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Source: Bo T – OAR 2017 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: bo-t-oar-2017-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:16:58
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Thank you, Senator. Is that got anybody? Get them. All right. Hi, everybody. I'm an Al-Anon from West Blockton, Alabama, and my name's Bo Templin. Hi, y'all. How y'all doing? We're not going to go ahead and let you know, we're not, no, Cleveland's not playing tonight. But I live 15 minutes off the campus of the University of Alabama. Now, they got a football team down, we've got a football team down there you might have heard about.
And we're playing Texas A&M right now. I did get to watch the first two series before I left the room, and Alabama was ahead seven to three, so we're headed in the right direction. Okay. Well, thank you for having me up here. Thank you for inviting me to your party. Because you see, 35 years ago, me and my wife and two kids was introduced to this way of life at a party. It was at an A.A. Al-Anon anniversary.
And we fell in love with y'all that night, that thing about attraction rather than promotion. You got to win. I'll talk a little more about that. But we fell in love with you that night, and we fell in love with the parties. We've not found it necessary to leave you since that time. We've been right with you. And we, back then and still today, go to all the parties that we can go to. So if you're new here, or maybe not new, and this is maybe your first event of this kind, I hope that before you leave here, you feel like you've been at a party.
Because that's what this is, this weekend. It's a celebration of our recovery. That's what it's about. And I love the parties, and I thank y'all for inviting me to be at this one. Now, there's a couple more thank yous that I've got to get out of the way here. And this next one is just, well, it's dear to my heart. I know that this is the Ohio Al-Anon Convention. I also know from some meetings I was in earlier today that there's two or three or four AAs sprinkled amongst us.
And I want to talk to those AAs for just a second. And what I want to say to you, if you're sitting in this room tonight and you're a member of AA, from the very bottom of my heart, I want to say thank you. Now, see, when I got here Labor Day weekend in 1982, we used to do that real regularly. We used to tell the AAs, thank you, real regularly. And somehow or another over the years, we've gotten away from that.
Well, we're not doing that as much. That's a different story that we're not going to get into tonight. All I know is that every time I get behind a podium like this and I have the opportunity, I'm going to take the time to say thank you to Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you for two reasons, AA. Thank you for being here in 1951 when Al-Anon was born. Thank you for having this program in place, for having already worked most of the kinks of it out.
And when we stepped forward and said, hey, as us family members, can we have your program, you threw your arms open wide and we said, sure you can. And here's what we want you to do, family member. We want you to come into this thing, learn how to take these 12 spiritual principles, learn how to implement them in your life on a daily basis, and learn how to live happy, joyous, and free. And then not be dependent on what another person does or does not do.
The other reason, I told you there's two reasons, I want to thank you for being there July 29th, 1982 when my gal reached out her hand. Because you see, the bottle had her and I couldn't do anything about it. And I was running myself crazy trying to find a way to get Shirley sober and keep her sober. And of course you know I never could find that.
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And when she had her moment of clarity July 29th, 1982 and she reached her hand out to A.A., A.A. was there and you took your hand and you put your arms around her and she didn't have to die from a fatal disease that we didn't even know she had. How can I ever repay the debt of gratitude that I feel to Alcoholics Anonymous? Because you see, as a result of that and a lot of other things going on, this past April me and her celebrated the anniversary of number 53.
And we couldn't have done it without you. See, when she was up there in that treatment center, I told her, I said, we're 18 and a half years into our marriage and it ain't going to make it to number 19. And one of them old gals up there said, you're about the dumbest gal I've ever seen. She said, you've lived through all the hell, she's up here now and she's serious about getting sober and things are going to get better and you're running.
She said, yeah, you need to be up here. So thank you, AA, for saving Shirley's life. When I introduced myself to you, I introduced myself as an alibi. Oh, I got one more thank you I got to do, though. Jumping ahead here. I want to thank the recorder. Now, let me tell you something. I've got a little small recording company down my way. Not nearly as big and well-known and well-traveled as Bill is over here.
But I understand this part of it. I understand that when I got here, when this thing started yesterday on Friday, I was here relaxing, meeting folks, talking, having a good time. He was working the whole weekend. He's been working double duty because I had him up here behind the podium. But it's my opinion, and I call that a boeism. I'm full of them. And it's my opinion that this is the greatest way in the world to carry the message.
It really is. Now, when I first started getting these invitations to go speak, I started getting invitations in 1986. There wasn't many male Al-Anons out there that would get up behind the podium. There wasn't many male Al-Anons at that time. So my sponsors, they had a problem on their hands. Because they did their share of speaking around down in the southeast. And they knew about my ego. And they knew that I probably had an out-of-town talk already prepared.
They just wasn't sure how they were going to control me. Because they couldn't be there every time I spoke. So here's what they did. They came up with a deal of where if I went out of town to a convention and spoke, then on Monday, of course, I had to check back in with them. Now, I never knew which time it was going to be. It wasn't every time, but every once in a while on a Monday, a friend would say, well, come on over this afternoon.
Jim and I want to listen to that talk. Well, see, I never knew which one they were going to listen to. And I knew that standing up here that I better behave myself because this might be the one they wanted to listen to when I got home. So I went out of town one weekend. I got back, and a friend says, well, come on over at 530. We'll listen to that talk. So I got over there, and Jim got home at 530, and we were sitting at the kitchen table, and it was cassettes back then.
And I plugged the cassette in, and they got me introduced, and just as I started talking, there was this loud hum. And the longer I talked, the louder the hum got. It got to the point you couldn't even hear me. And finally, I looked at Jim, and I said,
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Jim, there's something wrong with that man's equipment. He said, no, bud, there ain't nothing wrong with that equipment. He said, you forgot to thank the taper. So, Bill, thank you, buddy. Now, if you get one of these CDs, and on the way home it starts humming, you know who to call. When I introduce myself to you tonight, I introduce myself as an alumni, and I'm going to talk about that for a few minutes.
