like my good points. I tend to be very generous at times. I've got this real compulsion on sweaters. I've got a sweater collection that an arctic in the eskimo would envy and every year when the first cold wave comes in i lay out all my sweaters and i get ready to weed out the collection and give it to the needy and several years ago about five six i did it and i went through all the sweaters i didn't like and bundled them up and got ready to take them and something occurred to me there's no reason why the poor should be out of style after my dad was killed in a mine accident my mother used food stamps and i had to go to the grocery store with them and that's the most shameful single thing i had a do like that in my whole life and i know the pain that a lot of people have when they're locked in poverty and there's no sense why if i'm giving them something it's got to be out of date and since that time when i read my weed my sweater sweater collection is the most painful thing i do i lay out all my sweaters and i've got like 20 or 30 good sweaters i get first choice and the poor get second choice i get third and fourth choice they get fifth choice i get sixth seventh and eighth they get ninth and this thing is serious enough that two years ago ninth choice after i made it was something i wanted and i started bargaining i would give them two of mine for one of theirs and i made the swap and i couldn't live with it i had to give it back to him including one one of the other ones that I threw in with the swap. I'll tell you that, because you can like that, but I don't want to tell you, that I'm still charging things to the church, that i shouldn't. I don' t want you to like that. I can tell you about how much time I can put into the program, sponsoring, listening to fifth steps, going to meetings, talking to people. I don''t want to tell you abut the times I'm real lazy, and don't do anything in the program. That I'll be at a meeting, and the phone's gonna ring, and because I have this horrible hang-up, I don'T remember names her faces. I'm not sure if I know the names of all the people there, and if somebody's being asked for, I'm no going to know if they're there, so I won't answer the phone. And that keeps me from taking 12-step calls when I'm there. I don't want to tell you that because you don't like that. And I can go right down the list with things like this and give you examples of what I will allow you to love and what I don' t want you to l ove. And th at's how I go to God, and that's how i want to go to my sponsor, and that' s how I want to present myself to you. But i can't do that i got to pull myself together and just be a person just be larry and that's all and that the principle that's the sixth step entirely ready to have god remove these defects that means i'm not going to stand as a series of traits before god i'm not going gonna stand as series of events before god you don't relate to the things i've done well and reject me for my failures of the past You don't accept and reject me for my actions. You accept or you reject me, and I don't think God does this either. I was taught more about God by a red-headed drug addict in Dallas, Texas in one trip to Florida and back for Young People's AA than I learned from all of the priests in four years of seminary study who taught us. She said two of the most astounding statements I've ever heard. One is biblical solidly after I began looking. The other definitely isn't. The first one she said that is biblical is, she said, my God has no memory. And I figure, isn't that stupid? You'll find it in the Bible. You're told he can't remember our sins and he casts behind his back all of our sins. My God is a God of the now. And when I start telling him what I'm sorry for, he says, what? What'd you say? And he's just loving me now. I mean, that's like AA. We don't carry around memories, not the fellowship. You know, I take AA as a group. I come to you. You don't remember my failures. You don'T remember how I've screwed up and the ass I made of myself at a meeting. You just accept me. You accept me in the nail. And that's how it goes. And that'S how my God deals with me. The second thing won't have anything to do with this step, but boy, it fractured my thought of God worse than anything else that I've ever met in my life. She said it stronger than I'm going to say. Some of you may know the word, but I doubt it, being all ladies and gentlemen. Incidentally, the most exciting thing that I've discovered at AA is, did you ever notice there are only ladies around a table in Alcoholics Anonymous? This shocks me often. I'll look around the table, there are no ladies around. There are only women, there were only ladies. And I just try to think of what bitches they were in their last drunk. And it shows me the power that is present in the fellowship. Anyway, you ladies won't know this, But what she said to me was, we're driving along and we're both in the back seat. There's three of us there, two people in the front. It's like an 18-hour nonstop trip there, whole weekend conference and back. But on the way up, she starts saying, my God doesn't care who I screw. You don't say that to a