Because, you see, that's another boeism of mine, is that we don't talk enough today about what an alumni is and what an alumni is not. And so there's three or four things that I do today on a real regular basis in order to qualify myself as a member of alumni, and I want to share a few of those things with you. The first thing I do in order to tell you I'm a member of alumni is I suit up and show up, occupy that chair in that alumni meeting on a pretty regular basis, pretty regular basis.
Now, I know this is a program of action. I know you can't get it by osmosis because I tried. The first seven months that I was around this thing, not in it, but around it, I was showing up at a lot of meetings, sitting on that front row, and sitting next to the old-timers trying to get their recovery to rub off on me. And it didn't work. It took me seven months before I had my moment of clarity, and I realized that I was going to have to take action in my own recovery or at least get ready to.
I already knew it. But that it wasn't going to happen from sitting in a chair, although I believe that it begins with suiting up and showing up and sitting in that chair. Let me explain it to you this way. If you come down here to Alabama to mine Shirley's Place, we call it Serenity Hill. We live out in the middle of the woods, and it's one acre wide and two acres deep, and it's on the side of a gentle hill.
And if you come down to Serenity Hill, I could take one of them chairs, and I could take it back on the back of the lot, and I could sit it in the middle of a chicken coop back there, and I could occupy that chair in the middle of that chicken coop every day for 20 years. And guess what? Yeah, I still wouldn't be a chicken. That's right. But let me suggest this to you. If I do that every day for 20 years, at the end of that time, I'm going to know a whole lot about chickens, and I'm going to know a whole lot about how the chickens are getting it done.
So you see what I'm saying? And when I was a newcomer and I was here, it's sitting in that chair with those seasoned veterans that were there for me and watching them and listening to them, that I began to get an idea of what it was going to take for me to be like them when I grew up. So even though I wasn't ready to take action, sitting in that chair was preparing me for when the time came to take that action.
So the first thing I do is I suit up and show up on a regular basis. Now, the second thing I do, in order to tell you I'm a member, is I have a home group. Now, my home group is the Wednesday night discussion group here in Bessemer, Alabama. We call it the harmony group, because if you show up on a good Wednesday night when nobody's having any problems, you might find a little harmony there. And that's what we strive for there.
But when I got here Labor Day weekend of 1982, I didn't need a home group. When I got here, I didn't need Al-Anon. Because you see, there was nothing wrong with me. Shirley had the problem, and if she didn't drink, we were going to be all right. And I believed that with all my heart. The AAs talk a lot about delusion, and I believe that was a delusion for me, because I totally believed that with all my heart.
But you see, my wife went to a treatment center about 40 miles north of Birmingham, and that was still back in the days that treatment centers were staffed by recovered alcoholics. by Recovered Alcoholics. And you could use the textbook Alcoholics Anonymous in the treatment
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center. So she got some of the best treatment we've ever had. And they had a thing up there at that treatment center called Family Week. And they wanted me and Mike and Sissy, because Mike was 15 and Sissy was 13, they wanted the three of us to come up there and move in. They had a family wing. Move in up there and stay there from Monday to Friday. Well, we had good insurance. So, you know, we plugged in, said okay, we'd be there. Well, we showed up on Monday and I already told you there was nothing wrong with me. I was going up there to help her. But I had not been on the property up there 15 minutes until I was in a stomping, shouting argument with the lady that was in charge of the family wing. Because see, there was five family members, five family groups going through Family Week at the same time. So when we got up there and they sent us down to the family wing, well, this lady met us and she said, now, Sissy, I want you up at this end of the hall in the room with Mr. So and So. And Mike, I want you down at this end of the hall in the room with Mr.
So and So. And I stepped forward and I said, well, now, wait just a minute. I said, you're putting my two teenage children in a room for a week with people that I don't know and know nothing about and I'm not so sure I approve of that. And she looked at me with that big Al-Anon smile because she was an Al-Anon. And she said, oh, Mr. Templin, it's not necessary that you approve of it. She said, you're in this room right here and you got 15 minutes to be unpacked and in the group room for orientation. Let me tell you, I was unpacked and I was in that group room. No doubt. No doubt. But there's a couple things that happened up there.
They call it family week. I call it hell week because that's what it was for me. But there's a couple of things that happened up there in hell week that made an impression on me then and they still impress on me today. And the very first thing that impressed me was I heard one of those counselors up there say, the ones that stay sober when they leave here are the ones that go to Alcoholics Anonymous. And in the snap of your fingers, my job in life changed. And I became the driver. Yeah. See, I already had it figured out. If she didn't drink, we was going to be okay. He just told me if she went to AA, she wouldn't drink. I mean, it was just clear. Then right before we left up there on Friday, I heard another one of those counselors up there say, you know, it's a good idea to go to 90 meetings in 90 days. We did. Yeah, we did. I had my last argument up there with them on the day that we picked Shirley up. We picked her up on Saturday, September the 4th, 1982, which was Labor Day weekend. And we were told to pick her up at noon. And me and the kids got up there, and I got out, and I walked in there, and I said, how in the world can you people do this? I said, I guess by God we've run out of insurance. I guess that's how you tell when they're well. She's up here because she has a problem with alcohol, and you're putting her out on Saturday of the biggest drinking weekend of the year. How can you be so uncaring?
And they said, well, we're going to give you some directions to follow that's going to take care of that, if you'll just allow us to. And like I told you, they were recovered alcoholics. So I have an aunt and uncle in the Bessemer group of Alcoholics Anonymous that had 20 years each sobriety at that time. So those staff members up there knew my aunt and uncle from being in AA themselves. So they didn't blindly send us to a group, okay.
They didn't give us a name written on a piece of paper that they'd never met and never talked to. They said, you're going to leave here, and you're going to go straight to the Bessemer group of Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you know, they have their own building. Do you know
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where that is? And I said, yes, I do. And they said, well, you've got an aunt and uncle down there. And I said, yes, I'm aware of that. And they said, well, you're going to go down there. You're not allowed to go by the house, because they knew if we went by the house, we'd stay. You're going to go straight down there. You're going to hook up with them. And y'all are going to go 40 miles down the road to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for their AA Al-Anon anniversary. So we take off to Bessemer. We get down there at the AA building, and there's people everywhere. And they was forming a convoy. I know there's some folks in this room that's convoyed to meetings before. Dadgummit, we don't have time to convoy anymore. And I miss that. I miss it. But boy, we had a convoy then. I'm up to now where I believe there's about 85 vehicles in that convoy. We had two doors, and we had four doors, and we had pickup trucks with and without camper shelves. We had a wrecker. We had motorcycles.
We had everything that you could think of in that convoy. Every one of them was a drunk vehicle. By that, I mean there wasn't a straight piece of sheet metal nowhere. None of them had air conditioners at work. And this is Labor Day. And Labor Day in Alabama, it's 95 degrees and 90 percent humidity. And Uncle James, my uncle, he looked like he was guru in the thing. So he gave the order out there for everybody to load up. And I turned and I grabbed Shirley, and I said, get out of the way. I said, they're fixing to be a big fight. Because we had 85 vehicles, but we had enough people for about 120 vehicles.
And they started running to those vehicles, and they started piling in and rolling windows down and feet sticking out this window and arms hanging out this one, and everybody laughing and cutting up and having the time of their life. And that was right at the time, I don't know why this is important. That was right at the time that they had just completed the interstate between Bessemer and Tuscaloosa. Well, halfway between Bessemer and Tuscaloosa, there's a rest area. So Uncle James is out front, we're riding in his Suburban with him, and we get down there to the rest area, and he wheels in. I said, well, you know, I found out that half the people in that group, in that convoy, had never seen a rest area. So we all had to pile out and go in, get a drink of water and use the bathroom, sign the book, you know, do all that. But this is our beginning. This is how we were brought into this thing.
We get out there to Tuscaloosa, and we get unloaded, and they had the anniversary on the campus of the university, and big old hall down there. Depending on who's telling the story, there was somewhere between 500 and 750 people at that anniversary. And I said, we unload, and we go in there. And it just blew me away when we walked in that room. All you people were in there, and everybody had either a Coke or a cup of coffee. Everybody was cleaned up. You were dressed up. You had on foo-foo juice. You were walking around that place, hugging, and everybody just having a blast. And I just couldn't believe it. Sissy got her first resentment in recovery that night. I don't know if you all up here in Ohio, at that time down in Alabama, they had a football coach down there named Barry Bryant.
A lot of folks have heard of him. And they had a red and white, crimson and white football, that's their color, that they was raffling off as a fundraiser with Barry Bryant's signature on it. And I bought Sissy a raffle ticket, and she didn't win it. So she had a resentment when she left there that night. But let me tell you about my God. You see, my God was watching over me that very night, and I'd have told you God didn't know where I lived.
This was 1982, and they had a male Al-Anon speaker, and a female AA speaker. I can't tell you who he was, where he was from. I have no idea what he said, because see, I
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wasn't there about him. I was there about Shirley. That female AA got up there and got up there, and I found out she lived pretty close to us. And I can still today tell you her talk. She's become such a part of our recovery. Today, 35 years later, she's Shirley's sponsor. Started right there that night. But see, we didn't catch up on that. That went right over our head. We got through with that thing, back to Bessemer, and we went home.
Shirley had been in treatment for 38 days. So it was her first day home in 38 days. The kids bought her a two-pound bag of chocolate chip cookies, and we had a gallon of milk. And we sat in the middle of the Dan floor, and we talked about y'all. We talked about what we had seen down there. We talked about the feelings we had. We talked about how y'all accepted us. And we found out that all four of us were just excited, excited about this thing. We talked about you until the sun came up. And I know we did, because I saw the sun come up. Because see, the front door was open, and I could see the sun. The front door at our house had not been open in a long, long time. But it was open that night, and it's been open ever since. We no longer try to keep y'all out or try to keep us in. No, no.
So we asked the kids to go to Allentown for four weeks, a big, strong Allentown group in Bessemer at that time. And after four weeks, we'd sit down and talk with them. So they did. They agreed to. Mike was 15. He was blonde-headed, blue-eyed. He was a good-looking rascal. Had a motorcycle. Was not a problem child at all. Just spent more time chasing girls than he did chasing books. But I was kind of proud of that, Shirley. Shirley was the one that got on him about his grades. But Mike went to those four meetings, and he looked at his mom, and he said, Mom, I love you being sober. But I can't sit in those meetings and talk about that stuff. That's just not me. I said, now, if y'all go to a convention down on the coast, I'll be glad to go to that convention with you. But said, I just don't believe I can do it. And we didn't force him. Sissy, 13 years old, and had found her home.
We didn't know until two years later that we heard her making an Alateen talk that she opened up in the Alateen talk about she was contemplating suicide the summer that her mom went into treatment. And we missed it. Totally missed it. So part of what I want to do here tonight is say thank you to Alateen for saving my daughter's life. And not only did you save her life, then you raised her. Because she stayed in Alateen until she was 20, then she came on into Al-Anon. And she's 48 years old today with 35 years of Alateen in Al-Anon. Still an active member of Al-Anon. But Mike said it wasn't for him. But let me tell you something. Mike's life changed. His attitudes changed. Noticeably. And the only way I know to explain that is that when you live in a home where there's active alcoholism, you're going to be affected. When you live in a home where there's active recovery and spiritual principles are being practiced, you'll be affected.