priest. By the end of the trip, having been shocked and gone into shock and needed medication and everything else. I agreed. I don't want a God who's concerned with who I screw. You're not going to put me in hell because I've screwed someone. You wouldn't want that. You might lecture me if somebody's being hurt, but you're not gonna put me in hell for it. And any time you're better than God, something's wrong with religion. And I can't find that in the Bible where God is so upset with who I screw, but you see my God loves me. Now there's a second side to this that she didn't see, and she knows that I care who I screw. You know, if it's a bird, it might be a very different reaction from a lamb, a guy or a gal. I mean, there are different emotional reactions different people have, and I may not be able to live with some of those results. My God will not stop hating me, but I carry guilt for some of the things I do, and because He loves me, in that sense, He's concerned. Not in the sense of judging me, but in the sense of getting a broken heart. That's a very deep point. Anyway, the principle though is just very simple. My God has no memory. He deals with me in the now. He doesn't deal with past actions. He dealing with people in the present. And that is so crucially, crucially important for me. And so I just try to be me. When I try to be me, I just get such a wave of peace. Go back to thinking of standing on the water. You know, isn't it just ludicrous to think That on top of the water I have my head up here And my right arm is under the water And my left leg is on top You know I've got good traits and bad traits That isn't how it is One person God is keeping on top Of the water is a whole person And that's all it is And it fits the image God keeps me on top Of the Water And what I have to do is just try to be me To appropriate Larry just as a simple little person and just to be Larry. There's so much of me that is bad. Maybe you remember this as sort of the parable of the Oklahoma wheat. It's not in the Bible. I want to go back. Let's go back to January. If you had toured the land of Oklahoma, our winter wheat, had you gone into our fields, would have been about an inch high. It would have been green. There'd be nothing coming to a head at all, and it would have Been very sparse. Now, in June, when we harvest it, it's supposed to be two to three feet high. I'm not a wheat farmer. I'm from Pennsylvania, if you remember. But it's about two to four feet high, golden, fully headed out, and very thick. But in January, it's not supposed to be like that because it couldn't take the ice and the snow. In January, that wheat is the size and the color and the thickness that God knows if it's going to reach a harvest in June. It should be in January. and I look at myself and I curse myself for being gold and not green and for being an inch high and not three feet high for not being coming to a head when I'm supposed to be coming to ahead and for the fact that I'm being so thin when I am supposed to be so thick and I forget that if God is in control I am where I am supposed to be in His growing season and I am not an inch higher or an inch smaller than God knows is best for me in His plan today another example that I really like to chose the same thing if a child's brain were fully developed at birth and it immediately started walking its legs would be bowed because the bones are too soft in the upper part of the torso is too far out of proportion too heavy and the the legs the child would be crippled forever children don't crawl until their body can take it and they don't walk until their body can take it and the same thing is true emotionally you know some of us think we're supposed to be able to walk to do the heroic things that some real people with deep spirituality do with a lot of time in the program and if I were able to do some of those things my emotional legs would be so bold I'd be so so filled with pride I'd be crippled emotionally probably the rest of my life when I come in here I just have to stay there for a while and vegetate and then I start crawling and Then I start walking. And there's stumbling steps. And then I start running. And eventually I can go a lot further. So the sixth step, wholeness as a person. The seventh step, probably the least worked step, humbly ask God to remove these defects. Probably the step I worked the least when I thought I was working it for about the first nine years of my program. i want to talk a little bit about defects i want to go back and carry this together from the sixth step and share with you the importance that defects have in our life i want a comment first about feelings and here i'm going to share things that a lot of you may never have thought about and you may want to think about it i'm not asking you to agree but at least to prod your your thinking i personally believe there is no such thing in the universe as a bad feeling. I want to repeat that. I think there is no such thing in the university as a good feeling. It is my opinion that feelings are instincts of the body to preserve or protect life. Anger is not bad. Fear is not good. Lust is not evil. Greed is not bad. Feelings can lead to actions that are harmful. Dwelling on the feelings, mulling over them can lead to states that are impactful. But the clearest way I could show this to you is just think of an animal that has absolutely no anger or fear. My impression is it could never make it in nature. There's a threat threatening me. Anger is an outward movement of my body to remove the threat and protect my life. Fear is an inward movement of my body to remove me from the threat and protect myself. If I'm standing in the middle of a Nebraska wheat field, if I'm standing in front of the Holiday Inn in Omaha, and this isn't the way I wrote it here, and a tornado's heading right at me, and I don't have any fear, that's not healthy. That's not healthy at all. I won't take the steps I need to protect my wife. Joe Martin says this, I think, in his Chalk Talk or one of his films. You slap me in the face. I feel anger. That's not wrong. That's a healthy emotion of the body. If 10 years later, I'm still nursing it and filled with anger, that's unhealthy. That is resentment. I've nursed a good reaction. So to me, these feelings all serve a purpose in life. If they lead to actions that are going to hurt me or unnecessarily hurt someone else, then the feeling has led to a harmful action and it isn't good. We also have action patterns that we call defective that I want to point out are very necessary. They all are important in my life. Depression serves a function. I did a six-week term in a mental hospital in Missouri. The worst time of my life, it was near, my drinking was getting ready to explode, and I knew I belonged there as a patient. And I did, and I had to keep the psychiatrist from learning. But one of the things I heard is that any psychological pattern, any psychological illness has pain at one level, but it has a benefit at another, and that's why the person has it. If you've got any pattern in your life, a sex hang-up that you keep going back to that you don't like, a pattern of action, an explosive temper, depression, jealousy, Whatever it is on one level. It brings you pain, but on another level you've kept it because it's performing a service Whatever I've got I've gotten because either now I've been being hurt a lot by the world either it keeps pain out or in a painful world It brings some pleasure in depression so simple to show When I go into a depression, it's usually because I've scarred badly emotionally and I can't take another rejection my my heart It's just an open bare wound. It's bleeding and it can't take more pain at this moment Depression is a series of kind of feelings that paralyzes me keeps me from going back out in the world And I do feel upset in the paralysis, but it by keeping me from out in world It shields me from additional pain while I'm in it and it serves a good purpose for me I can go across the board on that The Al-Anon trait That so many of us have in AA too Of being a victim Is a good example of this I'm a martyr I'm not responsible for my pain He is She is The bishop is I don't have to own this pain I can throw it off on someone else and it serves a function. I've got the pain. I'm one of these people who feel like I don't have a right to live. I can mass grade that now that I'm not good enough by bringing you on my little island of hurt with me and blaming you and how you're acting, how the bishop doesn't appreciate me and mistreats me for the pain I'm feeling right now and I don' t in my own feelings of not being good have to add that additional burden of taking responsibility for the painful pain I am feeling and so there's some things being done. the removal of any of these things therefore a feeling or a pattern can create a vacuum the most dramatic thing that ever happened to me in my entire life is how i quit smoking three packs a day for about 20 years driving on my fifth a birthday i had three packs in the car ready to smoke it was 11 o'clock at night i came down to get my lighter the club where i sobered up gives one five ten fifteen twenty years lighters and i picked up my five-year lighter Was thanking god driving back had a cigarette in my hand Had already had three packs smoked and was looking for it had 100 miles to drive to at least another pack in that 100 miles Pulled a cigarette out and I heard god speak not with my ears If you've heard it, you know what i'm talking about. If you don't wait until you do if you do Well, how you know i've no doubt about it. It's god what I heard was you don'T have to smoke now Never had a cigarettes since felt no nicotine withdrawal I was already working the program of overeaters anonymous. So there was no snacks put no weight on I do not smell smoke. Now, if there's a lot in a room, my eyes will tear up. And the last, this is eight years now, going to be in the end of May, I've smelled smoke about seven times, eight times, that's all. I don't try to run around getting cheap thrills from your smoke or I'm not one of those rabid fanatics the way a lot of ex-smokers are. Oh, she lit up. She let me run around, you know. Yeah, you can smoke and they're fanning you. None of that stuff. It's like I never smoked in my life. In case you've wondered if I have an alcoholic