Quick story. Mike came in from school one day. Now he still believed in Alateen. And he loved what he was doing for his sister. And he had a lot of confidence in her. He came in from school one day and said, Sissy, get your book and come to my room. I need to talk to you. So Sissy grabbed her Alateen book and off and went to Mike's room and shut the door. Shirley said they were in there about an hour and a half.
Shirley said they were in there about an hour and a half. They came, finally they came out and Shirley looked at Mike said, well Mike what was that about? He said,
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oh mom I had a closed meeting. So the third thing that I want to tell you about is I'm sponsored. Not only am I sponsored, I sponsor folks. The hardest thing I've had to do in this program since I've been here is I had to replace my sponsors one time. It was something we hadn't planned on. Jim and Fran died on me. I tried to run around here for about three months without sponsoring. I saw I couldn't do that. So I've had new sponsors for a long time. I think that old time sponsorship has been one of the most important parts of my recovery. Old time sponsorship. And I think that's one of the hard things for us to find today. So for us that have got old time sponsorship, we need to stay on the firing line. We need to make sure that we're still sponsoring folks in the old time way. So that we can get this thing perpetuated again. So that it's ongoing. So that we don't totally lose. I remember when I asked Fran if she would sponsor me. There were no other guys there. Fran was old enough to be my mama. I met several school teachers up here this weekend. Fran was a retired school principal. She was a Methodist and she was the principal of a Catholic school. You should have heard her tell that story. There was a disciplinarian side to her that I didn't know existed until I asked her to be my spot. She was a past delegate. My group was born in 1961. She's one of the co-founders of my group. My own group. So we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But sponsorship is such a vital issue. And if you're not having meetings at your home group on sponsorship, volunteer to chair a meeting.
Go in there and have a meeting on sponsorship. Let people find out. You know, I remember, well we'll talk about that later. But anyhow, so it's suiting up, showing up, home group, and sponsorship. Now, long before I got a home group, Shirley and I were going to 90 meetings in 90 days. We lived in a suburb of Birmingham. There was plenty of groups around. So here was the deal. I'm the driver, remember? We'd get in the car and we'd head off to a meeting. We'd get to the meeting, get out. I'd walk in, go in with her. I'd take her right down to the front row.
So we'd sit right there on the front row, just so she could hear real good. That speaker say something important, I'd pop her with that elbow, make sure she heard that. And that's how the process was going. So we showed up there at Bessemer one night. Now, we had been to Bessemer for several meetings, but we showed up there one night and those guys met me at the door and said, well, Bo, you can't come into this meeting tonight. This is a closed meeting for alcoholics only. I said, what do you mean I can't come in? I said, no, it's my job.
They laughed just about like you did. They said, no, no, it's time you turn Shirley over to us. And you need to go to that meeting over there in that room. And that's when they pointed to the Al-Anon meeting. Well, I didn't have old time sponsorship at that time. When I finally, seven months after I was here, when I finally got Jim and Fran as my mentors and my sponsors, one of the first things they told me was that from this point on, you'll go to every meeting you go to at least 30 minutes early. Prepare to stay until it's over.
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Now, most AA and Al-Anon meetings are going to be over in an hour or an hour and 10 minutes, but not all of them are. So you're going to show up at least 30 minutes early, and you are going to be prepared to stay until it's over. Now, I can't tell you how many times that me and Shirley have still been at that club up there at 11 o'clock and at midnight. Because when the meeting was over, and we said, amen, we had to go make another pot of coffee because we had a new family there. And we didn't let them walk out without getting some help.
Well, we still do that today. We stay until the work is taken care of. Let me tell you about getting there early. If you get there early, you get to chair a lot of meetings. Now, I don't mean choose the speaker or choose the topic. You get to set up the chairs and get the room ready. If you get there 30 minutes early, you get to make a lot of coffee. Just exactly like you like it. And you don't have to walk around all night bitching about the coffee's too strong or the coffee's too weak or nobody made any decaf. Get there early. Make it like you want it.
But here's the biggest thing about getting there early. If you get there 30 minutes early, you'll be one of the ones that's there to welcome that newcomer when they come in that door and to extend the love of these programs. Well, I didn't have that old time sponsorship you see that night when they told me to go in that meeting. It was three minutes to eight for an eight o'clock meeting. So I hustled over there and the door to my al-anon room is at the back of the room. I stopped at the door and made a quick head count down through there.
There was 23 women and one other guy. And he was sitting down on the very front row. And the only empty chair in the room was right beside him. Front row. So I hustled on down there to the front row and I sat down and they was opening the meeting. Well, you know, I was familiar. We'd been going to meetings. I knew about opening meetings. So then we had the meeting and the meeting was over and he turned to me and stuck his hand out and he said, Hi Bo, my name's Kervin.
I said, Kervin, I'm glad there's at least one other guy here. And he started laughing and he said, Oh Bo, I'm moving to Panama City Beach in the morning. He said, This is my last meeting here. And he wasn't lying. He ain't been back 35 years. But see, in retrospect, I realized that God knew just how sick I was and knew that it was going to take all 23 of them women from me. So he got Kervin out of town. Then the ladies started coming up to me and they would introduce themselves and I would stick out my hand and they would push my hand aside and they wanted to give me a hug.
Because you see, I belong to the hugginess group in the southeastern United States. I didn't know it then, but let me go ahead and tell you now. I firmly believe that there is spiritual healing. There's spiritual healing in the hugs that we have in Illinois. I believe that today. That's important. Well, after about the third one, I just wasn't real huggable. So one of our seasoned veterans came over and the reason I'm calling them seasoned veterans is because I'm becoming an old timer and I don't like that.
So I'm changing the name of them. So she grabbed me by the hand and she took me to the back of the room where the door was. And she took a chair just like that and set it just inside the door. And she said, Bo, we want you to come in here just as much as you will. See, I told them I wouldn't be coming much. I was only in there because they wouldn't let me sit out there with Shirley. And they just smiled and said, that's okay.
We want you to come as much as you will and when you come inside the door, this is your chair. This is as far as you have to come in the room. And you don't have to come down and participate in the meeting. You can just very quietly sit back here. And what I know today was, I didn't realize it then, she was telling this newcomer that you need to sit down and shut up. And then they did something else that night. They assigned one of those gals to me.
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Now we're an old group, like I said, born in 61. So we believe in rotation. And that girl changed on a monthly basis. Now here was her job. In order to tell you what her job was, I have to tell you how we close our meetings and we do like y'all do and I'm so proud of that. Because we close and we close with the Lord's Prayer. We've not had any meetings or group conscience meetings or discussions or anything about changing that. It's always going to be closed with the Lord's Prayer.
And so they knew from watching me that when we said amen, I was out the door. So everyone who was assigned to me that month, her job was, while we were saying the prayer, her job was to get out the circle and go to the back of the room and get between me and the door. And give me that going home hug. So see, I'd drop like that and I'd turn and I'd go for the door and there she'd be. Well, I had to make a decision. And I could stay in there and hug 23 or I could hug one and get on out of there.
Every one of them, I know they had practiced this somewhere, every one of them, as they would give me that going home hug, they would lean up and whisper in my ear and say, Bo, you keep coming back because we need you. If you needed me, I mean I wanted to help all I could, I didn't let you know that I'd been reading the literature and I'd been listening to what you were saying and that my miracle was in the process of happening.
It was in the process of happening. And those gals taught me how to hug without ever telling me that I had to hug. That's old time sponsorship. That's one of the first hooks that they began to use on me to keep me here until my miracle happened. Let me tell you about another hook. And it's been talked about so beautifully from this podium today. It's a gal named Martha that did the thing on laughter. And she, I want to tell you, I just sat there and just tears coming down my eyes and I said, my God, she's been to my homework.
She's, because let me tell you, laughter was one of the big things that got my attention that very first meeting that night. It was a speaker meeting and one of our seasoned veterans was sharing her story. So she got up there that night after they introduced her and she said, hi, my name's Doris and it's been 14 years since I had to plan a murder. And the whole room erupted in laughter. Everybody except me. I'm sitting down there on that front row and I'm saying to Martha, I can't believe she said that. You'll never hear me admit that out loud.
Because I was like her and every one of y'all. I was going to kill Shirley and tell God she died. But before I left there that night, the thing I realized was that nobody was laughing at Doris. Everybody was laughing with her. So let me tell you how important laughter is in my life today. I think that laughter is one of the first signs of recovery. Now I want to tell you, I'm going to give you a job to do, something that I do all the time. Not as much as I can because we're not getting as many newcomers as we used to.
But when you get a newcomer in, you know I've got a God that just performs miracles in my life continuously. All the time. Sometimes they're miracles for me, sometimes they're miracles for you and He allows me to recognize that and to watch it happening in you. Now that's the cool deal. Watch a newcomer when they come in. They ain't laughing. Ain't got anything to laugh about. They're full of fear, they're full of anger, they're full of embarrassment, they're full of guilt.
[00:45:01]
They don't know if this is gonna work or not, and they're not smiling. What's our job? Make them comfortable. Start using one of those hooks. Anything to get them to come back to another meeting. They come back to three or four more meetings, you look at them and they're not frowning. And when I see them and they're not frowning, I just very quietly say, hey, God, we got another miracle going on here.
All right, I'm glad you're allowing me to see it and be a part of it. Let them stay there long enough to get a sponsor and start getting into the recovery, and all of a sudden, they're laughing. And when you do that, I say, all right, God, another miracle right in front of my eyes. And I got to be part of it. So let's don't miss the miracle of laughter. It's so important here. One more hook, and then I'm gonna run out of time, but I will cut it off somewhere.
And this is the biggest hook in my life, and they started it that very first night there, and it's still going on today. And that's a hook called unconditional love. See, those gals started loving me unconditionally that very first night. And after a few meetings, I did realize that they never asked me to do anything. They never asked me for anything. Every time when I walked in the building, they were coming up to me, glad you're here.
Good to see you. Do you need anything? Can I do anything for you? Do you have any questions? And it was always, what can I do for you? And I knew that was different, but I didn't know what you called it. And then one night I went to a meeting and the topic was unconditional love. So now I had a name for it. So I set out to be the best there was in the southeastern United States at sopping up unconditional love.
And if I was gonna do that, then I had to get to be the best at giving it away. That was my opinion. So I set out to learn all I could about unconditional love. And I was gonna do that by showing up at these meetings, picking out the winners, the seasoned veterans, hooking up, sitting beside them, engaging them in conversation and getting their ideas about unconditional love. So I was on this vendetta and going around all over and I had been invited to speak in San Diego, California at their spring conference.
And so I went out there and the Friday night speaker was an AA speaker that I had heard on cassette tape. I'd never met him. And he was one of my heroes. I loved that man. I loved his message. And he was the Friday night speaker. So I said, by golly, I'm gonna be on the front row. I ain't missing that one. So Friday night, I'm right there on the front row and he's up there and he's telling his story.