mind, this will prove it to you. Three months of this, it occurred to me, well, if it's this easy to quit, why don't I go back to smoking because I can quit whatever I want? But I realized if I lit a cigarette that day, I probably would never quit again. It's like I've never smoked in my life. Hearing this, about five of my friends tried to quit smoking. They weren't ready. See, God came in with enough love and pushed my smoking out, and it's like i've never smoked in my lifetime. These other people, one of them was a society gal. She quit smoking and she put a lot of weight on. And she couldn't stand living fat. She went to shit several times. That didn't work. So she decided she'd go back smoking until she lost weight and then she quit smoking. Needless to say, she's fat and smoking today. And has been, she has been to quote fat farms and shit for smoking and for the overeating and everything else. And you know, just she unleashed another problem because she wasn't ready to have it removed. Now, the seventh step. Humbly ask God to remove all these defects. I want you to listen very carefully. I didn't know what my note here was. I want to listen to this. Listen very carefully to what I'm going to say. In 12 years in the program, God has never removed a single thing I have humbly asked Him to remove. I want repeat that. This is very important. in 12 years in the program God has never removed a single thing I have humbly asked him to remove in 12 year's in the program everything that I have gone to my sponsor with and humbly asked to have removed God has removed by the day as long as I have done exactly what my sponsor has told me in 12 years inthe program God well everything that I have goneto my sponsor withand humbly asked to have removed has been removed by the day by god as long as i am still doing what my sponsor told me and that makes sense to me because you see god gave me a chain of command i didn't find god i've never met god directly i found a sponsor a person who took me to a group who took me to the program and through that i experienced god and that's my chain of command and it's been to understand everything about god ever since all of All of the steps that deal with God, when I'm dealing with them correctly, I will run through that format I've just described for you. So if I go direct to God, I'm short-circuiting the map he gave me to find him. And if I say, God, remove this, he just lets me have it. Now, if Igo to my sponsor and I ask, hey, I need help with my sex problems. I needhelp with my greed. I needhelp with a dozen other problems. And I do exactly what my sponsor tells me. I get precisely what he guaranteed. It's easy to go to God. That's an easier, softer way. That's one of the dangers, incidentally, of alcoholics finding God and going to church and switching from A to church. Church for all of us is an easier and softer way we don't have to do fourth step inventories. In any church I know of you don't need to do a fourth step inventory. You don't want to have to make a list if you don' t have to go through a written inventory. You don' T have to take a list and make a nice time and feel very spiritual as long as it works and then for most of us it just doesn' T continue working If we find God in AA, we can always celebrate him as much as we want if we keep our basic AA. But if I go direct to God, that's an easier, softer way. There's no shame. But if i have to go to my sponsor, that is really humiliating. That is humbly asking. A year ago, I was living at my sponsor's home, two days a week going to law school. And several things had happened. I had some sex problems and didn't tell him about it, just kept them from him. And I was in a bad place with the archbishop, not wanting the relationship healed. and I couldn't live with it. I was going to God and you know nothing was happening I was feeling miserable and I finally just went and told my sponsor both of them that's all and I told him I don't want this problem with the Archbishop healed because I don' t like him. I'm not ready to have this defect removed. Telling him that was the beginning of having it removed. He didn't give me any orders all he just knew it was out in the open and when I go share it with him that's almost like humbly asking and he gave me some advice and when i follow that advice those defects are removed And that's my chain of command. Therefore, the principle of the seventh step to me, and this is brand new in the last month. Incidentally, every time I have done these steps pointing out the principles, my list of principles change. And I'm happy for that. It shows I keep growing in my understanding of the steps. The principle ofthe seventh step is cooperation. God could and would if he were sought God could and would if he was sought my God doesn't interfere unasked he gives but I have to open my hand to accept there's a neat story let me give you in the gospel it's early in Luke I'm going to use the word Jesus I hope you can accept this. Jesus is born. God's love is with his parents and he's just a baby and wherever the parents go, he's got to go. And he's 40 days old and his parents take him to the temple in Jerusalem. They