And then he stops and he says, you know, I'm gonna do something a little bit different here for a minute. He said, I wanna talk to you for just a minute about the most important thing in my life today. Now this was a guy with over 30 years of sobriety. Well, my keen out Illinois mind, I knew right away, well, I know the answer to that. It's his recovery. That's what's the most important thing in his life today.
Well, it wasn't. I was wrong. It wasn't his family. It wasn't his health. He said, the most important thing to me in my life today is my relationship with God. And I picked up. I said, I better listen to that. And he said, I call my relationship with God the vertical. He said, I call my relationship with you the horizontal. And what I know today is that as long as I'm okay vertically I'm okay horizontally.
And he said, so what I know today as long as I'm spiritually fit I don't have any problems with you. So today if I start having problems with you I don't have to come to you. I go to my sponsor and we read and we pray and we talk and we find out what's bothering me. What's wrong in me. And we get that squared away and all of a sudden the problems I was having out here just go away. They're not that important anymore.
So he said, what I do every day is I get up and I start my day with good morning God. And then he says, God, I'm fixing to get out of this bed and go take a shower. And before I do God, I want to invite you into my life
[00:50:01]
and ask you to run my life today. Just today. And what I want you to do God is I want you to make me the best child of God that I can be today. And I'm asking you to start that process right now. And he said, then all I've got to do is go out there and make those big decisions. God's gonna take care of the other one. All I have to do is decide whether I'm gonna cut the front yard or the back yard. What, you know, am I gonna vacuum?
Those kind of things. And he said, God takes care of everything else. So he said, and then I said, you know, here's what happens. When I'm spiritually fit and I start my day that way, then God can use me as a channel of his love. And God can love you through me. Now if you'll become spiritually fit and in tune with God, then God can use you as a channel of his love. And God can love me through you.
And he said, and let me close this part of it by saying, by the way, God's love is unconditional. Boom, there's my answer. I no longer have to run all over the United States and Canada bugging people trying to figure out how to get better at unconditional love. I need to work on my relationship with God. And it will be taken care of. And I have learned that to be true, my own experience. So the most important thing in my life today, I started out by talking with God.
And that's the relationship I have with God today. Yeah, I pray when I wake up and I pray when I go to bed, but I pray all day long, all day long. It's just part of my life. So these are the hooks that those gals used to keep me here for seven months. It took seven months for my moment of clarity to come. Happened on a Saturday morning. And I was sitting in the den with a cup of coffee and it was raining so hard you couldn't see outside.
Outside the house, I mean, it was raining. And I just went into a tirade. And I was hollering at God. What's the deal, God? I'm driving the car. I'm getting them to their meetings. I'm providing for them. We're doing things that are right. Can't it rain Wednesday? See, I wanted to play a round of golf. I wanted to play a round of golf. And Shirley was standing at the door and she waited till I wound down.
And she said, well, are you through? And I said, yeah. She said, well, who you gonna blame this one on, big boy? I haven't had a drink in seven months. And that was my moment of clarity. That's when I realized that what y'all had been telling me was true. This was about me. And I took a look around. That aunt that I told you that had 20 years of sobriety there in Bessemer, when we got to the convoy that day, she pulled Shirley aside and said, we'll start Monday.
Said, you don't have to pick a sponsor. I'm your sponsor. And said, we'll get together Monday and we'll take our big books and we'll start working through this recovery program. And we'll show you how to utilize these programs and grow spiritually. And that's what Aunt Katie did. So she did that because that's the old time way of doing things. And that's the way she was sponsored. When I asked Fran to be my sponsor, she said, boy, the only way I know to sponsor you is in the steps.
If you're ready to make a conscious commitment to me to implement these spiritual principles in your life, then I'm ready to walk with you. And she did that. She had the information because she had been given the information. That's how the information goes here. It's passed on. About 90 days into this sponsorship thing, we knew I needed to talk to a man. So Fran sent me out there to the AA room and she said, you pick one that's working a good 12-step program.
And I happened to pick the one that she'd been married to forever. And Jim and Fran became my mentors. Now, the beautiful thing about that was that
[00:55:00]
Jim was the assistant director of the largest halfway house in Alabama. And they used the Joe and Charlie recovery program, which is an in-depth study of the Big Book. So Jim knew that Big Book. And Monday nights then, we don't have it anymore, but Monday night at Bessemer then, we had an open Big Book study where the AAs and Al-Anons and Al-Ateens, if they wanted to, could come. And Jim always directed that meeting.
So we're geared up. I've got sponsors. I'm doing things that are a lot better. I'm not really getting well, but I think I'm seeing a little more sunlight. But it came time to write an inventory. Now, Bo figured that out. He didn't ask Jim and Fran. And I didn't ask for any instructions. I guess I was gonna surprise them. And of course, I couldn't write an inventory. I didn't know what I was doing. So I worked on it for a couple of days, and then I called Fran and told her what kind of trouble I was having.
She said, well, that's a 5.30 meeting. Now, a 5.30 meeting was one that I was not allowed to skip. I was at their house. Jim got home at 5.30. Fran would have the coffee made, and we'd sit down at the kitchen table. So we were there, and Jim came in. He said, whoa, looks like we're having a problem meeting. And he sat down at the table, and he said, what's the problem? I said, Jim, I'm trying to write this inventory, and I just can't get it written.
And Fran spoke up and said, Bo, son, if you're trying to write that inventory, you've got to be in trouble. Because you see, you're trying to do the fourth step, and you're not through with the third step. And I've been telling you from the beginning that these steps are numbered for dummies like you. And I did. I had that Southern Baptist God of mine sitting up there judging me and punishing me. And I wasn't about to get involved with a God like that.
I'd been raised in that Southern Baptist church, but I wasn't going in. Jim took me back down the hall right then. We went back to his study and sat down, and he reached around on the shelf and he got the textbook Alcoholics Anonymous. And he brought that book out, and he opened it up in front of me to the chapter to the agnostic. And he took this al-Anon into that book, into that chapter that day.
And it was there that Wednesday afternoon that I found the God that I still have in my life today. And it came right off the pages of the big book, and the description is a God of infinite power and of infinite love. Can you imagine? Never ending, inexhaustible, power and love. And that's the God that I have in my life today. My God loves me so much today He allows me just to mess up like crazy and get just as sick as I have to get.
But as soon as I can't handle it anymore, I holler out to God and I turn and He's closer than my next breath. To take the pain away. Now there's a lot of other things that I need to go into, but we're just not gonna have time to go into them tonight. But I do have a couple of things I'm gonna talk to you about. Are we close on time? Okay. So, we got, Aunt Katie's got Shirley, Alateen's got Sissy, spiritual tenants have got Mike, and they're doing fine.
And I'm sitting there getting sicker and sicker and sicker until I have that moment of clarity. Then I get started and spiritual things begin to happen in my life. Spiritual growth begins to come. Five years into this program, we had recovered financially enough that we were gonna do something that had been years since we had been able to do and we were gonna go on vacation. We were gonna take Amtrak trains to Washington, D.C.
and move y'all for Shirley's aunt and uncle that live up there. Uncle that live up there and me and the uncle was going to play golf all week and Shirley and her aunt was going to take the kids around and let them see all the Washington stuff.
[01:00:03]
Sissy had just completed her first year of college. Mike did not go to college, did not want to go to college. He said he had the looks and Sissy had the books. He still lived at home. He was 20 years old and had a dynamite job. Good job and he loved his job. So May 17, 1988, I was working a late shift at the halfway house that Tuesday and Mike was going to work. He came by me and stopped and hit me on the shoulder and he said, I'm going to work, Dad.
He took about three steps toward the door and stopped and turned around and looked at me and said, I love you, Dad. And out the door he went. Last time I ever saw him alive. Ten o'clock that night, Mike was killed instantly by a drunk driver of all things and our world came apart. But you know what? Y'all came in. You wouldn't allow us to destruct. You took over. The family came and they had to go home and get their kids ready for school.
The Baptist church showed up with the fried chicken and tater salad and they left. Y'all showed up and you stayed 24 hours a day. You stayed. That uncle that we were going to see in Washington, quick as he heard we got the news about Mike, he's in the car and he's down there. And so from Wednesday until Sunday, he sat in our living room and he watched y'all as you came and as you went. And he listened to what you had to say.
When you got ready to go home on Sunday, he said, let me tell you kids something. We were younger, he called us kids. He said, I don't know a whole lot about AA and Al-Anon, but I'm going to make it a point to learn more. He said, I'm a deacon in that Southern Baptist church up there in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said, I've sat in your house for the last four days and I've felt closer to God than I've ever been in my life.
I said, God was here. God was here. Yeah. Jim, my sponsor, Wednesday morning he walked in the door there. First off, within 45 minutes of us getting the news of Mike's death, Jim and Fran was in our living room. I didn't call my mother right away. I didn't call my sister right away. The first phone call I made was to Jim and Fran. Yeah. Of course, that came right on. Wednesday morning, there was 15 Alatines in our front yard in a circle of love with Sissy in the middle of that circle of love.
That's the kind of stuff you get here. Wednesday morning, Jim walked over to me and looked at me and said, where's your shotgun? I said, what are you talking about? He said, don't play games with me. Where is your shotgun? Because he knew what I had been thinking about. And I had to go to the bedroom and get my shotgun and give it to him. He said, I'll decide when you can get it back. Yeah. So that's the part y'all played in it.
It was unbelievable. Unbelievable. Well, I can tell you today that because of Mike's death, that I have walked the deepest, darkest valley that a daddy will ever have to walk. Or something could happen to Sissy and he'd be just as deep and just as dark, but he wouldn't be any deeper or darker. And you see, I've already walked the deepest, darkest valley that a daddy will ever have to walk. Let me tell you the good news about that.
I never took one step of that walk alone because I was incapable of doing it by myself. You were there and you walked with me every step of the way. So what I know today is that if you got this hand and God's got this hand, I can face anything out there that this world can throw at me. Because you see, when you got this hand and God's got this hand, Bo's got the power. Bo's got the power. And it's necessary for me to stay here with you and stay in the middle of you where I can stay in contact with that part of the power.
That's one of the reasons I still come back to a lot of meetings. The other is because I have an obligation to be there.
[01:05:02]
You see, I know. I don't believe this. I don't suspect this. I know this. That there ain't nothing out there that that world can throw at me that I can't walk through. As long as I'm with you and you got this hand and God's got this hand, we can go. We can go. So we did and about a year later, Sissy wanted to get married. We was hoping that he would come out of Al-Anon, but he didn't. He came out of the AA room.
I had always told Sissy, whoever he is, whenever he shows up, tell him don't come in here asking for your hand. Tell him to come in here with a financial statement. Well, when I found out it was Bob, I said forget about that because I knew Bob. Bob had five years of good big book sobriety, but he didn't have a real good financial statement. But that was okay. That was okay because they were in love.
They wanted to get married in that same Southern Baptist church that Shirley and I got married in. I said if it worked for y'all, it'll work for us. So one of our counselors in Hell Week was a retired Methodist minister who got so tired of burying his parishioners from alcoholism and drug addiction that he retired from the ministry and became an alcohol and drug counselor. So when he heard about it, he said, well nobody will marry that couple but me.