present the baby. Then he grows up and at the age of 12, there's a story that's right about the time when a young man became an adult in Jewish law. His parents go back up to Jerusalem.They go home and they think he's with them and he isn't. He stays in Jerusalem them, they lose them and they have to go looking for him. I like that story because it's the story of almost every one of our religious lives. When you're new in this program, you're going to find God in your own heart and God's going to be a baby and wherever you are, it's like he stays with us with no demands at all. But if you're like me at a certain point, God starts growing up. And when that starts happening, if I want to keep my God experience, I have to be where he is. I've got to go looking for him, he's no longer going to be automatically where I am. And if I'm now doing just my own things, I'm going to lose my experience of him. I have to cooperate with him. He will not automatically be with me all the time and every time. Action is necessary on my part. Calling my sponsor, sharing my pain, not just secretly going to God. This is a continuing relationship for me. And that's very important. Humbly asking, may I point out, is not proudly demanding. There's a world of difference between the two. Most of my prayers, and I'm sure most of yours, are proud demands. Dammit God, I want to stop smoking. The best way to see it is, humbly ask God to quit smoking today. And if you light up a cigarette later on today, do you thank God? Because that's his answer then. When I first started really handling my weight, my overeating, my abstinence in that program is dated in January 78 or something like that. It's eight or nine years now. It was a day on New Year's Eve. I knelt down and said, God, whatever weight I have from now on, I'm going to try to thank you for at the end of the day. I'm not going to fight food anymore. I'm putting it all in your hands. I'm powerless. You fight it all, and that's it. You can load a banquet with my favorite foods, a table, and I don't feel an urge. But the hardest thing is when I feel I'm heavy, thanking God for the weight I have. If I ask God to lose weight and I'm angry as I usually am when I don' t have it, then I'm not humble or I'm either being proud or demanding. And it's very difficult. You know, you load your hand with marbles and humbly ask me to remove them. If I walk away from you, you should say thanks if you've been humble. You just be grateful at any response at all. Humbly asking is not giving God orders. It's putting myself in a position where I'm going to try to be ready to cooperate with God as he enters my life. Going back to the parable of the walking on the water, I'm going to cooperate with God to stand as erect, as tall as He will allow me to on top of the water at any given moment. I will try to make the effort to want to be the person that God wants me to be in His love today. I'm cooperating. It's very difficult for me to feel that at this day I'm the size God wants me to be. I have a meditation that I'd like to share with you. It'll jump ahead to the 11th step but it'll fit in here because it does fit and goes back to the wheat. If I'm at a meeting where there's a lot of heavy sharing, to me that's love. I was talking to somebody this. Go into the Bible a moment. The Bible says something, greater love than this has no man than to lay down his life for his friends. That's the greatest love there is. So many Christians share their success. The greatest love I've ever seen on earth is in Alcoholics Anonymous when we share our failures. When I tell you what I never wanted to tell anyone else on earth, when I pull out of my heart that which is most personal to me, how I hurt other people, how i continue to hurt other people and I share it with you to help you. That is the greatest love there is. And that's a very healing love. When there's that kind of sharing at a meeting, I don't know how this happens. It just happened like I was somewhere about four or five years sober and all of a sudden I was at the meeting and I just pulled away from it. And I went into a meditation and I pictured a little plot of land about, oh, I'd say maybe four feet by five feet, just all dirt. And there was a tree, a little tree about two and a half foot tall with not a leaf on. And the tree was me. I knew that. That's all that happens. And the Lord came out and hugged it, and that made me angry because I felt he should spit on it. And about six months later, he just hugged her, that's all, and I felt that. About six months after, this will be over like a three or four year period, I go back in the same meditation and I heard the Lord speak. See, I was angry the tree had no leaves and it was so small. It wasn't, no leaves and no fruit. And what I heard was it's winter. And in Pennsylvania, trees with that kind of branches better not have leaves in the winter or they won't take the weight of the snow and this fruit tree was about two and a half three years old and they don't produce at that age it's not healthy their branches are too young and that was good i was where i was supposed to be about five months later the same meditation occurs again and all i heard is there was once a time when the redwoods in california were that size and when they were two and a half feet tall it was because that was precisely how tall god wanted them to be that day they may have wanted to be taller but god didn't in that day in his plan that meditation has increased and i've had some other very powerful effects but that's the point i want to show you wherever i'm at today I am where God wants me to be at this moment. I am no taller nor any smaller than He wants me to be. And if I'm going to know His peace, I have to cooperate with Him and not tell Him I will be at peace if I am standing six foot tall on top of the water. I must be willing and I must able to tell Him I will be in peace if stand the size I am right now at the top of the water, and by cooperating means I am ready to try to accept myself in love as the person that you would have me be right at this moment. I have a few more minutes. That basically has finished the seventh step, so I'm going to share on one or two things that I hear in AA that I can't find in our literature that very much upsets me. We have just a few minutes left. Just because you hear it in AA doesn't make it true. There's a lot of nonsense, I think, in AA. Maybe it's good for some people, but it doesn't help me. First, one of the things is that the first one who was up this morning has the longest sobriety. Did you notice that people who say that celebrate birthdays? and that's a contradiction and I want to tell you what I don't like about it I believe the people here with time like Dick and I don' t know if he has the most sobriety but the people who have been here before me carry an AA tradition that I need desperately to keep me from making the mistakes that they've seen other people make if we were all one day sober You know, we would just think all we got to do is get together to stay sober. After about 30 days, we'd have seen some people go back to drinking and we realized we got to take the first step after about 20 more days. We'd see we'd Have buried a lot more people or watched a lot more go out with her. You got to take The first three steps after a year to three years. We'd realize you got to Take the first five steps after 12 years and 10 months that realization becomes a lot deeper and there's a lot more needed. I sobered up in a group that didn't respect its elders, and so we lost them. They didn't come to meetings. And I remember sitting at a discussion meeting on the eighth and ninth steps. They were combined, unfortunately. And there was only one guy there. He had 18 years, and he had been coming year after year to lead the only discussion on the steps in this club. The big book wasn't held in a lot of respect, nor were the steps. It was an unfortunate place for someone to be. This guy tried to tell us, well first we went around the table and all of us agreed, 18 of us agree that we either would not or did not work the eighth and ninth steps and didn't see any value to them. And he tried to tells us how great they were and he was like whistling in the wind. But if he wasn't there it would have been the blind leading the blind. We desperately need the people who have the insights, who have the ears to sit there and kind of just nod their head at our stupidity and just oh you're just such a jackass. You know and just tell us what's wrong. And that statement first one sober in no way seems to indicate there's a difference in quality sobriety, and it's the quality of sobrietry that people with, for me, I'd say 18 to 25 years have, that really gives me what I more than anything else need in my own life. Another thing that I've heard a lot that I really don't agree with at all is that we're all one drink away from a drunk. That's true, probably, but Clancy says it really, and It isn't, it's my don't experience it isn't either, not from me. We're not one drink away from a drunk. Not all members of Alcoholics Anonymous who take a drink get drunk instantly. Some of them don't get drunk, really get on a drunk for six months. Most of them I don't think get on the drunk for the first day, two, three, four, five. But a little time bomb starts going off. And incidentally they can tell themselves, I didn't get drunken today so I can't be alcoholic because in AA they say we're all one drink away from a drunk and see I didn't get drunk. And that can prolong their drunk. I heard this again and again and again where I sobered up. And one day my sponsor at that time with 18 years who had as much serenity as anyone I've known in the program and I were at a meeting together. And I looked at him and I looked at me and I said you have to be a total idiot to say that he and I are the same distance away from the drunk. We may all be one drink away from starting a drunk, but we're a hell of a far distance in number of steps away from that first drink. And that's the important distinction that I want to hear. I want know how many steps you are away from that drink because you then can tell me things and show me things and help me grow in our program. And that is very important to me. I think that's basically what I want to share with you. So thank you very much.