So here we are out there that Saturday, about 250 of you, about 80% y'all, and 20% normal folks or world folks or whatever you call it. We had a big candle for Mike. We lit that candle because we wanted him to be represented. We felt like he was just in the other room anyhow. Howard comes in, that's the preacher, wearing a Catholic robe that he had borrowed from somebody, doing a Methodist ceremony in a Southern Baptist church.
Now we opened that wedding with the serenity prayer and we closed it with the Lord's prayer. And I still got a deep, deep resentment at my wife because she would not let me pass the basket. I had just spent a bunch of money. So it was right after that that since Cissy wasn't living at home anymore that we sold the house there in Hueytown. She always wanted to live in the woods so we found, we're land barons now, I found us two acres out in the middle of the woods out there in West Blockton.
And we moved out there and we put some dozers on there and cleared that place out. Bob and Cissy wanted to go with us. I couldn't afford to build two houses but I bought two houses, two manufactured homes. We put one down at the bottom of the hill for Bob and Cissy and one up top of the hill for me and Shirley and we named it Serenity Hill. Because if you show up on a good day, when everybody's acting right, you just might find a little serenity out there.
About a year and a half after we was out there, it's 335 feet from the road up to our house, completely surrounded by wood, real dense woods like we have here. Nothing been on that property in over 85 years. And we're sitting out there on the front deck and here comes the most beautiful black lab you've ever seen in your life, wandering up our driveway. She's solid black except for the white flash on her chest and her right rear foot is white.
And she walked up there and she adopted us and she took over Serenity Hill. So we were going to name her and I wanted to name her Onyx. I thought that was very fitting until Shirley reminded us that our garbage company was named Onyx. So I was carrying the trash out one night and it was pitch black dark, I mean dark. And I was out there at the garbage can dropping a sack of trash in there and I still wasn't used to her being around that much.
[01:10:04]
And she eased up beside me and rubbed up against my leg, scared the bejesus out of me. And I walked back in the house and I said, her name is Spook. So that's how Spook got her name. And God love her, she's getting old and she's going down. And we understand that. That's what we're all going to do at one time or another. So anyhow, 1999 we found out, it was 1997 when we moved out there in the woods, 1999 we found out Cissy had an aneurysm in her brain.
She has polycystic kidneys and that can be an offspring from polycystic kidneys. She inherited polycystic kidneys from her mom. Her mom inherited them from her mom who inherited them from her mom. So it's a generic thing. So, but they, I went crazy. I'm hollering at God, you got my boy? What is it that we're doing so wrong that you're going to take my girl? I completely forgot that if God's not involved you don't find aneurysms until they burst.
God has to be involved and show you, direct you, straight to. I should have said I was there in the office when that brain surgeon looked at that, okay, looked at that MRI and saw his eyes light up. And he said, come here and look at this. He said, this is right out of the textbooks. He said, this is absolutely going to be a piece of cake. And it was. Operated on her on Tuesday morning, came into her room on Saturday morning.
Said, get out of my hospital. Go home and heal. You're okay. He also had a plaque in his waiting room that said, this medical practice believes in spiritual healing. And if you do not adhere to these principles, we suggest you find another doctor. Yeah, that's when we knew we were okay. So I'm out of time. But I got to tell you about what happened to me in February of 2015. I got sick. I tried everything I could do to die.
When they got me to the hospital, I had double pneumonia, an intestinal flu, and my blood sugar was 650. And I was turning blue. And they got me into ICU. And the problem was, they needed to treat the double pneumonia, but you had to treat that with steroids. Well, steroids kick your blood sugar. So they were having to tap dance around this thing. And I'm laying there in ICU, and I'm in reality and I'm out of reality.
In reality. And I had a male doctor, a male nurse up there was real cool. And we'd go off on one of them trips. And when I came back to, he'd look at me and he'd say, well, that was a rough one, wasn't it? And I'd say, yeah. He said, I can tell by your expressions and the way you were breathing. And so then I went off on one, and I came back. He said, that was a good one. He said, are you going to tell me about that one?
And I said, Chad, I don't know if you'll understand it, but I'm going to tell you what just happened to me. I said, I found myself in a place. That's all I can tell you is a place. I don't know if it was a room or what. But all around me was something like chocolate milk boiling around. But it was cold, real, real cold. And I was scared, because I couldn't figure it out. And I remember hollering out, and I said, God, is this it?
Are we done? I said, because if you're calling me home, that's OK, too. But get me out of this. Don't leave me here. And when I said, please don't leave me here, immediately, right out there in front of me, just like a kaleidoscope, it began to clear. And as it made its way around, it cleared away that murk, and it ended up with the most beautiful sky, blue sky. to me of course was, although I'm not calling you home, I ain't done with you, we got more
[01:15:03]
work to do, and if I don't ever have another spiritual experience in my life, that's enough to carry me through. I just don't want to have to get into the ICU to do that. So, real quick, got to close. Charlene sends her love, Spook sends her love, and everything, we got some family, some sickness going on, and we're dealing with it, but things are okay, on Serenity Hill, because we're close to you, and we plan to stay close to you. So I want to close by making a deal with you, and here's the deal. I've never seen the burning bush, and I've never felt that cool breeze, but the God I have in my life today speaks to me more regularly than He's ever spoken to me in my life, and darned if it don't usually look and sound a whole lot like you. It's important for you to realize that, because you see, you are my channel. You are my channel. That's how vital you are to me. So here's the deal. I'm going to keep coming back. Rooms like this full of folks like you. You're part of the deal. I want you to keep coming back. Rooms like us full of folks like you. If you keep coming back, and I keep coming back, then somewhere down the road, our paths will cross again as we trudge this road of happy destiny. May God bless you and keep you until then.
Thank you so much for having me.